Contagion and the State in Europe, 1830-1930

by Peter Baldwin

Overview

This book explains 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, and uses medical history to illuminate broader questions of the development of statutory intervention and the comparative and divergent evolution of the modern state in Europe.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521642880
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	08/19/1999
Pages:	596
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.70(d)
Lexile:	1850L (what's this?)

About the Author

Peter Baldwin is Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of The Politics of Social Solidarity: Class Bases of the European Welfare State (1990) and Disease and Democracy: The Industrialized World Faces AIDS (2005).

Table of Contents

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.

Editorial Reviews

"I find this a quite dazzling work, imaginative in conception, broad in vision, amazingly erudite in execution, and perceptive in its judgements. There is simply no work like it—a Europe-wide juxtaposition of medicine and politics. Readers will surely relish the astonishing 'War and Peace'-like panorama of disease which Baldwin paints and the consummate mastery with which he handles his magazine of materials."
Roy Porter, Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, University of London

"...Baldwin is a stylist as well as a deeply curious researcher. Some passages are beautifully written, terms have been artfully chosen, there is humour, amusing and effective anecdotes abound."
Times Literary Supplement

"Peter Baldwin has written an expansive book bridging political history and the history of disease regulation."
American Historical Review, Andrew R. Aisenberg

"The boldness of the undertaking is more than matched here by the astonishing depth and breadth of the research. This encyclopedic bibliographic range makes the book a real treasure for researchers, and even if for no other reason than this, historians of public health will be in Baldwin's debt for many years to come."
JAMA

"...this book is well sorth the effort it takes to read. Though not abandoning the notion that prevention poliicies are partially shaped by political and economic interests, it gives a far more nuanced picture of the complex relationships between policies and interests than we have had before, and on a scale unmatched by previous work. It is an important and valuable contribution."
Journal of Interdisciplinary History

"Peter Baldwin takes his readers on an unprecedented, century-long grand sanitary tour through Britain, France, Germany, and Sweden. At ease in all four languages, weaving his way skillfully through innumerable sources and the results and remains of many an earlier expedition, never losing his verve and good humor, our navigator demonstrates as has never been done before the sheer mass and complexity of state policy, action, and public deliberation on contagious disease in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This is an achievement in itself."
Journal of Modern History

"The recent publication of this work in paperback form makes it an excellent resource for upper-level and graduate college courses. Scholars and students of medical history, political theory and European history in general all have much to gain from Peter Baldwin's contribution to the field."
H-German, Jason M. Wolfe, Department of History and Humanities, Lee University

From the Publisher

The boldness of the undertaking is more than matched here by the astonishing depth and breadth of the research. Baldwin has unearthed and digested an exhaustive array of both primary and secondary sources covering three major diseases (cholera, smallpox, and syphilis) in four countries—and in four languages—over the course of an entire century. This encyclopedic bibliographic range makes the book a real treasure for researchers, and even if for no other reason than this, historians of public health will be in Baldwin's debt for many years to come.

Journal of the American Medical Association