Book Review

摘要

This book by Matthew Newsom Kerr is the latest contribution to the discussion of how medicine doubled as the means of both public service and governance in nineteenth-century Britain. The framework of this book is founded upon Michael Foucault’ body of work concerning liberalism, governmentality and biopolitics. The author argues that biopolitical imperatives went hand in hand with liberalism in Victorian London. He explains it with reference to how the civic authorities controlled various diseases, such as plague and smallpox, through various medical policies and institutions. He raises an interesting point that the ‘liberal systems of security’ (p. 8) were based on the fear of diseases. With the aid of doctors and health administrators, the state transformed the fear of mortality into a principal justification of the governance of citizens. In this story, hospitals and clinics were sites of biopower and complex negotiations between the civil society and sick individuals. In order to establish a healthy, sanitised, orderly and disciplined society, the liberal state took recourse to legitimising quarantine, isolation, segregation, seclusion and confinement, thus becoming a ‘surveillance state’. Public health and political modernity arguably informed the development of one another. The history of this co-constitution underpins the discussion in this book.