Through a history of public health, I look at how early 19th-century public health interventions were a product of a modern line of thought that has a dark side, leading to discrimination, authoritarianism, eugenics, and the Nazis.
What does it mean for a body - flesh and bones - to be politicized? For the rhythm of heartbeats, the density of muscles, and the flow of the arteries to be molded and shaped by power?
What's the best way to rank citizens on a scale? To make the child’s body still, obedient, but strong?
How far can we go in engineering modern utopian bodies?
Is it possible to forge the iron of the national body through recommendations or if not, by force?
Throughout the 19th century, bodies emigrated in droves from the country to the city. Their stomachs were hungry, for food, for work. They crowded flesh on flesh into slums. “Little Ireland” in Manchester had two toilets between 250. 5 or more often slept in one bed. Cesspools and dunghills were everywhere.
At the same time, factory owners needed these bodies to be productive, energetic, malleable.
We take a look at the Philosophical Radicals, who were inspired by Jeremy Bentham, Edwin Chadwick, Social Darwinism, Eugenics, and enforced sterilization. The 1846 Nuisance Removal Acts, Robert Bayden-Powel and his concerns about national degeneration that led to the development of the Scouts, productivity during the First World War, and the development of eugenicist thought and societies.
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Credits:
Chadwick's sanitary map of Leeds.. Credit: Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
Section of the Thames embankment in 1867: the position of the low-level sewer is shown. Wood engraving.. Credit: Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
Sources:
James Le Fanu, The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine (London: Basic Books, 2012)
George Rosen, A History of Public Health (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2015)
David Armstrong, Political Anatomy of the Body,
PATRICK E CARROLL, Medical Police and the History of Public Health, www.cambridge.org/core/servic...
www.parliament.uk/about/livin...
Deborah Lupton, Imperative of Health: Public Health and the Regulated Body
Steffan Blayney, Industrial Fatigue and the Productive Body: the Science of Work in Britain, c., Social History of Medicine Vol. 3 1900-191
Cornelie Usborne, Social Body, Racial Body, Woman’s Body: Discourse, Policies, Practices from Wilhelmine to Nazi Germany, 1912-1945
Marius Turda, Modernism and Eugenics
thehistoriansapprentice.com/2...
20 июл 2020
