ABSTRACT
Ganiare established his moral superiority over his patients through his ability to read and to understand not only the secrets for health that were hidden in Nature, but the secrets of social order concealed within his patients illnesses and characters. Ganiares medical practice provides an excellent case study of how these ideas played out in daily life in a provincial French town, and his casebooks can be read as books of secrets. Ganiares social status as a member of an elite Beaunois family was also important which, along with his pessimistic religious views, predisposed him to assume that men who lacked self-control were sources of social disorder. The metaphorical meanings of major epidemics, such as plague, smallpox or cholera, have been studied by historians of medicine, but less is known about people's perceptions of the common outbreaks of infectious disease In addition to considering day-to-day health in Beaune, Ganiare was also interested in local epidemics.
