Mercier's Clinic: Public Health Utopianism in L'An 2440, rêve s'il en fut jamais.

The eighteenth-century medical Enlightenment in France saw fierce conflicts between inoculistes and anti-inoculistes, attacks from philosophes and surgeons on the privileges and dogmas of elite academic doctors, and attempts by reformers to improve medicine, hospitals, and sanitation. In this articl...

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Publicado en:Eighteenth Century Fiction Vol. 35; no. 4; pp. 463 - 485
Autor principal: Billing, Andrew
Formato: Literary Criticism
Publicado: University of Toronto Press Oct2023
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Acceso en línea:Ver este registro en EBSCOhost
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        atl: Mercier's Clinic: Public Health Utopianism in L'An 2440, rêve s'il en fut jamais.
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        au: Billing, Andrew
        affil: Associate Professor of French at Macalester College, Saint Paul, Minnesota, United States
      su:
        L'An 2440, rêve s'il en fut jamais (Book)
        Mercier, Louis-Sébastien, 1740-1814
        Public health in literature
        Utopias in literature
        French literature
        Biopolitics (Sociobiology) in literature
        Medicine in literature
      sug:
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          L'An 2440, rêve s'il en fut jamais (Book)
          Mercier, Louis-Sébastien, 1740-1814
          Public health in literature
          Utopias in literature
          French literature
          Biopolitics (Sociobiology) in literature
          Medicine in literature
      ab: The eighteenth-century medical Enlightenment in France saw fierce conflicts between inoculistes and anti-inoculistes, attacks from philosophes and surgeons on the privileges and dogmas of elite academic doctors, and attempts by reformers to improve medicine, hospitals, and sanitation. In this article, I show that Louis-Sébastien Mercier's L'An 2440, rêve s'il en fut jamais (1771) intervenes in this debate by portraying a France experiencing a public health crisis and providing compassionate remedies in a futuristic "public health utopia" for the diseases of France's individual and political bodies, including a proposal for a new inoculation clinic. Mercier's novel is the first French biopolitical novel, assigning responsibility for health and medicine to the state; it is also technocratic and sometimes anti-populist, and it aims to suppress as much as resolve social antagonisms on the eve of the French Revolution. I argue that Mercier's view of the state's role in public health is closer to physiocratic than republican or liberal positions, and affirms several characteristics of the absolutist tradition.
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    language: English
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