Questions: Week 2

Dear members of seminar III:

We have 3 excellent commentaries by David Zilberman, Jesse Geisler and Megan Low. They each take slightly different tacks and there is a lot to respond and add to.

Each week I will have questions to guide your reading. Margaret Galvan, our Tech Fellow, will be posting them this very soon. As a preview, I am listing the questions for your current readings.

1. Discuss the issues at stake in the debate over the “cause” of disease. Who espoused the view that it was environmental, versus those who advanced deprivation as its cause? What interests were at stake? What moral positions on poverty were taken? What remedies were proposed by each camp? Did Engels differ from other critics in his analysis of the problem? In his solution? Who was his audience?

2. Who were the major “players” in the debate over disease and the public’s health?

3. Were they responding to epidemics? Fear of epidemics? Fear of the poor?

4. How has “mobility” been leveraged in a disciplinary understanding of disease? What role has it played in pathologizing / categorizing the poor?

5. Describing the work of Farr, Eyler writes that “regularity and order in human life and behaviour is what gave statistics its potential value as a tool for the study of man”. He goes on to quote Farr, saying; “It is the duty of physicians, in recording facts respecting disease and death, to employ the same care as astronomers and meteorologists bestow on the observation of physical phenomena, and if that is done the observations will admit of the same kind of generalizations.” What, according to Eyler and Farr, are the benefits of a positivist empricist approach to understanding the social world? What, in your opinion, could be some critiques of this position?

Other questions to ask yourself as you read the 3 commentaries already posted:

Did Farr, Engels and Chadwick hold to a single theory of disease causation or accommodate multiple possible theories of causation?

What is the use and power of statistics in the early 19th century? Why does the concept incorporate both facts (the percentage of horses in a particular London district) and a set of techniques for analyzing phenomena?

Is Engels excoriating the British state, the government, or a segment of society? What is the relationship between the 3 for him?

What is the relationship between knowledge and action? How do the different men you have read about see knowledge as the prelude to resolution? Who is the agent of problem solving?

What is the role of science in knowledge and problem solving? In the creation of public policy?

I hope all these questions help you in thinking about your own commentary.

Professor Oppenheimer