City of the Plague: Victorian Liverpool’s Response to Epidemic

Abstract

Conscious of its reputation as Britain’s unhealthiest town, the Corporation of Liverpool, in the mid-nineteenth century, developed a long-term strategy to combat the factors that allowed disease to flourish. Typhus, which periodically reached epidemic proportions, had been an underlying factor behind much public health reform, yet by the 1860s, it tended to be viewed with some degree of inevitability. The re-emergence of cholera in 1866 after a gap of twelve years triggered more urgent and immediate interventions. Perceived as a potentially catastrophic ‘alien’ invader, its outbreak in Liverpool was traceable to European emigrants in transit. Just as Irish immigrants had been scapegoated for importing typhus, the ‘Germans’ were identified as a source of dirt, degradation and disease. Despite the alarm generated by cholera, its sporadic incidence was a disincentive to the building of a permanent infrastructure with sufficient capacity to cope. Isolation hospitals, quarantine facilities, and nursing care needed to be constructed, commandeered, or conjured up on an ad hoc basis, bringing into focus the practical role of parochial authorities in the health of the town.