In this first English-language study of popular and scientific responses to tuberculosis in nineteenth-century France, David Barnes provides a much-needed historical perspective on a disease that is making an alarming comeback in the United States and Europe. Barnes argues that French perceptions of the disease--ranging from the early romantic image of a consumptive woman to the later view of a scourge spread by the poor--owed more to the power structures of nineteenth-century society than to medical science. By 1900, the war against tuberculosis had become a war against the dirty habits of...
In this first English-language study of popular and scientific responses to tuberculosis in nineteenth-century France, David Barnes provides a much-ne...
Ultimately, the attitudes of physicians and the French public were shaped by political struggles between republicans and the clergy, by aggressive efforts to educate and "civilizethe peasantry, and by long-term shifts in the public's ability to tolerate the odor of bodily substances.
Ultimately, the attitudes of physicians and the French public were shaped by political struggles between republicans and the clergy, by aggressive eff...
