Carpenter, Alfred John (1825-1892)

2 autographed letters from Alfred Carpenter, 1825-1892. Correspondents include a letter to Jabez Hogg, Opthalmic Surgeon (1817-1899), no.1.

1875-1889

1 file (2 items)

Purchased from Hodgson's, London, June 1931 (acc.80890); Provenance details not recorded (acc.67430)

Online Archives and Manuscripts catalogue

Alfred John Carpenter (1825-1892), physician and propagandist for the cause of sewage farming. The son of John William Carpenter, surgeon, of Rothwell, Northamptonshire. He became a pupil of William Percival at the Northampton Infirmary about 1841 and later assisting John Syer Bristale. He entered St Thomas's Hospital, London, in 1847, taking the first scholarship, and going on to win the treasurer's gold medal. He was appointed house surgeon and resident accoucheur, and became a member of the Royal College of Surgeons and a licentiate of the Society of Apothecaries in 1851, he went into practice at Croydon in the next year.

Carpenter spent the bulk of his career in Croydon but moved up the metropolitan and national medical hierarchies, gaining an MD at London in 1859, and returning to lecture at St Thomas's on public health between 1875 and 1884. He was also a medical advisor to four successive archbishops of Canterbury.

Between 1859 and 1879 Carpenter was a leading light on the Croydon local board of health, and he was the founder manager of one of the earliest municipal sewage farms, at the village of Beddington. He was committed to the centrality of fresh air and ventilation as preconditions for the maintenance of good health, Carpenter nevertheless believed that no significant danger attached to the controlled irrigation of sewage in the immediate vicinity of large centres of population. He undertook epidemiological investigation to prove that Croydon and Beddington were characterized by lower rather than higher death rates in general, following the establishment of the farm, he insisted that there was no connection between the "natural" treatment of sewage and an increase in infection among humans, or parasitic diseases among cattle.