[Epidemic disease and regulation of migration in Canada].
Beginning with the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, the Parliament of Lower Canada adopted a rational and scientific mechanism for regulating migratory movements within its territory. Other than internal imperatives pertaining to security, this mechanism revolved around a prophylactic control of these movements of population. With the great migrations of 1830-1834 and 1847, the politicians of Lower Canada and the United Canada subsequently needed to revisit their regulatory mechanism in order to render it more efficient. In truth, new arrivals were frequently the spreaders of infectious diseases. Yet more importantly, the great epidemics, such as that of cholera in 1832, or of typhus in 1847, were not merely physically lethal, but were potentially disastrous to the social order. How then to resolve the potential pathological threats to the physical body with those to the political body? The political powers of the day adopted an entire method of thinking and a vocabulary which was more scientific, replete with medical references. Adopted under the seal of an emergency, these new measures of state control of prophylaxis were greatly inspired by those medical theories concerning infection and contagion which were prevalent prior to the arrival of the Pasteurian model of medicine. Those in power then used this new framework to analyze the question as a rational political problem. In the end, they would establish a tighter mechanism of state-controlled prophylaxis through the law, through regulations, and through devices for surveillance and control such as quarantine. The guarantor of social discipline through the erosion of individual freedom, this mechanism of state-run prophylaxis of migratory movements would, from that point forward, be justified by the health demands of the Cité organique, of the public health.
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Département d'histoire et de géographie, Université de Moncton, Nouveau-Brunswick.
D002170:Canada; D018595:Colonialism / Q000266:history*; D003140:Communicable Disease Control / Q000266:history*; D003141:Communicable Diseases / Q000266:history*; D004641:Emigration and Immigration / Q000266:history*; D049671:History, 18th Century; D049672:History, 19th Century