Legislation for infectious disease surveillance (notification, isolation, disinfection and contact tracing) provided government with unprecedented access to the homes and bodies of the poor and a set of tools to destroy and neutralize the biological threat posed by the intimacy of domestic space.

This paper focuses on municipal disinfection in England in the late Victorian period. Until now, historians have suggested that disinfection was accepted simply because the general public became convinced by the discoveries of medical science that showed disinfection killed germs. Whilst bacteriological knowledge certainly was a significant contributing factor, this paper contends that the effective municipal disinfection of homes and material belongings was achieved because it was transformed into a mobile, technologically-sophisticated and unobtrusive practice; that is, it became ‘liberal’.

By utilizing an extensive array of sources at the local and national levels, the paper explores the design of steam disinfection as a safe, self-regulating and easily-managed technology that minimized the ruination of material possessions such as clothes and books and maximized the destruction of germs. I show how the fumigation of homes was largely displaced by disinfection with chemical spraying, which became a portable, rapid and well-directed intervention supposedly capable of reaching the darkest and most dangerous corners of the home. As such, I demonstrate how assumptions about the corporeality of everyday life were built into the material form of disinfection technologies.

Central to this critique is an analysis of the spatial practices of medical science, using the tuberculosis disinfection experiments in Manchester’s public health laboratory as an example. These investigations, which took place in the 1890s under the supervision of Dr. Arthur Ransome and Professor Sheridan Sheridan Delépine, utilized a laboratory room fitted out to replicate the conditions of domestic space. The experimental materials were taken from the homes and bodies of tubercular Mancunians. Whilst these experiments demonstrate the uncertainties of science and the deeply contingent nature of laboratory research, I also argue that this laboratory was a confident spatial expression of the supposed social and moral relations that were brought to bear in the experimental setting.