Edwin Chadwick and the Public Health Movement.(Review)

1952 was a good year for the history of public health in Britain. Within a matter of months R. L. Lewis's Edwin Chadwick and the Public Health Movement and S. E. Finer's Edwin Chadwick appeared, establishing the basis for modern scholarship in the field. The 1960s and 1970s saw new work and new debates emerging, and the public health question became a central component in the debate on `the nineteenth-century revolution in government'. Nevertheless the history of public health remained within the kinds of paradigms developed in 1953. Historiographically speaking, the Benthamites had won. The story of the emergence of public health policy was a story of inquiry, the …