THE "SCIENCE OF HEALTH" AND THE "SCIENCE OF MANNERS": HYGIENE AND EDUCATION IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

Abstract

During the eighteenth century, promoting health through the adoption of good habits became a common aim in pedagogical treatises, domestic medicine works, literature, particularly the novel, and journals. Hygiene and education were an important part of the projects of enlightened reformism, in which social reform and the reform of the individual were tightly connected. This paper focuses on the ways hygiene was popularized, the convictions shared by physicians and educators about the mind-body relationship and about the connections between health and morals, individual well-being and social utility, and analyzes the social and moral meaning of the new habits of health and physical education. Thus, hygiene is read as a new discipline of the body which grew popular in the eighteenth century among the enlightened elites and acquired wide social, moral and political implications.