Les corps vils: Expérimenter sur les êtres humains aux XVIIIe et XIXesiècles (review)

Grégoire Chamayou defines "vile bodies" as those humans who in the past had little value to society: prisoners, the handicapped, slaves, and orphans, among others. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, these bodies served as experimental material for the development of medical science. Chamayou is concerned not with human experimentation in general, but with a very particular genre: the testing of new medicines. His book, based on his doctoral thesis, is both an examination of experimental practices and an account of the social process of avilissement, which degraded certain humans to a status that allowed them to become experimental subjects. Chamayou claims that this topic has been largely ignored by historians of science, which is not entirely true, as his extensive bibliography attests.

Chamayou's temporal boundaries are the beginnings of smallpox inoculation in Europe in the 1720s and 1905, when the French physician Pierre-Charles Bongrand first enunciated a principle of consent for experimental subjects. Within these bounds, he proceeds topically rather than chronologically, looking at various classes of subjects and varieties and sites of experiments, although the narrative does move forward chronologically as the book proceeds. Following an introduction that offers an admirably clear elucidation of just what constitutes an experiment, Chamayou talks about the dissection of executed criminals, the use of prisoners as experimental subjects, smallpox inoculation, self-experimentation, the use of hospital patients, and colonial subjects. Some of these discussions are more successful than others; for example, his chapter on dissection is too narrowly constrained by the boundaries set by Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish (1975), although Chamayou's account of the debates over the cruelty of the guillotine is fascinating. However, it also points to a tendency in the book to simply relate a series of anecdotes. Chamayou is on firmer ground when he moves beyond well-known stories such as the introduction of inoculation to talk about their moral implications as contemporaries recognized them.

The heart of the book concerns the nineteenth century, and here, perhaps because he is less fettered by his reliance on Foucault, Chamayou's discussion is much more original and compelling. How did French physicians justify experimenting on hospital patients and the poor in light of the Declaration of the Rights of Man? Chamayou points out that the equality of human bodies—which made experiments on one person valid for the many—did not extend to equality of social status, which made some people more valuable, or more expendable, than others. Although physicians were certainly aware of these contradictions, Chamayou asserts that the pressure toward greater scientific progress in the nineteenth century nullified their concerns. This was also, he notes, the case with experimentation on slaves and colonized subjects. The gradual development of the idea of consent made continued experiments on the latter all the more reprehensible, Chamayou argues.

Chamayou almost entirely overlooks experimentation on animals during this period, which was in many cases very closely tied to the human experiments he cites: I did not think it was possible to talk about Bernard, Koch, and Pasteur without talking about their experiments on animals. This omission seriously skews his account of the development of bacteriology. Joseph Meister, surely the most famous human experiment of the nineteenth century, only merits a brief footnote, and Gerald Geison's The Private Science of Louis Pasteur (1995), which detailed just how experimental Meister's case was, is not cited.

Les corps vils offers a focused look at the heyday of particular practices, especially in France. It is well produced but has a French-style index of proper names only.