Anniversary of the guillotine
April 25th 2000. On this day in 1792 Dr Guillotin's much-improved device for executing people was first used in Paris to remove the head of a highwayman. Six years later, in the year of the French Revolution, the same man was to become the head of the very first government public health department. It was clearly no coincidence that the dominant ideology of this time was that coercion in matters of diet and lifestyle were the keys to ensuring the universal health and eventual compliance of the French people, even though dictatorship, and the much extended use of the guillotine, would initially be required to begin such a radical and mechanistic process.
All that, of course, was long ago in history and such approaches to the issue of 'governmentality' in health could never gain credence now, could they?
