The great stink of Paris and the Nineteenth-Century struggle against filth and germs
By: David Barnes.
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 2006
Place of publication: Baltimore
Language: eng
Number of pages: 314
Subjects: Social medicine -- Europe -- History.; Social medicine -- France -- History.; Diseases -- Europe -- History.; Diseases -- France -- History.; Public Health -- history -- France.; Health Knowledge, Attitudes, Practice -- France.; Communicable Disease Control -- history -- France.; Sanitation -- history -- France.; Bacteriology -- history -- France.
Description: "Historian David S. Barnes examines the birth of a new microbe-centered science of public health during the 1880s and 1890s, when the germ theory of disease burst into public consciousness. Tracing a series of developments in French science, medicine, politics, and culture, Barnes reveals how the science and practice of public health changed during the heyday of the bacteriological revolution." "This study sheds light on the scientific and social factors that continue to influence the public's lingering uncertainty over how disease can - and cannot - be spread."--Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction; title: "Not everything that stinks kills" : odors and germs on the streets of Paris, 1880; title: The santiarian's legacy, or how health became public; title: Taxonomies of transmission : local etiologies and the equivocal triumph of germ theory; title: Putting germ theory into practice; title: Toward a cleaner and healthier republic; title: Odors and "infection," 1880 and beyond; title: The legacy of the twentieth century.