Cleaning up the Great Wen: public health in eighteenth-century London.

We know all too little about how the mortality and morbidity patterns of eighteenth-century London relate to the activities of the capital's doctors and of those who campaigned for better public health, and this essay pretends to make few inroads into the problem.' In fact, we can hardly expect to have a sound basis upon which to build our explanations and interpretations, until far more research has been completed, analysing, parish by parish, such matters as population shifts, migration, and family structure. The aim ofthis discussion, rather, is to serve as a reminder that we need not unduly disadvantage ourselves in our attempts to understand the health of London by addressing these problems from misleading perspectives and with false expectations. In particular, if we take our norms for public health from the High Victorian age-as has all too often been done-we instantly turn what the Georgians actually did to improve the health of their metropolis into a self-defeating mystery.