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Health by design: teaching cleanliness and assembling hygiene at the nineteenth-century sanitation museum
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 September 2018
Abstract
In 1878, amid a rapidly proliferating social interest in public health and cleanliness, a group of sanitary scientists and reformers founded the Parkes Museum of Hygiene in central London. Dirt and contagion knew no social boundaries, and the Parkes's founders conceived of the museum as a dynamic space for all classes to better themselves and their environments. They promoted sanitary science through a variety of initiatives: exhibits of scientific, medical and architectural paraphernalia; product endorsements; and lectures and certificated courses in practical sanitation, food inspection and tropical hygiene. While the Parkes's programmes reified the era's hierarchies of class and gender, it also pursued a public-health mission that cut across these divisions. Set apart from the great cultural and scientific popular museums that dominated Victorian London, it exhibited a collection with little intrinsic value, and offered an education in hygiene designed to be imported into visitors’ homes and into urban spaces in the metropole and beyond. This essay explores the unique contributions of the Parkes Museum to late nineteenth-century sanitary science and to museum development, even as the growth of public-health policy rendered the museum obsolete.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 51 , Issue 3 , September 2018 , pp. 457 - 485
- Copyright
- Copyright © British Society for the History of Science 2018
Footnotes
I am deeply indebted to Seth Koven and Carla Yanni for their invaluable instruction and readings of numerous drafts of this article. I would also like to thank, for their comments and assistance, A.J. Blandford, M. Dale Booth, Alexander Hyde, Clare Kim, Vivien Ravdin, Katherine Ryan and Andrew Seaton. Special thanks are due to Beverly Bergman, who first ‘rediscovered’ the Parkes in 2003 and helped me track down several records; to the obliging staff at the Wellcome Library Rare Materials Room; and to Charlotte Sleigh and the two anonymous reviewers for their generous comments and suggestions.
References
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52 The Parkes's geography speaks in a way that site architecture did for other museums of the day. See Forgan, Sophie, ‘Bricks and bones: architecture and science in Victorian Britain’, in Galison, Peter and Thompson, Emily (eds.), The Architecture of Science, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999, pp. 181–208Google Scholar; and Yanni, op. cit. (22).
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91 Transactions of the Sanitary Institute (1891) 12, pp. 93–102.
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100 In 1956 the formal museum closed. The Royal Society for the Promotion of Health removed the Parkes name and opened a series of rotating exhibits under the Health Exhibition Centre title to better target a public interested in shorter, themed displays. See Bergman and Miller, op. cit. (4), pp. 60–61.
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