ABSTRACT
In the nineteenth century, public health reform interwove Victorian social science with Enlightenment political economy and was integrated into philosophical radicalism and the politics of social amelioration. The reform impulse of early 'social physics' carried over into the first attempts to make medicine a social science of health and welfare in the mid-nineteenth century. The prescriptive nature of the organic analogy continued to have a powerful influence on the development of medicine as a social science of the management of the health of populations. The 'geography of health' was examined in Britain as part of the discovery of the social conditions of the poor. The study of health and disease as part of the study of the state of society flourished within English learned societies in the early nineteenth century. Subsequently it became the basic tool of every English public health officer, analysing the health of a district through infant mortality, the most important vital measure.
