ABSTRACT
This chapter elaborates the understanding of 'the social body' and uses this understanding to offer some remarks about cities as social bodies. It describes the understanding of 'health' and its coarticulation with social bodies. The social 'body' ceased to be a simple juridico-political metaphor and became a biological reality and a field for medical intervention. The doctor must be the technician of this social body, and medicine a public hygiene. The chapter highlights the importance of particular knowledges of health for governing urban life. The division of the city into areas dealt with by police and health boards began to allow for the possibility of seeing a link between squalor and crime, such that a strong link between a kind of physical health and a kind of moral hygiene began to be enunciated. Measures designed to have beneficial effects on the health and hygiene of populations may have unintended consequences.
