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Coming down with an infectious disease in early 1900s London would have been a pretty unsettling experience. Not only were effective treatments hard to come by, but the municipality had the legal right to enter your home and disinfect it. City workers could seize your belongings and take them away for steam cleaning, all in the name of public health. Yet these precautions were not draconian or even heartless: If this process rendered you homeless, you would be offered overnight accommodation in a comfortable, modern one-bedroom apartment alongside the building where your possessions were being sanitized.
Measures to contain today’s pandemic, such as stay-at-home orders and compulsory mask wearing, may feel to some like an unwelcome intrusion by the state into their daily lives. At the Hackney Borough Council Disinfecting Station, however, anti-disease actions were more of a public amenity, a way to keep the public healthy and a cohesive unit ....

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