Rotten Bodies by Kevin Siena;

Author:Kevin Siena;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300233520
Publisher: Yale University Press

John Howard and Plague

For even now it was indeed plague that still lurked behind the Jail Fever Panic. Howard made that clear in his less heralded but equally fascinating follow-up to The State of the Prisons, 1789’s An Account of the Principal Lazarettos of Europe, with various papers relative to the Plague. Howard claimed an epiphany while touring jails: “It likewise struck me, that the establishments, effectual for the prevention of the most infectious of all diseases, must afford many useful hints for guarding against the propagation of contagious distempers in general.” So in 1785 he set off on a tour of plague lazarettos, first in France and Italy and later in the eastern Mediterranean and Turkey. The resulting book was meant to teach Britons how to build and administer institutions to ensure effective quarantine. However, Howard also took the opportunity to clarify medical opinion on questions related to disease and the body, questions that were still unresolved. In so doing he demonstrates just how influential early modern theories of the plebeian body remained even at the end of the Enlightenment.51

Aikin, Howard’s biographer and friend, shows that Howard had kept medical theory at the forefront of his mind when planning his lazaretto tour. Indeed, along with physician John Jebb, the surgeon Aikin helped formulate a list of questions for Howard to pose to lazaretto doctors.52 The list is invaluable for investigating the issues about which British doctors remained unsure. Aikin’s own beliefs matter in this regard, not only because as a close confidant his thoughts surely informed Howard’s, but also because he helped edit An Account of the Principal Lazarettos and probably influenced what appeared in the book.

Aikin’s ideas on contagious diseases can be apprehended from his 1771 treatise on hospitals, which demonstrates concern for many issues central to prison reform: the management of space, hygiene, and ventilation for establishing healthy institutions. He was clearly a disciple of Pringle, who, we should remember, wrote the first book on jail fever and updated seventeenth-century plague theories by identifying putrid blood as the feature predisposing poor bodies to fever. Aikin concurred with Pringle’s assumptions. Accounting for fever in hospitals, he immediately homed in on class: “Whoever has frequented the miserable habitations of the lowest class of poor, and has seen disease aggravated by a total want of every comfort arising from suitable diet, cleanliness and medicine, must be struck with pleasure at the change on their admission to a Hospital.” However, “the peculiarly noisome effluvia” issuing forth from such lowly bodies rendered hospitals “a dismal prison” where the sick poor “perish by mutual contagion.” He then lamented, presciently: “Every hospital, I fear, without exception, may in some measure be considered as a Lazaretto, having its own peculiar disease within it. That dreadful distemper, little less malignant than the plague itself, distinguished by the title of the jail or hospital fever, has long been known as the inbred pestilence of crowded receptacles of the sick.” He then cited Pringle directly, calling fever “the

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