Reviewed by:

• Rotten Bodies: Class and Contagion in Eighteenth-Century Britain by Kevin Siena
• Lyn Bennett (bio)

Rotten Bodies examines the lingering effects of plague epidemics in eighteenth-century discourses of illness. After appearing regularly since the Middle Ages, the last British plague epidemic of 1665–66 effectively wiped out twenty-five per cent of London’s population. Britons did not know that it would be the last plague occurrence, however, and the book invokes a wealth of evidence to show how fear of another visitation exerted its influence throughout the eighteenth century. The Marseille epidemic of 1720 exacerbated English anxieties, and the resulting plague panic brought about new quarantine regulations as well as numerous works that, Siena points out, consistently looked “to past epidemics for useful knowledge” (19). As the Marseille crisis subsided, England’s plague-induced fear did not, and Siena shows how earlier epidemics continued to shape discourses of disease even as writers increasingly shifted their focus to the pestilential fevers that became plague’s successor. Regarded as “just [End Page 305] a symptom” in the twentieth century, fever took on “a dizzying variety of forms” (15) as an illness unto itself in the eighteenth century. Fever, Siena argues, became “the most amorphous, mercurial, and complicated” of afflictions, in part because its perceived causes were rooted in beliefs about its less protean but much-dreaded antecedent. Examining eighteenth-century discourses of fever, this monograph focuses particularly on the relationship of disease and social class as it highlights the many ways plague “remained a powerful ghost animating discussions of poverty and disease throughout the Enlightenment and beyond” (228).

Arguing that “by the time of the last great English plague epidemic of 1665–1666, medical constructions of the impoverished body demonstrate all of the features that commentators would recycle, reformat, and redeploy” (19) throughout the century that followed, Siena traces a “remarkable consistency in theories on urban epidemics over a very long time” (221). The book opens with an illuminating chapter on seventeenth-century plague treatises that acknowledges the work of historians who have established a clear link between plague and poverty. That link, Siena argues, became essentialized in the plebeian body as physicians invoked Galenic theories to explain plague as the product of blockages that impeded the flow necessary to humoral balance and thereby encouraged rot and putrefaction. Drawing on the work of well-known seventeenth-century physicians such as Stephen Bradwell, Gideon Harvey, and Nathaniel Hodges, Siena’s analysis points to the emergence of an economic rhetoric associated not only with plague but also with scurvy, menstruation, and sexual licentiousness, a rhetoric that effectively conflated “poor blood and plague-infested blood” in a symbiotic equation that was ultimately “a matter of degree, not kind” (48). The discourses of plague and fever worked to fashion an economically informed physiology that rendered the already corrupt plebeian body so hospitable to plague that the disease could appear even without external cause. The book carefully grounds its over-arching argument in seventeenth-century beliefs about plague and poverty, and does so with the aim of illuminating plague’s foundational role in shaping discourses of affliction whose relationship to class became no less firmly entrenched as the eighteenth century unfolded.

Tracing the ways that plague continued to serve the fashioning of a “class-specific physiology” (19) even as “pestilential fever took the baton from plague and became the principal disease on which anxieties about impoverished bodies were hung” (228), the book offers a detailed and compelling argument. In making his case, Siena invokes a wide-ranging body of evidence that is sometimes familiar and sometimes shocking. One example is found in the work of Daniel Defoe, where anxieties that remain largely implicit in his better-known A Journal of the Plague Year, a fictional account of the 1665–66 London plague, emerge as matter-of-fact [End Page 306] assertion in the slightly earlier Due Preparations for the Plague, where eight of Defoe’s thirteen proposals serve the end of “emptying London of its poor” (65). What is surprising about the...

审核人：

• 腐烂的尸体：十八世纪英国的阶级与危机蔓延
• 林恩·贝内特（生物）

烂尸考察了瘟疫在18世纪疾病话语中的挥之不去的影响。自中世纪以来定期出现后，上一次英国瘟疫在1665-66年间流行，实际上消灭了伦敦25％的人口。但是英国人不知道这将是最后一次瘟疫发生，而这本书援引了大量证据来表明在整个18世纪对再次拜访的恐惧是如何施加影响的。锡耶纳指出，1720年的马赛流行病加剧了英国人的焦虑，随之而来的瘟疫恐慌带来了新的检疫法规以及许多作品，这些作品始终将“过去的流行视为有用的知识”（19）。随着马赛危机平息，英格兰瘟疫引发的恐惧并没有消除，锡耶纳（Siena）展示了早期的流行病如何继续影响着疾病，即使作家越来越将注意力转向瘟疫热，瘟疫已成为瘟疫的后继者。被视为“公正[第305页的症状]在20世纪，发烧以“令人眼花variety乱的各种形式”（15）成为18世纪自身的疾病。锡耶纳认为，发烧成为“最无定形，最痛苦和最复杂的”痛苦，部分原因是其可察觉的根源源于对其蛋白质较少但备受恐惧的先例的信念。该专着考察了18世纪的发烧话语，特别着重于疾病与社会阶级的关系，因为它着重强调了瘟疫“仍然是一个强大的鬼魂，在整个启蒙运动及以后的时期中，对贫困和疾病的讨论都充满了生气”（228）。

锡耶纳（Siena）认为：“在1665年至1666年上一次英国大瘟疫流行之前，贫困人群的医疗结构展现了评论员将回收，重新格式化和重新部署的所有功能”（19）。 “很长一段时间以来，城市流行病理论上的显着一致性”（221）。这本书的开篇是关于17世纪瘟疫专论的开篇章，该章承认那些在瘟疫和贫困之间建立了明确联系的历史学家的工作。锡耶纳（Siena）认为，随着医生援引盖伦理论将瘟疫解释为阻碍身体平衡所需的血流的阻塞产物，从而鼓励腐烂和腐败，这种联系在百姓的身体中变得必不可少。锡耶纳（Siena）借鉴斯蒂芬·布拉德威尔（Stephen Bradwell），吉迪恩·哈维（Gideon Harvey）和纳撒尼尔·霍奇斯（Nathaniel Hodges）等17世纪著名医生的工作，指出经济辞藻的出现不仅与瘟疫有关，而且与坏血病，月经和性欲有关，一种有效地将“贫血和瘟疫感染的血液”混合在一起的修辞学，最终成为“程度问题，而不是善良问题”（48）。瘟疫和发烧的讨论有助于形成一种经济上广为人知的生理学，使本已腐败的平民身体对瘟疫非常好客，以致即使没有外部原因，这种疾病也可能出现。该书将其主要论点仔细地扎根于十七世纪关于瘟疫和贫困的观念中，

追踪瘟疫继续为“特定阶级的生理学”提供服务的方式（19），尽管“瘟热使瘟疫使警棍从瘟疫中夺走，成为悬于贫困者身上的焦虑症的主要疾病”（228），这本书提供了详尽而引人注目的论点。在陈述自己的观点时，锡耶纳援引了各种各样的证据，这些证据有时是熟悉的，有时是令人震惊的。一个例子是在丹尼尔·笛福的工作中发现，其中留在他的更知名的主要焦虑隐大疫年日记，一个虚构的帐户的1665年至1666年伦敦瘟疫，脱颖而出，就事论事的事实[尾页[306]在较早的瘟疫正当准备工作中断言，迪福（Defoe）的13项提案中有8项旨在“清空穷人的伦敦”的结尾（65）。令人惊讶的是...