Biosocialité

Biosocialité. Une histoire épistémologique et politique de l'incorporation



Mathieu Arminjon
 

Hermann
Collection : Med.
Date de publication : 2025-05-26

Au cours des vingt dernières années, la notion d’incorporation s’est imposée dans les sciences biomédicales. Comment en sommes-nous venus à penser les formes de vie biologiques comme résultant d’une incorporation des normes sociales ? Cette histoire épistémologique et politique de l’épidémiologie sociale entend répondre à cette question. Elle vise plus généralement à repenser les catégories du normal et du pathologique au prisme d’une approche socio-médicale.

Une histoire des usages de drogues en prison

Biz in the Pris: A history of drug use in prisons

Event

Thursday 4 September 2025, 6pm (online event)

Book online: Biz in the Pris: A history of drug use in prisons | Royal College of Nursing

Substance misuse is widespread in prison settings. Find out about the history of drug misuse, alongside recent creative interventions to explain the dangers of drug abuse to young offenders and beyond. Janet Weston will talk about the impact of the HIV and AIDS pandemic in the 1980s and 1990s on prisons and drug misuse. The emergence of HIV and AIDS in the early 1980s overlapped with a 'heroin epidemic,' and put prisons under new kinds of pressure. Denise Lyons will share the creation of the innovative ‘Biz in the Pris’ project, which involved people who work and live in secure environments in the creation of a comic book about addiction.

Publication médicale et obscénité dans la Grande-Bretagne victorienne

Selling Sexual Knowledge: Medical Publishing and Obscenity in Victorian Britain

Sarah Bull 



Publisher ‏ : ‎ Cambridge University Press
Publication date ‏ : ‎ July 10, 2025
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Print length ‏ : ‎ 306 pages
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1009578073


Bringing together perspectives from the histories of medicine, sexuality, and the book, Sarah Bull presents the first study of how medical publications on sexual matters were made, promoted, and sold in Victorian Britain. Drawing on pamphlets, manuals, textbooks, periodicals, and more, this innovative book illustrates the free and unruly circulation of sexual information through a rapidly expanding publishing industry. Bull demonstrates how the ease with which print could be copied and claimed, recast and repurposed, presented persistent challenges to those seeking to position themselves as authorities over sexual knowledge at this pivotal moment. Medical publishers, practitioners, and activists embraced allegations of obscenity and censorship to promote ideas, contest authority, and consolidate emergent collective identities. Layer by layer, their actions helped create and sustain one of the most potent myths ever made about the Victorians: their sexual ignorance.This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

Une histoire des hôpitaux de haute sécurité

Broadmoor and Beyond: The history of high security hospitals

Talk 

Thursday 9 October 2025, 6pm (London)

RCN, 20 Cavendish Square, London W1G 0RN

Book online: Broadmoor and Beyond: The history of high security hospitals (BSL) | Royal College of Nursing

The secure hospital system emerged after the trial of James Hadfield who, in 1800, attempted to assassinate the king. Hadfield was clearly unwell, but the courts did not want to release him as ‘not guilty by reason of insanity’. This led to the creation of a new ‘criminal lunatic’ wing at Bethlem Hospital. In 1863, this was replaced with the new Broadmoor Hospital. This talk by historian Jade Shepherd explores the history of Broadmoor and secure hospitals, followed by Chris Hart on the impact of these hospitals on nurses’ own mental health.

Soigner par le geste en Grèce archaïque et classique

L'héritage d'Asklépios. Soigner par le geste en Grèce archaïque et classique

Hélène Castelli


Éditions de la Sorbonne
4 août 2025
456 pages
ISBN-13979-10-351-0924-0

En 2020, la pandémie de Covid-19 a révélé la puissance ambivalente des gestes médicaux, perçus tantôt comme salvateurs, tantôt comme intrusifs, voire violents. Ce paradoxe, loin d'être inédit, invite à un retour aux sources de la médecine occidentale : comment les Grecs des époques archaïque et classique pratiquaient-ils et représentaient-ils ces gestes ? Pour répondre à ces interrogations, l’étude d’Hélène Castelli porte sur les actions manuelles visant à soigner, qu’elles soient réalisées par des médecins ou d’autres acteurs, réels ou mythiques, et restitue à ces gestes médicaux toutes leurs dimensions : technique, sociale et symbolique. Elle s’appuie sur des textes, images et récits issus du monde grec, datés entre le VIIIe et le IVe siècle avant notre ère, et contribue ainsi à historiciser la médecine grecque dans sa dimension pratique.

