ABSTRACT
The idea of Sozialstaat, social state, or l’État-providence brings us to the concept of a welfare state that is based on a sense of universal citizenship and distinguishable from earlier forms of poverty relief. The ideological changes that occurred during the Enlightenment contributed decisively to a political concern for health, disease, and the body. The birth of medizinische Polizei in Germany and Austria-Hungary, the Comité de Salubrité (1790) in France, and the British Sanitary Movement are part of the history of liberal states. The providential state included health as part of its ‘body politic’.
Health policies, statistics, and bacteriology were applied in the colonies, urban slums, and rural districts. Health officers in local and national authorities were the actors in this bio-political mission. Disinfection programmes, vaccination campaigns, bacteriological laboratories, and rural health centres show how health was united with scientific progress as a political tool for the conquest of poverty and squalor using experimental medicine. By the early twentieth century, health programmes and sanitary campaigns in European countries had become national policies.
This chapter also deals with the making of international cooperation to control communicable diseases, to protect trade from preventing the spread of disease, particularly cholera, plague, and yellow fever. The public health landscape became populated with the connections and networks produced by international sanitary conferences, as well as international conferences on charity, hygiene, demography, tuberculosis, venereal diseases, occupational diseases, work accidents, and the protection of children.
