When and how did public health become modern? Governing Systems answers this question through an examination of Victorian and Edwardian England, long considered a key location of the origins of modern public health. These origins, argues Tom Crook, should be located not in the rise of centralized bureaucracy but in the contested formation and functioning of administration and technology. Theoretically ambitious but empirically grounded, Governing Systems will be of interest to historians of modern public health and modern Britain, as well as to anyone interested in the complex gestation of the governmental dimensions of modernity.
