Rotten Bodies

"Excellent...This is a terrific book and comes highly recommended."—Samantha Williams, Family & Community History

“[A] fine addition to Siena’s existing body of work on pre-modern disease and an excellent reminder that the history of medicine forms an integral part of political, economic, and social history.”—Dr Michelle Webb, Reviews in History

“Rotten Bodies’ illuminating discussion of medical discourse on epidemic disease offers a valuable corrective… Siena’s mastery of the medical sources relating to his subject over the longue durée (and an unaccustomed longue durée at that) will be of considerable value to medical, cultural and social historians of the eighteenth century, and indeed those scholars working on the late seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries too.”—Neil Davie, Books & Ideas [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