Sick cities: getting the measure of urban public health. Essay review.

The quantification of the achievements of public health in history is certainly alive. But is it well? The arrival of these two volumes provides an opportune moment to assess the contribution made by historical demography to our understanding of the medical historical world. In some ways it is remarkable that a book adorned with the title The demography of Victorian England and Wales took so long to appear. Surely the Victorians-obsessive statisticians above almost all else laid it on a plate for their empirical heirs to devour? The census, annual and decennial records of birth, marriage and death, statistical societies, not to mention the almost limitless opinionated outpourings of epidemiologically-informed doctors and civil servants; all are testimony to the nineteenth-century national zeal for "numbering the people". In contrast, Body and city seems a more than apposite title for