Les corps vils: Expérimenter sur les êtres humains aux

XVIII e et XIX e siècles (review)

Anita Guerrini

Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Volume 84, Number 1, Spring 2010, pp.
131-132 (Review)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/bhm.0.0306

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/387357

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 book reviews  Bull. Hist. Med., 2010, 84  131

with the Paracelsian Leonhard Thurneisser for comparison. Their consultations

by post offer insights into a patient–physician relationship among social equals
that illuminates diagnostic disagreements among professionals and consequently
patients’ uncertainty in the face of difficult choices.
In spite of Lindemann’s efforts to integrate all these contextualized, local stud-
ies into the flexible boundaries of medical history, they remain, for the moment,
valuable building stones toward a much broader synthesis of eighteenth-century
medical theory and practice that should highlight the role of informed patients
in shaping the encounter.

Guenter B. Risse
University of California, San Francisco
University of Washington, Seattle

Grégoire Chamayou. Les corps vils: Expérimenter sur les êtres humains aux XVIIIe et XIXe
siècles. Paris: La Découverte, 2008. 423 pp. Ill. €24.50 (978-2-7071-5646-4).

Grégoire Chamayou defines “vile bodies” as those humans who in the past had lit-
tle value to society: prisoners, the handicapped, slaves, and orphans, among others.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, these bodies served as experimental
material for the development of medical science. Chamayou is concerned not with
human experimentation in general, but with a very particular genre: the testing of
new medicines. His book, based on his doctoral thesis, is both an examination of
experimental practices and an account of the social process of avilissement, which
degraded certain humans to a status that allowed them to become experimental
subjects. Chamayou claims that this topic has been largely ignored by historians
of science, which is not entirely true, as his extensive bibliography attests.
Chamayou’s temporal boundaries are the beginnings of smallpox inocula-
tion in Europe in the 1720s and 1905, when the French physician Pierre-Charles
Bongrand first enunciated a principle of consent for experimental subjects.
Within these bounds, he proceeds topically rather than chronologically, looking
at various classes of subjects and varieties and sites of experiments, although the
narrative does move forward chronologically as the book proceeds. Following an
introduction that offers an admirably clear elucidation of just what constitutes an
experiment, Chamayou talks about the dissection of executed criminals, the use
of prisoners as experimental subjects, smallpox inoculation, self-experimentation,
the use of hospital patients, and colonial subjects. Some of these discussions
are more successful than others; for example, his chapter on dissection is too
narrowly constrained by the boundaries set by Michel Foucault’s Discipline and
Punish (1975), although Chamayou’s account of the debates over the cruelty of
the guillotine is fascinating. However, it also points to a tendency in the book to
simply relate a series of anecdotes. Chamayou is on firmer ground when he moves
132  book reviews  Bull. Hist. Med., 2010, 84

beyond well-known stories such as the introduction of inoculation to talk about

their moral implications as contemporaries recognized them.
The heart of the book concerns the nineteenth century, and here, perhaps
because he is less fettered by his reliance on Foucault, Chamayou’s discussion is
much more original and compelling. How did French physicians justify experi-
menting on hospital patients and the poor in light of the Declaration of the
Rights of Man? Chamayou points out that the equality of human bodies—which
made experiments on one person valid for the many—did not extend to equality
of social status, which made some people more valuable, or more expendable,
than others. Although physicians were certainly aware of these contradictions,
Chamayou asserts that the pressure toward greater scientific progress in the
nineteenth century nullified their concerns. This was also, he notes, the case with
experimentation on slaves and colonized subjects. The gradual development of
the idea of consent made continued experiments on the latter all the more rep-
rehensible, Chamayou argues.
Chamayou almost entirely overlooks experimentation on animals during this
period, which was in many cases very closely tied to the human experiments he
cites: I did not think it was possible to talk about Bernard, Koch, and Pasteur
without talking about their experiments on animals. This omission seriously skews
his account of the development of bacteriology. Joseph Meister, surely the most
famous human experiment of the nineteenth century, only merits a brief footnote,
and Gerald Geison’s The Private Science of Louis Pasteur (1995), which detailed just
how experimental Meister’s case was, is not cited.
Les corps vils offers a focused look at the heyday of particular practices, espe-
cially in France. It is well produced but has a French-style index of proper names
only.

Anita Guerrini
Oregon State University

Arnd Friedrich, Irmtraut Sahmland, and Christina Vanja, eds. An der Wende zur
Moderne: Die hessischen Hohen Hospitäler im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert. Historische
Schriftenreihe des Landeswohlfahrtsverbandes Hessen Quellen und Studien
Band 14. Petersberg, Germany: Michael Imhof Verlag, 2008. 424 pp. Ill. €24.90
(978-3-86568-427-1).

In 1533, Phillip the Magnanimous of Hesse laid the groundwork for a set of
social welfare institutions collectively known as the Hohen Hospitäler. Of the
four original foundations, three continue to serve the state of Hesse today. Thus,
the Hohen Hospitäler can look back over an unbroken history of 475 years. An
earlier anniversary (the 450th in 1983) occasioned the publication of a volume
treating the territory-wide institution over its first two hundred years. An der