ABSTRACT
This chapter takes its point of departure in social control strategies and the power of classification. The argument is that modernity could hardly have succeeded without establishing an idea of an unhealthy Other, an atavistic being whose very existence threatens society with degeneration. The growing concern in the nineteenth century about national health issues following industrialization took as its point of departure various ideas on social biology. The idea of race very quickly became a notion that all these different social groups did not fit in society. By the mid-nineteenth century social and racial biology had established itself as a science of boundaries between groups and the degenerations that threatened humanity when these boundaries were transgressed. Social commentators of the time were also concerned with purifying society at home. In public political debate, arguments are often drawn from the perceived deterioration of the health of the national culture.
