Divine providence and epidemic cholera

When the first cholera epidemics struck England in the 1830s there were calls for days of prayer and penitence to deflect the Divine Providence assumed to underlie such visitations. By the time of the later epidemics prayer was considered less relevant than doing something about the drains, even though the cause of the disease was still unknown. Anglican clergy who had earlier led the calls for prayer were now active in the programmes of sanitary reform. This thesis traces the progress of the secularisation of explanatory assumptions for natural events and in the concept of Divine Providence.