Nourriture et identité en Angleterre (1540-1640)

Food and Identity in England, 1540-1640: Eating to Impress 

Paul S. Lloyd


Series: Cultures of Early Modern Europe
Hardcover: 264 pages
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic (April 23, 2015)
Language: English
ISBN-13: 978-1472514431

Food and Identity in England, 1540-1640 considers early modern food consumption in an important new way, connecting English consumption practices between the reigns of Henry VIII and Charles I with ideas of 'self' and 'otherness' in wider contexts of society and the class system.

Examining the diets of various social groups, ranging from manual labourers to the aristocracy, special foods and their preparation, as well as festive events and gift foods, this all-encompassing study reveals the extent to which individuals and communities identified themselves and others by what and how they ate between the Reformation of the church and the English Civil Wars. This text provides remarkable insights for anyone interested in knowing more about the society and culture of early modern England.

L'établissement du conseil génétique dans la seconde moitié du XXe siècle

The Establishment of Genetic Counseling in the Second Half of the 20th Century

Call for applications

International Workshop

Berlin, February 2-3, 2016

Deadline: May 17, 2015

The rapid development of molecular genetics in the 1950s not only led to the establishment of human genetics as a separate discipline, it also fundamentally changed the thinking about disease and health. Genetics became indispensable for studying the causation, formation, and development of diseases. Yet, because of the low potential for an actual cure of genetic diseases, genetic counseling received special significance as "the most immediate and practical service that genetics can render in medicine and surgery,” according to the WHO Expert Committee on Human Genetics in 1964. Genetic counseling centers were set up throughout the world, although unevenly distributed. The reasons for why people sought counseling varied considerably – from evaluating the risk of having a child with Down’s Syndrome to detecting the sickle cell gene.

The aim of the workshop is to bring together researchers in the history of medicine or science, in disability studies, cultural anthropology and other related fields in order to analyze global, national, and local factors that influenced the establishment of genetic counseling and shaped its further development. Both explorations of the concrete implementation of genetic counseling and examinations of its effects on society are of interest. We welcome lectures on particular countries, institutions, and persons as well as comprehensive topics, such as the entanglement of laboratory practices and genetic counseling, or the relationship of the women’s rights movement(s) and genetic counseling.

The following questions could be addressed:

•    How did genetic counseling become established in countries of the “First,”

     “Second,” or “Third World,” and against the backdrop of the Cold War and

      North-South conflict?

•    What was the role of national and international scientific networks at the

      time?

•    How was genetic counseling integrated into particular health care systems?

•    Which traditions in genetic counseling did human geneticists follow? From

      which did they distance themselves, in particular in regards to National

      Socialism?

•    What did the practice of genetic counseling look like?

•    Which strategies were deployed to popularize it?

•    Was there criticism of and/or protest against genetic counseling, and which

      were the driving forces?

The conference language will be English. The organizer plans a publication of the contributions. Participants are invited to send their abstracts of up to 500 words and a short CV to susanne.doetz@charite.de by May 17, 2015

Provided that funding can be secured for the workshop, travel and accommodation will be covered.

La négligence médicale dans la Grande Bretagne victorienne

Medical Negligence in Victorian Britain: The Crisis of Care under the English Poor Law, c.1834-1900 

Kim Price

Hardcover: 248 pages
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic; 1 edition (April 23, 2015)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1441125469
ISBN-13: 978-1441125460


Medical Negligence in Victorian Britain is the first detailed exploration of the hundreds of charges of neglect against doctors who were contracted to the 'new' poor law after the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834. The author moves beyond the hyperbole of Victorian public 'scandal' to use medical negligence as a prism through which to view hidden aspects of poor law doctors and their patients. This provides a uniquely grounded perspective, from the day-to-day experience of medical practice - for both doctor and patient - to the context of the medico-political, socio-legal and cultural processes that underpinned the social construction of negligence at this time.

The result is a clearly enunciated description of what negligence meant to the Victorians and how they sought to define and deal with negligent care, moving the topic from the sidelines of English welfare history to the centre-stage role it played in Victorian society. Thematically and chronologically arranged in two parts, the book uses extensive new archival material with a particular focus on the official inquiries into neglect conducted by poor law inspectors. It offers a fresh perspective on the poor laws that has repercussions for wider histories of welfare, medicine and legal medicine.

Histoire de la santé et de l'environnement

Network of Health and Environment of the European Social Science History Association Conference

Call for Papers

(ESSHC), at Valencia, 30 March – 2 April 2016.

