Abstract
‘Medicine in the community’ examines the rise of public health in the nineteenth century, with its new concepts of state directives on healthcare and mass treatment and prevention programmes. Before the advent of the industrial state, epidemic disease was little understood, and aside from the construction of plague hospitals, provoked little development in treatment or infrastructure. In the eighteenth century, inoculation and, subsequently, vaccination, became the first widespread and effective treatments for epidemic disease, while the nineteenth century saw the first public health legislation — driven by the dramatic effects of cholera and poverty.
