Matthew Newsom Kerr
I am an historian of modern Britain, public health, and medicine. My research is primarily in the cultural history of infectious disease and with a focus on visual representations and discourses of the body.
My first book, Contagion, Isolation, and Biopolitics in Victorian London (Palgrave, 2018), examines a large network of infectious disease hospitals erected by the Metropolitan Asylums Board starting in the 1870s. By the end of the century these public isolation facilities annually treated tens of thousands of cases of scarlet fever, typhoid fever and smallpox, and eventually also measles, whooping cough and tuberculosis. My aim in this book is to place the social history of infectious disease alongside the urban technologies of liberal governance and the biopolitics of citizenship. It brings to light a radical transformation in the experience and meaning of contagiousness. The isolation hospitals came to represent a new governing strategy for health security, but as such also emerged as key sites of contention and worked to reformulate the practices and discourses concerning the hygienic management of the social body, the self and the metropolitan landscape.
My current work concerns nineteenth-century smallpox vaccination, mainly in Britain but also globally. I approach this topic from the perspectives of visual culture and physical embodiment, posing questions about the contested meaning of smallpox disfigurement and the vaccine scar. The monograph I am writing is interested in exploring how vaccination shaped the corporeal culture of public health in profound, complicated and highly disputed ways. It produced body as a site of dispute over the meaning and practice of immunity. Similar to how smallpox itself left physical traces, the value of smallpox vaccination was entirely framed by its attendant scarification. However, the scarred body was not strictly a medical concern, but was constantly wrangled over by doctors, anti-vaccinationists, and other commentators and ordinary people. This visual culture of vaccination involved heated debates involving competing ideas about suffering and security, presence and disappearance, visibility and memory, inscription and legibility, exhibition and representation, print imagery and bodily display, clinical depictions of the aesthetic and grotesque body.
Courses regularly taught include:
HIST79/179: History of Technology, from Steam to Cyborgs
HIST123: Plagues, Epidemics and Infections
HIST24/124 & WGST140A: History of Sexually-Transmitted Diseases
HIST11H & HIST12H: Medicine, Health and the Body
HIST128: Crime, Prostitution and Poverty in Victorian London
HIST131: Britain and the First World War
“An ‘arsenal for the supply of ammunition for the defence of vaccination’: The Jenner Society and Anti-Anti-Vaccinationism in England, 1896-1906,” Medical History (forthcoming)
“Wearable Immunity: Beauty Lessons from the Pockmarking Era,” Nursing Clio, 21 January 2021.
Contagion, Isolation, and Biopolitics in Victorian London (Palgrave, 2018).
“Sites of Complaint and Complaining: Fever and Smallpox Hospitals in Late-Victorian London,” in Complaints, Controversies and Grievances in Medicine: Historical and Social Science Perspectives, ed. by Jonathan Reinarz and Rebecca Wynter (Routledge, 2014), 205-22.
“‘An Alteration in the human countenance’: Inoculation, Vaccination, and the Face of Smallpox in the Age of Jenner,” in A Medical History of Skin: Scratching the Surface, ed. Jonathan Reinarz and Kevin Siena (Pickering and Chatto, 2013), 129-46.
“‘French Beef was Better than Hampstead Beef’: Taste, Treatment and Pauperism in a London Isolation Hospital, 1871,” in Residential Institutions in Britain: 1725-1950: Inmates and Experiences, ed. Jane Hamlett, Lesley Hopkins, and Rebecca Preston (Pickering and Chatto, 2013), 35-50.
Recent conference presentations and talks
“Beautiful Scars: The Medical Aesthetics of Smallpox Vaccination Marks in Nineteenth-Century England,” American Association for the History of Medicine Conference, University of Michigan, 13 May 2023.
“Faces from the Past: Smallpox, Vaccination, and the Construction of History,” Nineteenth-Century Studies Association Conference, 31 March 2023.
“(Not) Seeing is (Not) Believing: Smallpox and Victorian Visual Culture,” Midwest Victorian Studies Association Conference, St. Louis University, 21 April 2018.
“(Not) Seeing is (Not) Believing: Smallpox and Victorian Visual Culture,” Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies, University of California at Santa Barbara, 3 March 2018.
Commenter for panel, “Medicine, Contagion, and Social Order, c.1700-1850,” North American Conference on British Studies, Washington, DC, 11 November 2016.
“‘Disenfranchised for doing his Duty toward his Family and his Neighbors’: Medicine, Pauperism, and the Workingman’s Vote, 1867-1885,” North American Conference on British Studies, Little Rock, AR, 13-15 November 2015.
“Tracing Smallpox: Hospitals, Cartography and the Health of London.” American Association for the History of Medicine Conference, New Haven, CT, 30 April - 3 May 2015.
“Drawing Circles: William Henry Power, Spatial Technologies, and the Inscription of Smallpox, 1881-1910.” Annual meeting of the Urban History Group on the theme “Urban Knowledge” at the University of Wolverhampton, 26-27 March 2015.
“Drawing Circles: William Henry Power, London Smallpox, and the Mapping of Biopolitical Territories.” Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies, Las Vegas, 6-8 March 2015.
“Tracing the Invisible: Smallpox and Medical Cartography.” North American Victorian Studies Association, Pasadena, 23-25 October 2013.
“Infectious Disease Hospitals and the Local Politics of Resistance: London, 1870-1885.” Complaining about Medicine, c.1700-2000, History of Medicine Unit, University of Birmingham (UK), 2-3 November 2012.
“Public Sphere, Public’s Fear: London Isolation Hospitals and the Local Politics of Resistance, 1870-1900.” Society for the Social History of Medicine Summer Conference: Emotions, Health & Wellbeing. Queen Mary, University of London, 10-12 September 2012.
“Pauperised by the Public Health?: Late Victorian London’s Isolation Hospitals, Taste and Body Politics.” North American Conference on British Studies, Denver, 19 November 2011.
“‘An alteration in the human countenance’: Inoculation, Vaccination, and the Face of Smallpox following Jenner.” Scratching the Surface: The History of Skin, its Diseases and their Treatment, University of Birmingham, 30 October 2010.
“Pauperised by the Public Health?: Taste and Citizenship in London’s Infectious Disease Asylums, 1871-1891.” Inhabiting Institutions in Britain, 1700-1950, Royal Holloway, London, September 15, 2010.