Rotten Bodies

“Kevin Siena’s second, brilliant, book ploughs a mercifully clear furrow through the morass of eighteenth-century medical writing. . . . This book is a genuine tour de force: clearly written, mercifully free of jargon and cautious about the nature of the fevers under discussion.”—Jeremy Boulton, Continuity & Change

“A well-researched and eminently readable book, Rotten Bodies considers a wide variety of texts and treatises in showing how earlier beliefs about plague continued to shape eighteenth-century discourses of affliction, and both its evidence and argument should prove useful to anyone interested in discourses of class and contagion in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain.”—Lyn Bennett, Eighteenth-Century Fiction

“A rich and thoroughly convincing theory about class, contagion, and space, which emphasizes a significant amount of continuity in thinking about disease from plague, through typhus, to cholera.”—Alysa Levene, Social History

“Rotten Bodies is a thoughtful and broad engagement with how the fear of epidemics effected eighteenth-century culture that centres class as a vital component of that fear and the reaction to it. . . . Siena’s focus on the fearing class provides an ample resource for further engagement with class and the body more generally.”—Richard T. Bellis, Canadian Journal of History

“This work will be required reading in fields of research that do not often overlap such as the histories of medical thought, histories of crime and penal policy, historians of the body, and those of social structure. All will find it highly engaging and thought-provoking, a book about putrescence, confinement, and contagion that offers a conceptual breath of fresh air.”—Henry French, American Historical Review

“An ambitious and important book.”—Christopher Hamlin, Journal of Modern History
 

“Rotten Bodies marks an achievement in combining the histories of poverty, public health, medicine, and prisons.”—Christopher M. Blakley, The Middle Ground Journal
 
 

“Fear – fear of contagion and fear of the poor animated eighteenth-century Britain.  Kevin Siena’s Rotten Bodies supplies an all-important new understanding of the histories of poverty, class and race.”—Tim Hitchcock, author of Down and Out in Eighteenth-Century London

“Kevin Siena has produced a lively, smart, and thoughtful history of the pestilential ‘plebeian body’ and the fears it produced throughout the long eighteenth century. As it moves through sites as varied as debtors prisons, slums, cotton-mill towns, and the homes of the poor, this book insists on both the centrality of class as a category of analysis for medicine in the Age of Reason and the importance of medicine for the history of emergent conceptions of class. It is a work sure both to challenge and reinvigorate the history of medicine and British intellectual and social history more broadly.”—Suman Seth, Cornell University