The living and the dead cohabited Paris until the late eighteenth century, when, in the name of public health, measures were taken to drive the latter from the city. Cemeteries were removed from urban space, and corpses started to be viewed as terrifyingly noxious substances. The dead had fallen victim to a sustained reflection on the notions of life and death that emerged from the two new medical fields of biology and hygiene. In large part, the Paris of the nineteenth century--the Paris of modernity--arose, both theoretically and physically, out of this concern over the relations between...

A collection of essays by Mirko D. Grmek, providing a portrait of his career as a historian of science and an engaged intellectual figure. Uniting some important strands of his published work, it covers deep epistemological changes in disease concepts and major advances in the life sciences and their historiography

A collection of essays by Mirko D. Grmek, providing a portrait of his career as a historian of science and an engaged intellectual figure. Uniting some important strands of his published work, it covers deep epistemological changes in disease concepts and major advances in the life sciences and their historiography

The Eclipse of the Utopias of Labor brings together a series of essays bridging intellectual history and the history of the body tracing the shift from the eighteenth-century concept of man as machine to the late twentieth-century concept of digital organisms. The book looks at the rise and decline of "the great utopias of labor" in the first half of the twentieth century.