Professional advantage and public health: British veterinarians and State Veterinary Services, 1865-1939

At the beginning of the twentieth century, municipal authorities in England and Wales, and in Scotland, began to develop systems of veterinary public health which encompassed both the welfare of animals and the safety of meat and milk intended for human consumption. This paper examines the motives behind veterinary attempts to extend the integration of human and animal health considerations within the public health framework in the inter-war period. In 1938 the Ministry of Agriculture implemented a national administrative structure for the management of animal diseases which absorbed the veterinary personnel of the municipal authorities, whose own veterinary public health activities largely fell into abeyance. As a result, the ideal of veterinary public health disappeared from British public health practice after 1939, and lost its force as a professional political cause. The mid-century disappearance of animal health from consideration in British public health programmes was one of a complex of historical strands which contributed to the late-twentieth-century emergence of public health crises over such animal-borne diseases as salmonellosis, Escherichia coli infection, and bovine spongiform encephalopathy.     

Prelude to the plague: public health and politics at America's Pacific gateway, 1899

San Francisco played a crucial in the formulation of American immigration policy vis-à-vis Asia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During this period, it was often difficult to differentiate political struggles over the exclusion of Asians from other conflicts. This article examines one such arena: an acrimonious, well-documented argument in 1899 between Federal and various State and local authorities over the arrival of a Japanese passenger liner that may--or may not--have been carrying bubonic plague. Six months later, the plague unquestionably arrived, resulting in the well-known San Francisco plague epidemic of 1900 in which more that 110 people died. Reviewing the 1899 prelude, the public attitudes of the various health authorities, and the way the press reported health issues, collectively give some sense of that historical space where the regulation of public health, politics, and the immigration industry intersected and were fiercely contested.     

The politics of evolution: Morphology,medicine, and reform in radical London

Summary

This essay closely examines the highly contested but widely employed historiographical category ‘absolutism’. Why are scholars so divided on whether it is even legitimate to use the term and, if they agree to do so, why are they still much at odds in explaining what it is? What are the main historiographical currents in the study of absolutism? Is it the same thing to speak of absolutism in regard to the practices of early modern European monarchies and with reference to the political ideas of so-called absolutist theorists? By addressing these questions through the methodology of intellectual history, this essay provides a comprehensive account of debates on absolutism and, at the same time, suggests that further work needs to be carried out on its theoretical aspects. In this respect, the author will propose a series of key ideas and principles which are meant to encapsulate the core of an early modern doctrine of absolutist monarchical sovereignty. It will also be argued that, when studying political thought, the term ‘absolutism’ might be abandoned in favour of the plural ‘absolutisms’ as a better way of understanding the past, its languages, opinions, people. In so doing, a thorough analysis of what political absolutism(s) is will be set forth, and a series of more general considerations on history-writing will also be advanced.     

Models of masculinity: sex education,the United States Public Health Service,and the YMCA, 1919-1924

In 1918, the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) told American parents that "it is no longer possible for you to choose whether your child will learn about sex or not." According to the PHS, most American boys learned about sex from "improper sources" by the age of nine. The "unfortunate effect of these early impressions" had, PHS warned, not only resulted in a gross misunderstanding of sex, but also been a major factor in the spread of venereal disease (The Parents' Part [the U.S. Public Health Service, 1918], p. 5). To counter and correct this miseducation, PHS joined with the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) to create a sex education program aimed at adolescent boys. Officially launched in the spring of 1919, the "Keeping Fit" campaign provides a unique insight into the federal government's attempt to medicalize and regulate American sexuality through the forum of public health.     

State,peasant, mosquito: The biopolitics of public health education and malaria in early republican Turkey

State officials in early republican Turkey framed malaria as both a medical and a political issue. In doing so, they engaged in public health education campaigns not only to resolve medical concerns but also to better govern the country's population and promote a broader modernist agenda. This article employs primary sources from Turkish archives and other collections in order to examine the governmental and the biopolitical implications of this experience. We thus scrutinize the civilizational discourse employed by politicians and physicians as they dealt with this “village disease,” the peoples who they encountered—and taught, and the obstacles that they perceived to exist within the traditional curative beliefs and practices found throughout rural Anatolia. Emphasizing modernist ideals in their medicine as much as in their politics, we conclude that health officials' lessons for waging an effective “war” on malaria targeted not just the disease but also its perceived societal sources of origin and—hence—the very populace it presumably sought to protect.     

