Machines of Security: Architecture, Geography, and Metropolitan Governance

Abstract

This chapter follows a series of epidemics from the 1870s to the 1890s involving first smallpox and then scarlet fever, during which the small-scale, ad hoc hospitals occasionally employed as an emergency measure by parochial boards gradually gave way to the Metropolitan Asylums Board’s large, standing machinery of metropolitan-wide disease management. Hospitals became a key point of controversy within larger conflicts over the appropriate sources, sites, and scales of London government. These debates help to reveal connections between the political ordering of enclosed spaces and the biopolitics of the modern city. The MAB hospital network exemplifies the “naturalization of the urban,” by which the biological averages, propensities, and dispositions of contagion emerge as special concerns to government precisely because they provide the means by which governance is constructed.