Mission and Method
The Early Nineteenth-Century French Public Health Movement

This book argues that the french led the way in the nineteenth-century public health movement.

Ann Elizabeth Fowler La Berge (Author)

9780521404068, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 25 September 1992

398 pages, 12 b/w illus. 6 tables
23.7 x 15.9 x 2.5 cm, 0.676 kg

"...a comprehensive review of the publications and practical achievements of the public health reformers who were active from the Napoleonic era to 1850...careful reconstruction of the evidence and arguments deployed by the reformers...the result of a prodigious amount of research in the publications of French public health reformers, and La Berge has largely suceeded in her attempt to write somethine like an 'official history' of the public health movement..." Thomas Kselman, Journal of Modern History

In Mission and Method Ann La Berge shows how the French public health movement developed within the socio-political context of the Bourbon Restoration and July Monarchy, and within the context of competing ideologies of liberalism, conservatism, socialism, and statism. The dialectic between liberalism, whose leading exponent was Villerme, and statism, the approach of Parent-Duchatelet, characterized the movement and was reflected in the tension between liberal and social medicine that permeated nineteenth-century French medical discourse. Professor La Berge also challenges the prevalent notion that the British were the leaders in the nineteenth-century public health movement and set the model for similar movements elsewhere. She argues that an active and influential French public health movement antedated the British and greatly influenced British public health leaders.

List of tables and illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Community, method, context
2. The methodology of public hygiene
3. The context of public hygiene: national public health policy
4. Institutionalization: the health councils
5. Investigation and moralization: occupational hygiene and industrialization
6. Investigation and practical reform: public health in Paris
7. Public health in Paris: investigation, salubrity, and social welfare
8. Public health and public health movements: comparison and assessment
9. Before Pasteur: hygienism and the French model of public health
Epilogue
Appendixes
Bibliographical note
Index.

Subject Areas: History of medicine [MBX]