Histoires féminines du VIH/SIDA en Écosse

Women’s histories of HIV/AIDS in Scotland 

Talk by Dr Hannah J. Elizabeth


Wednesday 10th September 2025

6pm - 7pm (doors open 5:30pm)

£3

Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, 11 Queen Street, Edinburgh EH2 1JQ 


Booking: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/womens-histories-of-hivaids-in-scotland-tickets-1521637391399



Join Dr Hannah J. Elizabeth at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh to explore women’s experiences of HIV/AIDS care and activism in Scotland in the first few decades of the AIDS crisis. This history is traced through a series of case studies, looking particularly at how women’s need for information, healthcare and community was met.

To do this, the lecture delves into the early history of the AIDS crisis in Edinburgh, a city which discovered and responded to HIV/AIDS relatively quicky, and so became infamously known as the ‘AIDS Capital of Europe’ in the UK’s tabloid press.

By focusing on women’s experiences of AIDS activism and care, especially around pregnancy and parenthood, the paper demonstrates how a variety of different groups came together in Scotland to meet the needs of women and other HIV-affected folk, offering some hopeful insights about the power of patient self-advocacy and collaboration.
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Dr Hannah J. Elizabeth is a cultural historian of emotions, childhood, sexuality and health based at the University of Strathclyde. Their current research focuses on the history of AIDS denial in the UK and Australia, building on their earlier work on the history of HIV in Edinburgh, and British HIV/AIDS education.

Beyond HIV/AIDS histories, they’ve researched and published on topics as diverse as the history of sex education, smoking, polio, fuel poverty, hypothermia, lesbian health activism and zombies.


You can find them on BlueSky at @sexhistorian

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Free for students (student card required), under 18s (ID card required) and Fellows or Members of the College.


Please email library@rcpe.ac.uk if you are a student, under 18, a Fellow or Member of the College and would like to be added to the attendee list 

Le dispensaire du peuple

The People’s Dispensary

The Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh have launched a new digital resource – The People’s Dispensary (https://www.rcpe.ac.uk/peoplesdispensary).

 

This site contains over 10,000 pages of patient case notes from the Royal Edinburgh Dispensary, dating from its foundation in 1776. These notes were created by Edinburgh physician Dr Andrew Duncan. Most patients have at least two or three pages detailing their case, some many more.

 

The pages are fully transcribed, tagged and searchable. They are indexed by patient name, practitioner name, disease, treatment, symptom and body part.

 

Records can both be browsed: https://www.rcpe.ac.uk/peoplesdispensary/browse/browse.html and searched: https://www.rcpe.ac.uk/peoplesdispensary/search/search.html

 

Some potentially interesting topics they contain are:

•             Occupations (not all, about around a quarter of the patient records detail their occupations and the impact those had on their condition)

•             Domestic medicine (some notes detail any treatment undertaken by patients before they were admitted into the dispensary)

•             Practitioners (the records contain information on 174 practitioners – from physicians and surgeons to folk healers and quacks, not only those in Edinburgh but in England and continental Europe)

Beethoven face à la maladie et aux médecins

Beethoven face à la maladie et aux médecins 

 
Patrice Pinet 


Publisher ‏ : ‎ Editions L'Harmattan
Publication date ‏ : ‎ July 31, 2025
Language ‏ : ‎ French
Print length ‏ : ‎ 240 pages
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-2336552088


Cet ouvrage reconsidère les pathologies mal déterminées de Beethoven (1770-1827) dans le cadre historique et conceptuel de la médecine, et étudie les hypothèses étiologiques de son syndrome abdominal, de sa surdité et de sa cirrhose terminale.
Il retrace ses rapports avec les médecins, les méthodes ou remèdes thérapeutiques auxquels il fut soumis, ses séjours dans les villes thermales, fournit un aperçu de sa psychologie et de ses relations amoureuses plutôt secrètes, et une enquête sur l’énigmatique identité de son « immortelle bien-aimée ».
En toile de fond de sa vie de Rhénan émigré à Vienne, s’esquisse ce temps de guerres et de bouleversements politiques, allant de la Révolution à la réaction monarchique qui succéda au démembrement du premier empire germanique par Napoléon.