An Interactive Annotated World Bibliography of Printed and Digital Works in the History of Medicine and the Life Sciences from Circa 2000 BCE to 2022 by Fielding H. Garrison (1870-1935), Leslie T. Morton (1907-2004), and Jeremy M. Norman (1945- ) Traditionally Known as “Garrison-Morton”

15961 entries, 13944 authors and 1935 subjects. Updated: March 22, 2024

QUINLAN, Sean M.

2 entries
  • 11464

The great nation in decline: Sex, modernity and health crises in revolutionary France c.1750–1850.

Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007.


Subjects: COUNTRIES, CONTINENTS AND REGIONS › France, PUBLIC HEALTH › History of Public Health, SEXUALITY / Sexology › History of Sexuality / Sexology, Social or Sociopolitical Histories of Medicine & the Life Sciences
  • 14104

Morbid undercurrents: Medical subcultures in postrevolutionary France.

Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2021.

"During the 1790s and beyond, medicine left the somber halls of universities, hospitals, and learned societies and became profoundly politicized, inspiring a whole panoply of different—often bizarre and shocking—subcultures. Quinlan reconstructs the ethos of the time and its labyrinthine underworld, traversing the intersection between medicine and pornography in the works of the Marquis de Sade, efforts to create a "natural history of women," the proliferation of sex manuals and books on family hygiene, anatomical projects to sculpt antique bodies, the rage for physiognomic self-help books that taught readers to identify social and political "types" in post-revolutionary Paris, the use of physiological medicine as a literary genre, and the "mesmerist renaissance" with its charged debates over animal magnetism and somnambulism.

"In creating this reconstruction, Quinlan argues that the place and authority of medicine evolved, at least in part, out of an attempt to redress the acute sense of dislocation produced by the Revolution. Morbid Undercurrents exposes how medicine then became a subversive, radical, and ideologically charged force in French society" (publisher).



Subjects: COUNTRIES, CONTINENTS AND REGIONS › France, Social or Sociopolitical Histories of Medicine & the Life Sciences