Mapmaking and Mapthinking: Cancer as a Problem of Place in Nineteenth-century England

In the nineteenth century, Dr Alfred Haviland plotted the distribution of cancer on maps of England. Matured within the intellectual milieu of nascent professional public health, his work can be married to that of his fellow sanitary reformers; however, his approach to medical cartography differed from what historians expect of Victorian mapmakers. While most of his mapmaking colleagues attended to urban places, Haviland turned his attention to the English countryside. This article will thus make three interventions into the limited literature on cancer in nineteenth-century England. First, it will demonstrate how cancer came to be constituted as a problem of place. Second, it will show that Haviland understood the disease to be produced by rural environs, and thus paradoxically correlated to healthful locales rather than areas of urban squalor. Third, this article suggests an alternative to the well-travelled interpretation of nineteenth-century mapping as an exercise in power and social control.