"Contagion by Telephone": Print Media and Knowledge about Infectious Diseases in Britain, 1880s-1914

Communication technologies have long generated anxieties about physical and mental well-being. From the 1880s until World War I, concerns about "infection by telephone" in the British press prompted medical authorities and the National Telephone Company to investigate whether using the telephone, especially in public places, increased the possibility of contracting infectious diseases such as tuberculosis and diphtheria. This article reconstructs for the first time these transnational debates and the associated medical experiments. In contrast to previous scholarship, which has conceptualized health concerns associated with the telephone primarily within the framework of a nervous modernity, this article argues that the anxieties about "infectious telephones" also reflected the complex negotiations surrounding the emergence of new telecommunication networks and medical theories. It demonstrates that state and commercial actors, medical knowledge, and print media all shaped notions of public health risks and how to contain them.