Tom Crook. Governing Systems

System-making is what made modernity. And quintessential modernizing systems were the public health systems that crystallized from the 1840s when the category and problem of “public health” itself crystallized. From the 1840s, systems proliferated as England connected to growing, urbanizing, and industrializing communities: systems for monitoring and measuring epidemics, for hurrying poisonous substances away from towns, for purifying bodies, and more. This period saw the evolution of systems for sanitary inspection, for measuring a wide range of things like mortality, for publishing new “social facts,” for coordinating brick-and-mortar sanitary machinery, and for promoting certain private habits. These systems, Tom Crook is careful to note in Governing Systems: Modernity and the Making of Public Health in England, 1830–1910, did not simply identify problems and realize solutions; nor did they simply mark a trend in centralization and control. Outcomes were wildly mixed, creating centralization and diffusion of control, and resulting in unintended consequences.

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