Contagion

Andrew Aisenberg has written an important and perceptive book using the regulation of contagious diseases to explore notions of individualism, social order, and the role of government in nineteenth-century France. Hygienists and government officials used contagion--or the belief that certain diseases were transmissible from person to person--to argue for both individual moral reform and governmental intervention to maintain public order. Aisenberg also shows how some sociohygienic investigators used science to explain morality in terms of sexual difference. More generally, he employs the discourse on contagion to examine the interrelations between politics and science. Arguing that historians have been slow to recognize the political nature of science, he situates the sci-entific discourse on contagion within the changing political context of nineteenth-century France

Context (archaeology) · Economics · Government (linguistics) · Individualism · Morality · Order (exchange) · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · Historical and Scientific Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · History of Science and Medicine · Law · Philosophy