Mission and Method The Early Nineteenth-Century French Public Health Movement Cambridge Studies in the History of Medicine Series

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.