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This article examines the scientific and medical objectification of workers' bodies in mining on the Ruhr as an integral part of the formation of a modern care and control regime. This specific control regime had been established with the modernisation of health insurance for miners at the end of the nineteenth century. The central thesis of this article is that in the German Empire new knowledge about the miner's body arose within the scope of the categories and paradigms of the hygiene movement. Above all this means that the miner's body, in particular his productivity and health, was analysed and categorised in relation to his working and everyday life environment. This specific form of hygienic objectification of the miner aimed at the production of a healthy environment as well as at the production of a hygienic subject. Indeed, this environmental-hygienic approach was to be complemented by a new scientific discipline at the turn of the century, namely bacteriology or more precisely, bacteriology-oriented hygiene. The fight against hookworm disease around 1900 and the extension of the medical infrastructure of the health insurance for miners will be taken as examples of this important turning point for biopolitics in industrialised Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]