Sanitary statistics and social interdependence during the First Republic

Abstract

This article analyzes the place of quantification technologies in the network formed to fight diseases, from the Pasteurian revolution to the sanitation movement of the 1920s. It investigates the role of sanitary demography in the imposition of the Pasteurian model among physicians, followed by the statistical monumentalization of the reforms for different social actors. Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory and Michel Foucault’s works on governmentality are used to problematize a set of documents consisting of the 1906 census, demographic articles and bulletins published in the medical press, statistical yearbooks and ministerial reports.

sanitary statistics; Pasteurian revolution; national problem; sanitary movement