By Elise A. Mitchell and Mathieu Corteel

This seminar examined two early public health interventions and their impact on the morals and ethics of the field. More particularly, Mitchell discussed the quarantining of slave ships during the Caribbean Slave Trade in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. She argues that these policies and practices reasserted recently-arrived enslaved Africans’ apolitical status and rendered them expendable in order to preserve the health of those considered part of the colonial commonwealth. 

Corteel looked at the assumptions surrounding 19th century health statistics, focusing on the normativity of public hygiene statistics on poverty before and during the 1832 cholera epidemic in Paris. Through this, he questions the moralistic emergence of public hygiene values through the lens of inequality.  

Read more and watch the seminar here.