In recent years scholarship on eighteenth-century German political culture has moved away from its fixation with national state formation and opened up new areas of investigation. Interestingly, the natural sciences and medicine have largely been ignored in this transformation. My study investigates how the history of science and medicine can be linked to these changes and suggests that what is needed is a new conceptual framework that transcends the existing disciplinary and sub-disciplinary boundaries, which are largely responsible for the segregation of topics and themes, methodologies and theories. I explores whether Michel Foucault’s concept of ‘biopower’ might be useful to this end. Foucault coined the term ‘biopower’ to account for a phenomenon, which he saw as central to the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century political imagination, the rise of the concept of population and the strategies and tactics for its management and control. What was new about this form of power, he argued, was that it focused on the control and regulation of the human body. Concerns with the wellbeing and longevity of individuals became the target in relation to the collective prosperity of the political whole.

With these general considerations in mind, my study investigates two biopolitical projects in one of the largest eighteenth-century German states, the Electorate of Bavaria. Both projects took as their focus the wellbeing of the individual and the collective whole. One, organized by the country’s influential court physician and protomedicus Anton von Wolter (1711-1787) focused on women’s bodies and reproduction; the other, let by Benjamin Thompson (better known in the history of science under his noble title Count Rumford (1753-1814) on the bodies of the poor and military personnel, and on food, nutrition and agriculture. Through the exploration of these projects, which bring the history of medicine and science together with the history of political culture, administration and economics, my study throws a fresh look on the ways how the government of humans beings took on new forms during the eighteenth century, forms of governance which are prevailing until today.