Contagion and the State in Europe, 1830-1930 (review)

If epidemic diseases are universal biological phenomena, the work of stateless germs, why then do the responses of states to them vary with what Peter Baldwin calls a "polymorphous perversity" of entangled rationales and practices (p. 525)? In reflecting on the variety of responses to cholera, plague, and yellow fever by mid-nineteenth-century medical scientists, Erwin Ackerknecht suggested in 1948 that this was a situation in which the facts available did not allow a rational choice between competing contagionist and anticontagionist etiologies. 1 There was consequently recourse to ideology: contagion and quarantine persisted in authoritarian states, while more liberal states (e.g., England) rejected commerce-stifling quarantines and viewed the same diseases as having environmental causes and remedies. The so-called Ackerknecht thesis flourished, but it also changed over the years. A growing appreciation of medical thought as cultural, social, and political made it seem plausible that the links Ackerknecht identified might prevail whatever the epistemic status of the rival theories; indeed, that those theories were necessarily and not incidentally wedded to the rival polities. Surely authoritarian governments would express their authority by seeking to control human action, while liberal governments would put disease out of business with reforms. Thus, to those for whom etiology was inherently ideological, the Ackerknecht thesis, which had originally carried little axiomatic baggage, became a prescient exemplar. Even if it were not quite right, it was eminently plausible, an elegant correlation of ideas, actions, and political structures that worked well in the lecture room. But it gained that status without thorough empirical test

Political science · State (computer science) · Computer Science · European Political History Analysis