Intrusive Interventions expertly charts the transition of infectious-disease management from a disjointed collection of locally enforced measures to a nationwide system of surveillance. Key to this new, consolidated infrastructure was a policy of compulsory notification, around which operated practices of isolation, disinfection and contact tracing. Although Mooney's work is framed by the civic-focused ideas that underpinned public health in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, his groundbreaking focus is the materiality and performative aspects of infectious-disease surveillance. Such attention to the practices of preventive medicine is, of course, a nod to Michael Worboys's seminal book Spreading Germs (2000). But where Worboys later reflected that he ‘missed a trick’ by not paying closer attention to the performance of germ management, Mooney's new book attends precisely to this issue.

Drawing upon rich collections of parliamentary papers, local- and central-government records, medical texts and periodicals, Mooney deftly traces the development of policies, practices and technologies that underpinned the performance of infectious-disease surveillance. His case studies – Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Nottingham, Leicester and London – demonstrate how central-government policies permeated public health at a local level. In these cities the practices of public health were a mixed bag: local authorities were notified of any individual cases of infectious diseases in their area, infected persons were removed to isolation hospitals, domestic spaces and personal belongings were disinfected, and public health officials maintained a watchful eye over domestic and municipal spaces. Under these measures, individual autonomy was seemingly subordinated to a utilitarian public health agenda. By emphasizing the practices of preventive medicine, Mooney makes important observations about the minutiae of social relations and asks important questions about state coercion and public resistance.

The key actors in this book are the medical officers of health (MOHs), whose interactions with local authorities, general practitioners and patients are given a new and interesting dimension through the book's focus on the practices of public health. This enables Mooney to engage with and revise existing historical scholarship, which has traditionally posited that the rise of bacteriology consolidated public health practices and made them more palatable to a general public increasingly acclimated to interventionist policies. Mooney presents a persuasive alternative reading to such ‘techno-scientific’ determinism, arguing instead that infectious-disease surveillance needed constantly to be revised and updated to neutralize the ‘political fallout’ from state coercion and interference. He challenges the traditional historical narrative, arguing that the rise of the ‘New Public Health’ pre-dated the codification of germ theories of disease causation. He demonstrates that the basic apparatus of infectious-disease surveillance was in place across England well before the bacteriological foundations of public health had been established. In so doing, Mooney not only challenges assumptions about the influence of bacteriology, but also introduces important new ways of thinking about much broader issues surrounding the ideology and practice of public health, particularly concerning the rights and responsibilities of the individual within the collectivist framework of liberal democracy.

The book is broken into two distinct but interlinked sections. Part One, ‘Making infectious disease surveillance’, charts the infrastructural, administrative and political consolidation of infectious-disease surveillance. It reveals the changing landscape of health care and preventive medicine during the 1860s and 1870s, when large infrastructural sanitary reforms ran parallel to an emerging utilitarian belief that the wider community would benefit from the compulsory cleansing, isolation and surveillance of working-class persons suffering from communicable diseases. Building on this examination of infrastructural and policy change, Mooney turns his attention towards the implementation of surveillance policies from the mid-1870s to the late 1880s, before notification became routine. He breaks new ground by revealing how the adoption of these policies depended greatly upon local circumstances.

Part Two, ‘Spaces of risk and opportunity’, is the more innovative and weightier of the book's two sections. Here, Mooney gives full attention to the politics, practices and spatio-epidemiological geographies of infectious-disease surveillance. Although hospital-based isolation became increasingly routinized, working-class opposition to these measures was far greater than has been previously supposed. Likewise, a number of highly infectious diseases were not brought within the framework of compulsory notification. The Victorian home and classroom were spaces where infected and non-infected persons congregated, thereby increasing the chances of disease transmission. But, as Mooney demonstrates, these spaces also afforded public health officials valuable opportunities to employ new methods of surveillance over communities otherwise resistant to state interference. Contact tracing among schoolchildren transformed schools into ‘quasi-public health laboratories’ that in turn enabled access by local authorities to seemingly inviolable domestic spaces. Perhaps Mooney's most important contribution to the historiography of public health is his detailed account of how surveillance, to become more palatable to the working classes, transformed into a series of mobile, technologically sophisticated and less obtrusive and destructive practices. Although the personal experiences of MOHs, disinfectors and surveilled working-class persons are at times obscured – most likely a result of the limitations in available archives – Mooney nonetheless charts with great nuance the everyday realities of preventive medicine.

Intrusive Interventions is an exciting and insightful contribution to the history of public health and health care in Britain. Mooney's methodology and conclusions move beyond the history of Victorian disease surveillance, forcing us to re-evaluate our understanding of the state's role in managing and maintaining population health. Moreover, this book speaks to the ongoing tension between collectivist and individualist ideas of health care – whether the rights and autonomy of individuals can be reconciled with policies designed to protect the well-being of the community.