Description: This book studies how doctors responded to, and helped shape deep-seated fears about nervous degeneracy and population decline in France between 1750 and 1850. It uncovers a rich and far-ranging medical debate in which four generations of hygiene activists used biomedical science to transform the self, sexuality and community in order to regenerate a sick and decaying nation"a programme doctors labelled 'physical and moral hygiene'. The study argues that medicine acquired an unprecedented political, social and cultural position in French society, with doctors becoming the primary spokesmen for bourgeois values, and thus helped to define the new world that emerged from the post-revolutionary period.
Review Quotes: 'Quinlan impressively incorporates a wide range of printed sources for the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to tell a sweeping story of medicine and politics. ... Overall, this is an excellent book that successfully accomplishes Quinlan's objective of considering 'how doctors contributed to a much broader public discussion about physical degeneracy and depopulation in France between roughly 1750 and 1850'... The Great Nation in Decline is a lively and engaging contribution to the historiographies of gender, reproduction, public health and modern France.' Social History of Medicine '... whether readers accept or reject the larger claims of The Great Nation in Decline, they can be grateful to Quinlan not just for the lucid and perceptive readings of the individual texts but also for injecting new life into discussions of France's contributions to the development of modern public health.' ISIS 'This well written and thoroughly researched book - it contains a wealth of archival documentation - should appeal to anyone interested in the history of modern medicine.' H-France