Rotten Bodies: Class and Contagion in Eighteenth-Century Britain

A revealing look at how the memory of the plague held the poor responsible for epidemic disease in eighteenth-century Britain

Britain had no idea that it would not see another plague after the horrors of 1666, and for a century and a half the fear of epidemic disease gripped and shaped British society. Plague doctors had long asserted that the bodies of the poor were especially prone to generating and spreading contagious disease, and British doctors and laypeople alike took those warnings...