No open-access location is known for this record yet.
No open-access location is known for this record yet.
The history of public health has tended to be studied in one of two ways. Prior to the 1960s, it was a triumphal narrative of scientific and humanitarian development. Since then, historians have been highly critical, emphasising the growth of governmental and medical control over citizens. The Great Nation in Decline by Sean Quinlan of the University of Idaho is a more complicated account of health care than these models, exploring the social anxieties and medical debates behind the reform of health conditions in modern France. Quinlan impressively incorporates a wide range of printed sources for the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to tell a sweeping story of medicine and politics. Reproduction, gender, race and class issues appear against the backdrop of exciting political changes. The period under discussion, c. 1750–1850, was one of great change in France: Enlightenment optimism that healthy societies could be built, complete reform of the entire medical system and significant medico-scientific breakthroughs. Throughout this period, French doctors used a discourse of physical and moral hygiene with the intent of renewing the nation, but did so in three distinct ways over time: to prevent degeneration in the ancien regime, to regenerate a healthy body politic after the Revolution, and to explain social antagonisms in an industrialising country. The book is divided into six chapters, which are chronological while developing three key themes.
Loading…
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 15 citations exist upstream.
Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.