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This chapter analyses attitudes towards dirt and bodily waste in nineteenth-century British and French science fiction novels as a means of understanding perceptions of disease and hygiene in the early period of bacteriology. One of its aims is to consider what this tells us about the modern individual's relationship with the body, especially the ways in which the ambivalence of this relationship is distinctively explored through literary texts. To do this, I examine three utopian novels from the last decades of the century, when the emphasis on extreme cleanliness
increasing state investment and declining public opposition, some doctors and biological scientists promoted their expertise with greater confidence during the 1920s and 1930s. They not only objected to involving laypeople in professional debates, but now asserted a ‘far more comprehensive authority [in] determining the shape of things to come’.63 A new generation of ‘public’ biologists such as Julian Huxley, Conrad Waddington and J. B. S. Haldane used popular outlets such as newspapers, magazines, radio and science-fiction stories to assert that human progress could only
, 1966), pp. 19–24. 96 ‘350,000 may have diabetes’. 97 On the complexities and shifts in British anxieties about Communism: M. Jones, Science Fiction Cinema and 1950s Britain: Recontextualizing Cultural Anxiety (London: Bloomsbury, 2018). 98 W. Oakley, ‘Detection of diabetes’, The Lancet , 282:7311 (1963), 787. 99 ‘Diagnosis of diabetes’, The Lancet , 276:7153 (1960), 745–6. 100 J. Tomlinson, The Politics of Decline: Understanding Post