The germ of this book was a doctoral dissertation entitled “Public Health in France and the French Public Health Movement, 1815–1848,” written in the 1970s, when few secondary sources on nineteenth-century French public health were available. After reading Erwin Ackerknecht's pioneer article, “Hygiene in France, 1815–1848” (1948), his “Anticontagionism between 1821 and 1867” (1948), and George Rosen's A History of Public Health (1958), as well as some articles by Rosen, I set out to write a survey of public health in early nineteenth-century France. I wanted to write a descriptive account, providing the main outlines of the story by looking at public health theories, problems, institutions, and policies. I hoped to find out if the French hygienists actually accomplished anything, and to see how the French movement compared with the more familiar and already well-documented British movement. The dissertation succeeded, I believe, in providing the basic descriptive account I sought, and was, I am gratified to say, the starting point for a number of scholars who went on to write monographs about various aspects of nineteenth-century French public health.

I was subsequently funded by the National Library of Medicine to do further research and write a book on the French public health movement. The present volume is the result of an additional year of research in France and the incorporation of many works that have appeared in the interim on nineteenth-century French medicine and public health.