The rise and fall of anticontagionism in France.

This article re-examines the anticontagionist controversy in nineteenth-century France. Erwin Ackerknecht attributed the discrediting of contagion theory to political opposition to quarantines and the rise of social medicine. Later scholars argue that he exaggerated the opposition between contagionists and anticontagionists. I argue that French doctors were genuinely divided on questions of knowledge and practice. Disease by disease, they battled it out. Anticontagionists gained the upper hand in the 1820s and 1830s, only to relinquish it again in the 1840s as contagionists revised their theories to be more progressive and tracked down evidence to which the Academy of Medicine lent its authority. At that point the majority of physicians rallied around to an attenuated theory of transmission and support for quarantines.