French hygienists sought to reform domestic public health through centralized state authority

Evidence

Drawing together architects, engineers, and doctors from the highest ranks of the medical profession, here was yet another group convinced by Pasteur’s findings. Brandishing the latest evidence provided by bacteriological research, they saw it as their mission to put an end to the particularism and bureaucratic chaos that characterized public health legislation and replace it with uniform up-to-date health standards throughout France. In the process they hoped to free the masses from sloth, superstition, and medical quackery, and inculcate “civilized” hygienic practices. The specific reforms they sought included the spread of medical assistance to the poor, routine inspection of lodgings, the mandatory reporting of contagious disease and disinfection of lodgings, mandatory smallpox vaccination, the provision of clean water, the creation of building codes, and the formation of a new corps of state-employed public health inspectors for overseeing these regulations. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 214

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the emerging hygienist movement and its specific reform agenda.
• XREF: The same ‘civilizing’ vocabulary used for French peasants in the Freycinet Plan context is applied domestically here, showing the civilizing framework was first tested at home.