Mapping the Victorian Social Body (SUNY series, Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century) - Softcover

Gilbert, Pamela K

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0791460266 ISBN 13: 9780791460269

Publisher: State University of New York Press, 2004

Synopsis

Explores how medical and social maps helped shape modern perceptions of space.

The cholera epidemics that plagued London in the nineteenth century were a turning point in the science of epidemiology and public health, and the use of maps to pinpoint the source of the disease initiated an explosion of medical and social mapping not only in London but throughout the British Empire as well. Mapping the Victorian Social Body explores the impact of such maps on Victorian and, ultimately, present-day perceptions of space. Tracing the development of cholera mapping from the early sanitary period to the later "medical" period of which John Snow's work was a key example, the book explores how maps of cholera outbreaks, residents' responses to those maps, and the novels of Charles Dickens, who drew heavily on this material, contributed to an emerging vision of London as a metropolis. The book then turns to India, the metropole's colonial other and the perceived source of the disease. In India, the book argues, imperial politics took cholera mapping in a wholly different direction and contributed to Britons' perceptions of Indian space as quite different from that of home. The book concludes by tracing the persistence of Victorian themes in current discourse, particularly in terms of the identification of large cities with cancerous growth and of Africa with AIDS.

About this title

About the Author

Pamela K. Gilbert is Professor of English at the University of Florida. Her books include Mapping the Victorian Social Body; Imagined Londons; and Beyond Sensation: Mary Elizabeth Braddon in Context (coedited with Marlene Tromp and Aeron Haynie), all published by SUNY Press.

Edition details

• Publisher: State University of New York Press
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0791460266
• ISBN 13: 9780791460269
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 267