Sanitary reforms in europe and asia in the xix-xx centuries: a comparative-historical analysis[Санитарные реформы в странах европы и азии в xix–xx вв. сравнительно-исторический анализ]

The aim of the study is to compare the experience of sanitary reforms of the 19th and 20th centuries in the context of the formation of modern states and centralised systems of public health protection (on the example of Great Britain, Germany, India and China). The relevance of the study is conditioned by the need to clarify scientific ideas about the processes of modernisation in Europe and Asia. The novelty of the study consists in clarifying the historical picture of the process of formation of modern states and establishing a link between the modernisation of statehood and the emergence of policies aimed at sanitation and public health protection. In the course of the research the methods of historical science were used, sources from foreign digital libraries were attracted. The methodology of social history of health care became the theoretical basis of the study. The conclusions of the study are as follows. Sanitary reforms were a historical response on the part of both European and Asian countries to the processes of urbanisation and industrialisation. Sanitary improvements were a rejection of the pre-industrial way of life with its inherent practices of manual water delivery and manual disposal of foul sewage. The agents of sanitation improvements were members of the urban middle class, especially physicians, whose interests were to enhance their professional authority and social standing. The history of sanitary reforms can be seen as part of the process of establishing a modern type of state - a state governed by a bureaucracy and concerned with the protection of public health. The cases of two European states and two Asian states suggest that the history of the creation of the modern nation-state in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was, to the same extent, the history of the creation of the sanitary or public health state.