In this first English-language study of popular and scientific responses to tuberculosis in nineteenth-century France, David Barnes provides a much-needed historical perspective on a disease that is making an alarming comeback in the United States and Europe. Barnes argues that French perceptions of the disease--ranging from the early romantic image of a consumptive woman to the later view of a scourge spread by the poor--owed more to the power structures of nineteenth-century society than to medical science. By 1900, the war against tuberculosis had become a war against the dirty habits of the working class. Lucid and original, Barnes's study broadens our understanding of how and why societies assign moral meanings to deadly diseases.

http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~dbarnes/Home.html

Associate Professor

Director, Health & Societies Major

Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley

B.A. Yale University

Teaching Fields:

history of medicine; history of public health; global health policy and disease prevention; history, anthropology, and sociology of health and disease.

Research Interests:

history of infectious disease, epidemiology, and public health; the Bacteriological Revolution and its effect on public health; 19th century European (esp. French) social and cultural history; cultural history of bodily knowledge and practices; history of disgust.

Selected Publications:

The Great Stink of Paris and the Nineteenth-Century Struggle against Filth and Germs (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006)

The Making of a Social Disease: Tuberculosis in Nineteenth-Century France (University of California Press, 1995)

"Targeting Patient Zero," in Flurin Condrau and Michael Worboys, eds., The White Plague Revisited: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the History of Tuberculosis (Montreal, QC and Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen's University Press, forthcoming).

“Confronting Sensory Crisis in the Great Stinks of London and Paris,” in William A. Cohen and Ryan Johnson, eds., Filth: Dirt, Disgust, and Modern Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005).

"Scents and Sensibilities: Disgust and the Meanings of Odors in Late Nineteenth-Century Paris," Historical Reflections/Réflexions historiques 28 (2002): 21-49.

"Historical Perspectives on the Etiology of Tuberculosis," Microbes and Infection 2 (2000): 431-440.