Pseudo-science and society in nineteenth-century America

Water, as portrayed in Goubert's study, strikes me as a quintessential Latourian non-human actor, which was "conquered" and transformed by architects, town planners, engineers, hygienists, physicians, and chemists, but which also made its own "conquest", dramatically changing the scientific and cultural landscape of nineteenthand twentieth-century France. Thus, Goubert argues that a cultural and scientific revolution reconceptualized water and its uses, and water-objectified, democratized, medicalized, industrialized, and commercialized -changed people's lifestyles and ways of thinking. Water and its promoters brought about a revolution in mentalites, and the environment underwent profound changes with the new sociosanitary infrastructure of post-Pasteurian, Third Republic France. This innovative and imaginative book, amply illustrated with marvellous examples of "water culture", will be welcomed by historians of medicine and public health and historians of modern France who seek novel, interdisciplinary ways to study health and disease in history. As an excellent example of histoire des mentalites, Goubert's work joins studies in the same genre such as Alain Corbin's Le Miasme et la jonquille: L'odorat et l'imaginaire social (1982), Georges Vigarello's Le Propre et le sale. L'hygiene du corps depuis le Moyen Age (1985), and Guy Thuillier's Pour une histoire du quotidien au XIXe siecle en Nivernais (1977) in enriching our understanding of sociocultural history: habits, attitudes, prejudices, and values and their relationship to health and disease.