ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the challenged conventional medical visions of urban terrain, meaning and practice. It reviews the three epicentres for infectious hospital protest in London, stressing the symbolic and practical geographies of Hampstead, Limehouse and Fulham. It then considers common complaints about Metropolitan Asylums Board (MAB) hospitals in the 1870s as forms of participation in public health policy and in epidemiological discourse. The chapter suggests that not to deny the contestedness of place nor to yearn for a depoliticised public sphere, but rather to understand and critique how local complaints of the kind are historically moulded by unequal distributions of power, informed by symbolic appropriations of place, and redirected by scientific and medical technologies. Attention and anxiety in London centred mainly on the activities of the MAB. Local agitations against the infectious hospitals were seldom grounded in grand ideological principles and therefore bore little straightforward connection to systematic medical heresies such as anti-vaccination.
