Siena, Kevin. Rotten Bodies: Class & Contagion in Eighteenth-Century Britain.

In the spirit of Roy Porter’s call for “doing medical history from below,” Kevin Siena’s book-length study of the interconnections between urban poverty and epidemic disease focuses on the figure of the “plebeian body” as a subject of intense medical and cultural debate during the long eighteenth century. Histories of medicine have thoroughly examined the sanitation and public health debates of the nineteenth century, where poverty gets scrutinized and criminalized as one of the primary causes for epidemics like cholera. Siena expands these histories by fleshing out what he calls “connective tissues between eras,” such as the pervasive scapegoating of the poor born out of an Enlightenment-era phobia of epidemic outbreaks in the wake of numerous plague visitations. For Siena, class provided a uniquely spatial and moral vocabulary for making sense of epidemic: fears of poor bodies crowded together in prison cells and workhouses extended to the slums as the...