Proposals are invited for panels or individual papers of any subject dealing with the social history of health and with environmental history. Papers may but do not have to address the connection between health and the environment. While individual papers are welcome, panels consisting of three or –preferably- four contributors and one chair and discussant (who can be the same person) have a higher chance of being accepted. We particularly encourage panels organised around a central theme with a comparative approach, bringing together contributions on different regions and/or time periods. Panel participants must come from different institutions and should come from different countries. We reserve the right to re-arrange panels and contributors as appears necessary in view of the incoming applications.

Suggestions are particularly encouraged on the topics listed below. But proposals on other topics from the entire range of environmental history and of the history of medicine and health are welcome.

Global Health - Possible sub-themes: travels of disease; the ecological imperialism revisited; globalisation; plague, cholera, aids, ebola

Global Resources, their use and impact on well-being: soil, fuels, water...

Temporary issues: the emergence and disappearance of perceived health and/or environmental topics.

Occupational Health in Resource Extraction: accidents, insurance, long-term health hazards …

Health and/or Nature as Commodity – Themes: developments of the market for medication, health foods and other health products; interaction between physicians, scientists and businessmen

Environmental Changes and Impact on Public Health – positive, negative, or both

Warfare: how has the situation of warfare affected the physical wellbeing of nature and people in it?

Normality – how have common conceptions changed about healthy people or a healthy environment?

Panel chairs can also act as discussants. Discussants have an important role in stimulating discussions, which should take up a substantial part of the panel time. They can identify central issues of the papers, point to similarities and differences, raise individual or general questions or otherwise broaden the perspective on the overall themes of the panels

The deadline is May 1, 2015.

Visit http://www.iisg.nl/esshc for:

General information on the biannual conferences

The organising institution

Registration (including paper proposal procedures)

For questions, suggestions etc., please write to:

Iris Borowy: iborowy@ukaachen.de

and/or

Enrique Perdiguero-Gil: quique@umh.es

Une histoire des soins de santé en Amérique

Health Care in America: A History

John C. Burnham

Hardcover: 616 pages
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press; 1 edition (April 23, 2015)
Language: English
ISBN-13: 978-1421416076

In Health Care in America, historian John C. Burnham describes changes over four centuries of medicine and public health in America. Beginning with seventeenth-century concerns over personal and neighborhood illnesses, Burnham concludes with the arrival of a new epoch in American medicine and health care at the turn of the twenty-first century.

From the 1600s through the 1990s, Americans turned to a variety of healers, practices, and institutions in their efforts to prevent and survive epidemics of smallpox, yellow fever, cholera, influenza, polio, and AIDS. Health care workers in all periods attended births and deaths and cared for people who had injuries, disabilities, and chronic diseases.

Drawing on primary sources, classic scholarship, and a vast body of recent literature in the history of medicine and public health, Burnham finds that traditional healing, care, and medicine dominated the United States until the late nineteenth century, when antiseptic/aseptic surgery and germ theory initiated an intellectual, social, and technical transformation. He divides the age of modern medicine into several eras: physiological medicine (1910s–1930s), antibiotics (1930s–1950s), technology (1950s–1960s), environmental medicine (1970s–1980s), and, beginning around 1990, genetic medicine. The cumulating developments in each era led to today’s radically altered doctor-patient relationship and the insistent questions that swirl around the financial cost of health care.

Burnham’s sweeping narrative makes sense of medical practice, medical research, and human frailties and foibles, opening the door to a new understanding of our current concerns.

Approches et directions en histoire du corps

The History of the Body: Approaches and Directions

Institute of Historical Research, London: May 16th 2015
http://bit.ly/historyofthebody



Registration 10 – 10:30am

Parallel Sessions 10:30 – 12:00pm

1A: Material Cultures (Chair: Will Pooley) Wolfson Seminar Room

Alun Withey ‘Technologies of the Body in Eighteenth-Century Britain’

Robin Macdonald ‘When ‘Discourse’ Meets ‘Experience’: Letters and Letter-bearers in the Writings of Seventeenth-century Missionaries in New France’

Lauren Fried ‘Histories of Trans Bodies: A Museological Approach’


1B: Interpreting Bodies (Chair: Kevin Lewis) Room 304

Clare Tebbutt 'Of Oysters, Fowl and Free-martins: The Animal of Human Sex-changeability'

Caroline Nielsen 'Fraudulent Bodies: The Creation of the Discourse around Malingering and Illness Deception by Military Authorities, c.1780-1840'

Laura Guinot Ferri 'Women Saints and their Bodies: the Case of the Spanish Nun Inés de Benigànim (1625-1696)'


Lunch 12:00 – 13:00


Parallel Sessions 13:00 – 14:30

2A: Technologies (Chair: Jennifer Keating) Wolfson Seminar Room

Dora Vargha 'Disability History and the Boundaries of Body and Machine: the Iron Lung Patient as a “New Life-form”'

