Resistance and Prevention: Rural local government and the fight against tuberculosis

With Wales considered 'the blackest spot on the tuberculosis map' of Britain, the Welsh National Memorial Association (WNMA) was founded in 1910 with the aim to rid Wales of the disease within a generation. Although the Association's vision of a national health service was lauded by contemporaries as providing a model for England, as the WNMA took over the running of tuberculosis services from local authorities, it met with resistance from county and rural district councils. This essay explores this resistance. In placing the views and work of county and rural district councils at the centre of analysis this essay uses Wales and opposition to the WNMA as a case study to rethink the marginalization of county councils and rural district councils in histories of local government, public health, and housing policy in a pivotal period of central-location relations. As this essay shows, the opposition county and rural district councils expressed to the WNMA was not a straightforward rejection of centralization by authorities on the margins of 'the modern'. Rather, they put forward a competing vision of health and social welfare that championed local autonomy and a strategy of prevention focused on the material and domestic environment and housing reform. As the essay shows, opponents of the WNMA were not backwoodsmen. They were part of a wider national and progressive social reform movement.