The Rise of Public Health in the Popular Periodical Press: The Political Medicine of W. P. Alison, Robert Gooch, and Robert Ferguson

This chapter examines the construction of the ‘political medicine’ of William Pulteney Alison (1790–1859) and Robert Gooch (1784–1830) and its development and popular dissemination through Blackwood’s. This humanistic ‘political medicine’ critiqued liberal political economists and utilitarianism and promoted the importance of moral feelings and Christian sentiments in informing public health policy. Alison’s contribution to the debates regarding poor law reform and Gooch’s proposal for a religious order of nurses – a project supported by his friend Robert Southey – are discussed as components within a progressive Tory social medicine. By way of contrast, the chapter closes with an examination of Robert Ferguson (1799–1865), the key medical contributor to the Quarterly Review from 1829 to 1854. Although Ferguson also contributed to what David Roberts terms ‘the social conscience of Tory periodicals’, writing on issues relevant to public health and promoting a paternalistic approach, his writings more clearly reflect the counter-revolutionary agenda of the Quarterly, as opposed to the more explicit humanism of Blackwood’s.