Listen

Description

Jacob Steere-Williams is a historian of epidemic disease, particularly in nineteenth and early-twentieth century Britain and the former British colonies. Jacob's book "The Filth Disease: Typhoid Fever and the Practices of Epidemiology in Victorian England" covers Typhoid fever which is a food- and water-borne infectious disease that was insidious and omnipresent in Victorian Britain. It was one of the most prolific diseases of the Industrial Revolution. There was a palpable public anxiety about the disease in the Victorian era, no doubt fueled by media coverage of major outbreaks across the nation, but also because Queen Victoria's husband, Prince Albert, died of the disease in 1861.