Lazy or diseased? Changing conceptions of beggars and vagrants in the Lithuanian discourse from the end of the nineteenth century to 1940

Until the outbreak of World War I, vagrants and beggars were depicted as a group lacking the basic elements of morality, which the national elite considered its own identity-maker. Unwillingness to work, filth, drunkenness, ignorance, and contagious diseases were depicted as the visible features of moral indignity. Their condition remained redeemable through educational tools. In postwar Lithuania, the overall characterization of vagrants and beggars remained unchanged. Nevertheless, their sanitary stigmatization and the concept of heritability of social ‘diseases’ became dominant, making isolation and disciplining the only tools to protect the ‘healthy’ organism of society from social contagion.