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Defending Home and Country: Florence Nightingale’s Training of Domestic Detectives

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Victorian Medicine and Social Reform

Part of the book series: Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters ((19CMLL))

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Abstract

In Victorian Writing about Risk (2000), Elaine Freedgood claims that the anti-contagionist theories of Florence Nightingale, Edwin Chadwick, and other sanitary reformers of the early Victorian period helped to calm England’s fears about epidemic disease after deadly outbreaks of cholera and typhoid had put the nation into a state of near panic. Anti-contagionist theory eased anxieties about industrial and imperial progress—medical experts and the press having blamed British expansion in these areas for the epidemics of the early part of the century (Freedgood, 42).

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© 2010 Louise Penner

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Penner, L. (2010). Defending Home and Country: Florence Nightingale’s Training of Domestic Detectives. In: Victorian Medicine and Social Reform. Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230106598_2

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