Contagion: Disease, Government, and the "Social Question" in Nineteenth-Century France (review)

Andrew R. Aisenberg. Contagion: Disease, Government, and the "Social Question" in Nineteenth-Century France. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999. vii + 238 pp. $45.00.

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.

Two major turning points punctuated the contagion discourse. The first was the move from a focus on public places as sites of contagion, such as sewers and streets, to the private dwellings of the poor. This shift dated from 1834 with the Rapport sur la marche et les effets du choléra-morbus dans Paris, in which hygienists identified working-class dwellings as the principal foyer of the 1832 cholera epidemic. The new emphasis on the home as the main site of contagion led to the 1850 Melun Law on Insalubrious Dwellings. Although hygienists and engineers promoted public works, after 1870 the contagion discourse focused increasingly on the home, where hygienists such as Paul Brouardel identified women and children as moral and hygienic reformers.

The second turning point was the Pastorian revolution. Aisenberg contends, as have other historians, that Pastorian microbiology transformed hygiene and the discourse on contagion but did not replace them. The emphasis on social epidemiology, which dominated early-nineteenth-century thought, continued. The new hygiene movement of the Third Republic appropriated and incorporated Pastorianism, which legitimized hygiene as a positive science. Meanwhile, public health assumed a new urgency on the Third Republic's agenda, as investigators attributed French depopulation and national decline to public health and moral problems such as high infant mortality, alcoholism, tuberculosis, and syphilis.

The tension between individual liberty and governmental intervention constrained the contagion discourse throughout the century. Particularly troublesome for liberals was the idea of governmental interference in the private home, the bastion of the individual--and yet most hygienists recognized that the major public health problems of the era required such intervention. Aisenberg deftly shows how, in order to justify such a move, Third Republic hygienists redefined the private space of the home into a dangerous social space requiring intervention.

What I found most interesting about Aisenberg's interpretation of this well-trodden area of public health and social reform was his emphasis on gendered and familial themes. He reminds us that hygienists correlated immorality with poverty, and poverty with disease. Government officials then used these findings to justify intervention by defining social problems as moral problems. But Aisenberg argues that the moral concerns focused mainly on women. His analysis of how hygienists, such as Louis-René Villermé and Paul Brouardel, used science to define morality in terms of sexual difference is new and important. His use of gender as an analytical tool provides a novel way of analyzing hygienic investigation and social reform. A gendered approach promises rich rewards, but what is not yet clear is how far it will take us if we move beyond the couple of examples discussed in this book.

Aisenberg's use of contagion as a "way in" to explore the relationship between politics and science is compelling. Many historians before him have read and analyzed the same sources he uses, but his exploration of the discursive practices of science within their political context and his gendered approach...