Vous consultezContagion morale et transmission des maladies : histoire d’un chiasme (xiiie-xixe siècle)

The origin of the concept of contagion is uncertain, but it seems that it belonged to the domain of moral investigation from the very beginning of the Antiquity, even before medicine theorized the nature of epidemics. In the West, until the xiii^th century, the idea of moral contagion had been developed in theological contexts (the contagion of sins, vices or heresy) without any explicit reference to a contagionist model based on medical research, although some diseases as leprosy or the plague never ceased to be associated with some vices. One of the purposes of this article is to show that the arrival of Arabic medicine transformed this theological and moral perspective, because medieval thinkers henceforth had at their disposal a medical and philosophical model to explain how certain passions or vices could be passed on from one individual to another. This explanatory scheme, which had nothing of a metaphor, remained in use until the beginning of the xix^th century, when the progress of medical research rendered it obsolete. Paradoxically enough, with the emerging social sciences at the end of the xix^th century, the concept of contagion, both moral and social, became descriptive and sometimes metaphoric again.

Keywords


moral contagion, sin, leprosy, Middle Ages