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Book chapter
Jean Geoffroy and the Conflicted Response to Childhood Epidemics in Fin-de-Siècle France
Visual Culture and Pandemic Disease since 1750, pp.93-115
Routledge, 1
2023
Abstract
This chapter examines the medical paintings of working-class children by Naturalist artist Jean Geoffroy. It argues that while officially commissioned paintings and illustrations follow the Pasteurian hygiene campaign, others are steeped in traditions of folk remedies and anticipated divine intervention on behalf of sick children. It fleshes out the politics of medicine against a conservative Catholic background that continued to exercise significant influence over working-class families in France. Geoffroy's "Catholic" medical paintings are devoid of irony and appear to sympathetically address the case of support for sisterhoods devoted to nursing that were being threatened politically, the reality that a concerning number of children died in the hospital in late-nineteenth-century France, and that hygienic measures and spaces of care for children instituted or encouraged under the Third Republic were less than adequate where the life and health of children were concerned.
This chapter also discusses regional and local resistance by doctors as well as institutions to state-wide measures in medicine and Geoffroy's engagement in these issues. It acknowledges Geoffroy's political savviness in focusing on women and girls rather than males in his medical paintings that demonstrated some form of resistance to Third Republic policies, arguing that they were less likely to attract controversy. Ultimately, we find that Geoffroy engaged in a conflicted response to the serious reality of continued staggering statistics of the death of children and babies due to contagious illness in late-nineteenth-century France.
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Details
- Title
- Jean Geoffroy and the Conflicted Response to Childhood Epidemics in Fin-de-Siècle France
- Edition
- 1
- Publication Details
- Visual Culture and Pandemic Disease since 1750, pp.93-115
- Resource Type
- Book chapter
- Contributors
- Marsha Morton (Editor)Ann-Marie Akehurst (Editor)
- Publisher
- Routledge
- Copyright
- © Routledge
- Identifiers
- 99380184793706600
- Academic Unit
- College of Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities; Art and Design
- Language
- English