Will Pooley 'The Shadow Cultures: Popular Receptions of Medicine in France c.1790-1939'

Beatriz Pichel 'Photographing the Emotional Body in the Late Nineteenth Century'

2B: Masculinity and Martial Bodies (Chair: Erica Wald) Room 304

Hilary Buxton ‘Intersectionality and the Global Soldier Body in the Great War’

Jessica Meyer 'Carrying, Cleaning and Caring: British Male Military Caregivers and the Body in the First World War'

Kate Imy 'Rebels of Ramzan: Indian Muslims, Food, and Fasting in the First World War'


Refreshments 14:30 – 15:00


Parallel Sessions 15:00 – 16:30

3A: Violence and Injury (Chair: Kate Imy) Wolfson Seminar Room

Giusi Russo 'Colonial Bodies in Pain: Emotions, Self-Rule, and Pathologies at the UN'

Heike Bauer 'Suicidal Scarring:Discourse, Experience and Magnus Hirschfeld’s Body of Work'

Luc Racaut 'The World Inside Out: Bodies and Emotions During the French Wars of Religion'


3B: Bodily Practices (Chair: Caroline Nielsen) Room 304

Kat Mutlow 'Peterloo: The Body and Radical Discourse'

Kevin Lewis 'Defining/Defiling the Medieval Abrahamic Body: Body Modification, Male Circumcision and the Problem of “Sacred Inviolability” between Christians, Jews and Muslims'

Cécile Feza Bushidi and Tom Cunningham 'Missionary Interventions Into Gikuyu Body Cultures, c1906-1938'


Refreshments 16:30-17:00


Plenary Talk 17:00-18:30 – Bedford Room, Senate House.

Fay Bound Alberti ‘Hearts and Minds go Head to Head: The Body and the Self in History’

Register at: http://bit.ly/historyofthebody

Menstruation et procréation dans la France pré-moderne

Menstruation and Procreation in Early Modern France: Blood and Taboo

Cathy Mcclive 

Series: Women and Gender in the Early Modern World
Hardcover: 288 pages
Publisher: Ashgate Pub Co; New edition edition (April 28, 2015)
Language: English
ISBN-13: 978-0754666035 

Early modern bodies, particularly menstruating and pregnant bodies, were not stable signifiers. Menstruation and Procreation in Early Modern France presents the first full-length discussion of menstruation and its uncertain connections with embodied sex, gender and reproduction in early modern France. Attitudes to menstruation are explored in three inter-linked arenas: medicine, moral theology and law across the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Drawing on a wide range of diverse sources, including court records and private documents, the author uses case studies to explore the relationship between the exceptional corporeality of individuals and attempts to construct menstrual norms, reflecting on how early modern individuals, lay or otherwise, grappled with the enigma of menstruation. She analyzes how early modern men and women accounted for the function, recurrence and appearance of menstruation, from its role in maintaining health to the link between other physiological and bodily processes, including those found in both male and female bodies. She questions the assumption that menstruation was exclusively associated with women by the second half of the eighteenth century, arguing that whilst sex-related, menstruation was not sex-specific even at the turn of the nineteenth. Menstruation remains a contentious topic today. This book is not, therefore, simply a study of periods in early modern France, but is also of necessity an exploration about the nature and constitution of historical evidence, particularly bodily evidence and how historians use this evidence. It raises important questions about the concept of certainty and about the value of observation, testimony, expertise, the nature of language and the construction of bodily truths-about the body as witness and corpus delicti (the body of the crime). 

Historiographie de la médecine chinoise

The Art of Medicine in Early China: The Ancient and Medieval Origins of a Modern Archive

Miranda Brown

Hardcover: 250 pages
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (April 20, 2015)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1107097053
ISBN-13: 978-1107097056

In this book, Miranda Brown investigates the myths that acupuncturists and herbalists have told about the birth of the healing arts. Moving from the Han (206 BC-AD 220) and Song (960-1279) dynasties to the twentieth century, Brown traces the rich history of Chinese medical historiography and the gradual emergence of the archive of medical tradition. She exposes the historical circumstances that shaped the current image of medical progenitors: the ancient bibliographers, medieval editors, and modern reformers and defenders of Chinese medicine who contributed to the contemporary shape of the archive. Brown demonstrates how ancient and medieval ways of knowing live on in popular narratives of medical history, both in modern Asia and in the West. She also reveals the surprising and often unacknowledged debt that contemporary scholars owe to their pre-modern forbearers for the categories, frameworks, and analytic tools with which to study the distant past.