Caring for ethics and the politics of health care reform in the United States

It is increasingly recognized that the work of (unpaid) informal caregivers constitutes an important contribution to care delivery in the United States and in many other societies. Accounting for the range of social, economic and political circumstances in which this care is produced has become the focus of a number of academics and others theorizing the ‘third sector’, or the ‘social economy’. However, some scholars are concerned that the increasing attention paid to the role of informal economic activity will either legitimate neoliberal state withdrawal from social reproduction or facilitate continued invasive commodification of relationships that were formerly part of social life. While these are possible dangers, J.K. Gibson-Graham's diverse economy framework and theory of community economy allow us to understand the social and economic conditions that support, rather than undermine, a caregiver's fidelity to the process of caring. Given the size of the informal caregiving sector, it would remain an important aspect of the care economy even if the United States developed a national health care system. It is important to understand informal caregivers as economic subjects, with their desires, motivations, hopes and anxieties. What emerges from my qualitative research is an understanding of informal caregivers as ethical subjects who operate best in a network of collective recognition and support. Informal caregivers are neither self-interested economic actors nor (necessarily) victims of failed social support. Rather, they are, potentially, agents of change in a new politics of health care reform.     

Partisan politics and the public sphere: The civil war north

The Civil War North presents an interesting case study of the relationship between a highly politicized public sphere and partisan electoral politics. Although the two‐party system remained intact throughout the war, the concept and practice of partisanship was challenged by the social experience of Northerners who ‘acted politically’ when they took part in the war effort. The creation of a mass citizen army and the mobilization of women and men on the home front meant that parties lost their function as the crucial mediating channel between citizen and government. The more that politics mattered, the less partisanship seemed to be relevant. The war exposed the latent non‐partisan political energies of Northern society. These conclusions bolster the arguments of those scholars who, questioning whether partisanship was as deep or as widespread as previously supposed, have begun to suggest that the ‘party period paradigm’ does not capture the entirety of the nineteenth‐century political experience.     

The cultural politics of shit: class,gender and public space in India

In this article we seek to interrogate the cultural, political and economic conditions that generate the crisis of sanitation in India, with its severe implications for the poor and the marginalized. The key question we ask is how to interpret and explain the spectre of ‘open defecation’ in India's countryside and its booming urban centres. The discussion is divided into three parts. Part one examines the cultural interpretation of ‘shitting’ as symbolic action underpinned by ideas of purity, pollution and ‘the body politic’. Part two takes the political economic approach to gain further insights into contemporary discourse, performance and cultural politics surrounding toilets and open defecation in India. Part three examines civil society activities, state campaigns and media accounts of open defecation to explore the disruptive potency of everyday toilet activities, and how these interplay with issues of class, caste, and gender. Drawing on interviews and a review of ethnographic work, we seek to interrogate the idiom of modern sanitation, with its emphasis on cleanliness, progress and dreams of technology, as a constitutive idea and an explanatory force in Indian modernity.     

The intimate politics of secularism and the headscarf: the mall,the neighborhood,and the public square in Istanbul

The headscarf continues to be a highly charged political issue in Turkey where it is often understood through the prism of the opposition between so-called Islamists versus secularists. My work brings together feminist scholarship on the politics of everyday space and recent rethinking of the categories of secularism and religion. I begin by situating this politicized debate in the everyday material contexts of the public square, the street, and the mall. By introducing popular culture (notably the film Bü?ra) and my own fieldwork on the veil, I argue that the headscarf represents the intersection of politics of place and individual agency in a way that renders ideological debates contingent on everyday practices. Reducing the headscarf to a sign of Islamism fails to take into account the ever-shifting meanings of this object across time and space. The differences within and between the everyday urban sites I examine reveal much more complex, often contradictory, and discontinuous geographies of secularism and Islam. This analysis reveals a multiplicity that belies attempts to delineate clearly bounded spaces, subjects, and ideologies, one that is intimate and political.