Contagion and the State in Europe, 1830-1930

A broad, panoramic study of the divergence in public health policies across Europe, 1830–1930.

Peter Baldwin (Author)

9780521642880, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 19 August 1999

596 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 3.7 cm, 1.07 kg

'Overall, Baldwin seems to favour the technological, commercial, and geographical explanations for national differences in public policy although at the conclusion he returns to the original Ackernechtian thesis with a certain amount of sympathy … [the book] is an elegantly written work, and constitutes essential reading for anyone interested in the history of public health.' Metascience

This book is a groundbreaking study of the historical reasons for the divergence in public health policies adopted in Britain, France, Germany and Sweden, and the spectrum of responses to the threat of contagious diseases such as cholera, smallpox and syphilis. In particular the book examines the link between politics and prevention. Did the varying political regimes influence the styles of precaution adopted? Or was it, as Peter Baldwin argues, a matter of more basic differences between nations, above all their geographic placement in the epidemiological trajectory of contagion, that helped shape their responses and their basic assumptions about the respective claims of the sick and of society, and fundamental political decisions for and against different styles of statutory intervention? Thus the book seeks to use medical history to illuminate broader questions of the development of statutory intervention and the comparative and divergent evolution of the modern state in Europe.

1. Preventive variations
2. Enter cholera
3. Cholera comes of age
4. Smallpox faces the lancet
5. Syphilis between prostitution and promiscuity
6. The politics of prevention
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: History of medicine [MBX], Sociology & anthropology [JH], Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900 [HBLL], European history [HBJD]