Conclusion

Abstract

In this book I have established relationships between medical theories about environmental exposure and British middle-class life. I have argued that such relationships can be identified in several domains in which social practice and expectations shaped medical analyses on the effects of external Stressors on bodies and the population at large. During the last third of eighteenth century, engagement with Hippocratic “airs, waters, and places” and Galenic “six things non-natural” acquired a quality of social and moral critique that was latent but not expressly stated in traditional statements of the doctrines. Luxury became the proximate cause of illness, for which therapy involved nonstandard approaches ranging from ventilation to travel to respirators to flannel. Informing these analyses was the guiding idea that external “influence” and bodily “exposure” derived from cultural perceptions of domestic space in more affluent households. When medical and social commentators referred to smell, smoke, clutter, cold, and bad weather, they usually took for granted the aesthetic and hygienic criteria spun around a middle-class sensibility to “discomfort,” which “delicate” individuals identified in places untouched by intervention, manipulation, and control.