Rotten Bodies: Class and Contagion in Eighteenth-Century Britain by Kevin Siena

Abstract

Reviewed by: Rotten Bodies: Class and Contagion in Eighteenth-Century Britain by Kevin Siena Alysa Levene Siena, Kevin – Rotten Bodies: Class and Contagion in Eighteenth-Century Britain. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019. Pp. 333. In 2011, I was privileged to host Kevin Siena as a visiting fellow at Oxford Brookes University, and in the course of his visit we shared many thoughtprovoking conversations about fever and contagion. What were interesting and well-conceived themes in 2011, however, have now become, in Rotten Bodies, 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. Siena focuses on class in its broadest terms as the backdrop for a discussion of health and the body in the long eighteenth century. By arguing that the bodies of the poor were both prone to putridity and contagion and, moreover, were liable to languishing in confined spaces like gaols, workhouses, factories—and indeed, their homes—Siena points out an evolving but essentially constant set of ideas about the [End Page 709] class-based body over a long timeframe. Class is thus interpreted as a biological as well as an economic state, whereby the poor body posed a constant threat of infection, especially where they came into contact with the better off. This went beyond a fear of the "underclass." Rather, Siena is at pains to point out that any poor body carried the threat of physical generation and contagion, as the poor contained an inherent predisposition to disease: their blood was, literally, "depauperated," or devoid of healthfulness. Thus, one of the sites of greatest insecurity was the prison, where respectable debtors were forced by the rapacious practices of gaol officials to sink into the mixed wards: "biohazardous zones characterised by proximity to lowly bodies and their filth" (p. 87). The courtroom was another risky space, where the poor could communicate their pestilence to judges and onlookers (fears fuelled by actual incidences of infection in Taunton in 1730 and London in 1750). Siena's thesis is developed by stages over a chronological treatment of the wider cultural meanings of typhus and the bodies which nurtured it. He illustrates how the most intense phase of fear about jail fever (the later decades of the eighteenth century) actually post-dated its worst period of incidence, and thus how much of that fear revolved around wider and developing anxieties about space and class, about who could catch the disease rather than how many people did so. This explains the concerns about debtors in particular, which prompted the passing of several Insolvency Acts to liberate the respectable poor from the dangers of the prison environment and the latent putridity of its occupants. It was not until the widely publicized case of transferred infection at the Old Bailey in 1750, however, that jail fever "came of age" as a "different cultural force" (p. 107). Medical tracts were published solely on this one disease, focusing on prisons but also other sites where the poor were crowded together—hospitals, ships and military camps. The emphasis was on bodily effluvia: the visceral business of blood, sweat, and feces, which combined the distasteful details of class-based prejudice with medical concerns about contagion and the body. The 1750 incident led to new emphasis on the old defences of cleansing with vinegar—not only buildings (including the court rooms) but also the bodies of prisoners—and vigorous laundering of clothing. Prisoners were separated from court officials during trials, and more and more inquests were held outside the prison to avoid the threat of the putrid environment. The same fears led to plans to rebuild Newgate prison, the focus for the worst attention—although the fact that the new building took 25 years to complete and was immediately burnt in the Gordon Riots limited the reassurance it could provide the worried well. Siena also utilizes his broader view of jails and the bodies they contained as a site of cultural meaning to explain the adulation laid upon the prison reformer John Howard. Howard's painstaking tour of English prisons took place in 1773 and led to the...