Isolation, Liberalism, Biopower

Abstract

This chapter introduces the cultural history of health governance and sketches the broad outline of how epidemic diseases were significantly transformed in Victorian London by a novel system of hospital isolation. The historiography of disease control in the nineteenth century tends to focus on how the fear and panic of contagious disease lends itself to authoritarian, emergency powers. This chapter, however, suggests directing attention to how modes of liberal rule and administration placed a significant amount of the burden for governing epidemics with the governed themselves. It argues that sanitary detention should be viewed as an expression of biopower, and that biopolitical mechanisms (as suggested by Foucault) are best understood as appropriate to liberal governmentality.