Preventive and Social Medicine: A Victorian Legacy

I give this brief historical review because it leads nicely into the subject of this lecture "Preventive and Social Medicine: A Victorian Legacy." For this commentary I have drawn on John M. Eylers book Victorian Social Medicine: The Ideas and Methods of William Farr. There were others of course but William Farr especially used statistics to advance the general welfare. For these reasons Victorian statistics became a science for social reform. Later in Farrs career he and Florence Nightingale collaborated on various initiatives for social medical reform and the reform of the Medical Department of the War Office. Their work together will be the focus of this talk. I know full well that we owe much to France and Germany for the origins of social medicine prior to similar efforts in England. But when Victorian social medicine came into full flower during the reign of Queen Victoria its influence spread to the far reaches of the Raj and its former colonies such as the U. S. in all more than 25% of the globe. So I shall be more Anglophone than Francophone on this subject of social medicine. Jan Morris provides a compelling portrait of England in the 1830s; and the "symptoms of change in a count which was enduring the menopause between an agricultural and an industrial society." (excerpt)