George Alfred Walker’s Public Health Campaign for Burial Reform, 1839–1852

Abstract

Nineteenth-century sanitary and burial reform were motivated by public health concerns and transformed the Victorian landscape with two forms of new infrastructure: sewers and out-of-town cemeteries. However, the history of burial reform ‘always sat awkwardly’ (in the words of Julie Rugg) with that of sanitary reform. In this article, we re-examine the campaigning career of George Alfred Walker (1807–84), a surgeon-apothecary who made public health the core of his argument for burial reform, to demonstrate that burial and sanitary reform were deeply intertwined via sanitary science, politics and science communication. We argue that Walker represented city graveyards as a nuisance similar to poor sewerage, utilising Thomas Southwood Smith’s heterodox fever theory to make his argument amenable to Edwin Chadwick’s goals and solutions: infrastructure ahead of poor relief. Walker’s solutions gave the medical profession positive reasons to support sanitary reform, as they proffered much-needed employment via burial reform. At the same time, his extremely active and varied campaigning throughout the 1840s took inspiration and strategy from the broader sanitation movement. By providing a comprehensive account of his campaigning for the first time, we show that sanitary reform politics was central to changing British burial management as a contested scientific theory was utilised to fit political ends.