Anne Hardy has drawn on a wide range of public health records for a detailed epidemiological investigation of the many infectious diseases—whooping cough, measles, scarlet fever, diphtheria, smallpox, typhus, typhoid, and tuberculosis—in Victorian society. Hardy explores factors which helped to reduce fatality, focusing particularly on preventive medicine, and on the local and domestic circumstances affecting the diseases' behavior. This is a significant contribution to the historical debate that arose from Thomas McKeown's theory of modern population growth.