"The Money Value of a Man" Health Experts' Economic Arguments at the Turn of the 20th Century

paul jackson / university of toronto / paul.jackson@utoronto.ca

biocapital

bioecomony

life itself

biopolitics

capitalism

Rajan

Cooper

life itself

Foucault

Marx

me-search

cholera experts

history and the future

history

“disquieting intelligence reaches us from the east”

“smoldering in Persia”

"Increase of Cholera"

CHOLERA MAY COME The Asiatic Type is at Hamburg…!

America Has Direct Communication! A Steamship on the Way …

This Continent in Genuine Danger.”

Dr. Bryce

Dr. Bryce

“…getting too near to be comfortable…Hamburg is near in the sense that there is a great deal of traffic from there to America…All we can to do is to keep Canadian machinery as perfect as possible and I trust that the American sea board authorities will do the same…One cannot help feeling grave,…as what may happen on this continent next year during the World Fair. The influx of foreigners will be very great and the disease may be carried here.”

filthy swamp

filthy swamp

“Settlements adapted to commercial intercourse prove often unhealthy to their inhabitants. Placed as they generally are on the banks of oozy streams and stagnating rivers; in certain seasons of the year, they contribute materially to the production of sickness.”

Toronto,

Ontario

Grosse Isle

Quarantine

Station

me-search

cholera experts

history and the future

Chadwick Farr Snow Pettenkofer Koch i

Zymotic theory

“The people bred on marshy coasts and low river margins, where pestilence is generated, live sordidly, without liberty, without poetry, without virtue, without science…Strangers no sooner set foot or attempt to settle on the soil than the endemic terror attacks them as if to bid them begone; and if they remain, their institutions, palaces, and monuments, fall into ruins, as the generations degenerate.”

Farr

3 million immigrants

between 1896 and 1914

population grew 43 per cent

between 1901 to 1911

Canada became the world's

fast growing country

Canada

Dr. Bryce

epidemiologic triad

= host,

agent,

and environment

Host + Agent + Environment cholera eugenics