Gouvernants et gouvernés face aux épidémies dans le Luxembourg au XVIIIe siècle

This book is dealing with the exceptional mortalities due to malnutrition and epidemics, with the sanitary situation (physicians, pharmacists, hospitals, etc.), with the mentalities AND with the administrative measures taken in the duchy of Luxembourg during the last decades of the 18th century in order to fight the different illnesses occurring or even to prevent them. In these days, the duchy of Luxembourg was part of the so called Austrian Netherlands (southern part of the Low Countries -> roughly today's Belgium and Luxembourg). The Dutch state known as "Netherlands", then called "Republic of the United Provinces", is not at all concerned by this study. The duchy of Luxembourg being isolated (surrounded by "foreign" countries) and far away from the decision-centers (Vienna and Brussels), the emergency situations created by the outbreak of seasonal and other epidemics is revealing of the poverty, of the lack of physicians and medicine, of the importance of religion and superstition..., but also of the goodwill of a certain number of "enlightened" persons in the lower and higher administration. Kayser's thesis is a very good introduction to the general history of the southern part of the Low Countries shortly before the French Revolution of 1789.