The workshop, organised by the History of Science and Medicine Working Group, features a Q&A session with Séveric Yersin, visiting fellow at the Alcide de Gasperi Research Centre.
The discussion will be centred around the main themes of Séveric's upcoming book The Sanitary Fortress Of The Alps. Public Health In Switzerland Between Cholera, Cattle Plague And The Spanish Influenza (1800-1921). As this manuscript began its life as a PhD thesis (defended in 2024 at the University of Basel and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris), this will be an excellent opportunity to discuss the process of turning a doctoral dissertation into a book, and a place for participants to ask questions relating to the editing, rewriting, promoting, and reframing one's contribution for broader academic audiences.
Séveric's manuscript will be of special interest to researchers and fellows working on the history of public health and epidemiology, 19th-century Central Europe, migrations, trade, transport and infrastructure.
The book argues that historical accounts of public health and infectious disease control in the 19th century have not given proper attention to developments on the European mainland. The author demonstrates that governments expanded sanitary controls on trains, wagons and stations to enable their frictionless operation. He also shows how, to impose sanitary measures on powerful private companies, centralisation of public health was necessary. Furthermore, the book takes into account the impact of disruptions of the geographical trajectories of infectious diseases (geo-epidemiology), mainly resulting from the development of railway transport.
Speaker's bio: Séveric Yersin is a visiting fellow at the Alcide de Gasperi Research Centre at the European University Institute and an associate researcher at the Europainstitut Basel. He completed his doctoral thesis on the history of public health in Switzerland (1800-1920) at the University of Basel and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in 2024. His current research focuses on the history of the Western European electricity market after the Second World War. In his project, which is supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (PostDoc.Mobility), he is analysing the emergence of the electricity network - the so-called ‘grid’ - from a political, economic and technological perspective.
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