around 1770 "the study and cultivation of the body became, at least in the intention of administrators, the task of 'policy'" (13)
in France and Prussia in particular ("Ute Frevert has spoken of the 'politization of disease and health' in Prussia between 1770 and 1880," 18)
"the relation between the described body and the managed environment could now be scientifically measured, understood, and correspondingly manipulated"
a "medical cosmology [which] corresponded to the individualism of the bourgeois class"--since scientific "hygiene" was less bound by the "rules of etiquette" and more by an "inner disciplining" (14)
"the utopia of a human, disciplined body" (15) -- ultimately the creation of an "administrative-descriptive conception" which disempowers the body (18)
the creation of underwear around this time, see Bakhtin on Rabelais, and note on 198
"The new rituals of a clean body and a clean home [...] had a personal as well as a political significance" (15)
see Norbert Elias' The Civilizing Process