What were the medical police?

Abstract

The article presents new ways of interpreting the concept “medical police,” which was used in the West in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Alternative understandings of the medical police in Europe, distinct from those offered by George Rosen and Michel Foucault, the preeminent twentieth-century thinkers on the topic, were derived by studying related treatises written in Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Spain, and Portugal. Records indicate that these treatises were not an exclusively German phenomenon nor did they constitute State regulation of the medical profession alone. Rather, they were broad-ranging treatises on how the State should manage public health in each location, according to its specific features and demands, whether institutional or political in nature.