Between Galen, Geddes, and the Gael: Arthur Brock, modernity, and medical humanism in early-twentieth-century Scotland

Arthur Brock (1879-1947) is generally remembered as the physician who treated poet Wilfred Owen for shell shock and as the translator of Galen and other ancient physicians. He was also a key figure in the early-twentieth-century humanist revival within medicine. Brock's interest in humanism, I argue, was inspired by a broader concern about modernity and by a desire to return medicine and society to the more harmonious, organic existence that he believed was characteristic of ancient Greece and could still be found among "primitive" peoples, such as the Scottish Gaels. This article explores Brock's anxieties about modernity and its relations to his interests in ancient and "primitive" peoples; to his medical thought and practice; to his interests in history, sociology, language, and translation; and to his involvement in the social and political life of Edinburgh and North Queensferry, where he moved in 1925. Crucially, it shows how all these interests and activities were influenced by Brock's mentor, Edinburgh polymath Patrick Geddes. The article concludes with a discussion of Brock's place in early-twentieth-century medical humanism.     

Infection, contagion, and public health in late medieval and early modern German imperial towns

From today's point of view, the concepts of "miasma" and "contagion" appear to be two mutually exclusive perceptions of the spread of epidemic diseases, and quite a number of historians have tried to discuss the history of public health and epidemic diseases in terms of a progression from the miasmic to the contagionist concept. More detailed local studies, however, indicate how extremely misleading it may be to separate such medical concepts and ideas from their actual historical context. The article presented here, based on local studies in late medieval and early modern imperial towns in southern Germany, demonstrates to what extent the inhabitants of these towns had notions of both "miasma" and "contagion." Furthermore, a contextual analysis of language shows that they did not see a necessity to strictly distinguish between these different concepts relating to the spread of diseases. Tracing the meaning of "infection" and "contagion," we find that these terms were used in connection with various diseases, and that a change in the use of the expressions does not necessarily imply a change of the corresponding notion. Moreover, a coexistence of differing perceptions cannot--as some historians have suggested--be attributed to a divergence between the academic medicine and the popular ideas of that period. A survey of measures and actions in the public health sector indicates that a coexistence of--from our point of view--inconsistent concepts helped the authorities as well as the individuals to find means of defense and consolation during all those crises caused by epidemic diseases--crises that occurred very frequently in these towns during the late medieval and early modern periods. As the article demonstrates, the interaction during such crises reveals the continuity of ancient rituals and concepts as well as the adoption of new insights resulting from changes in the economical, political, scientific, religious, and social structures.     

Continuity,chance, and change: The character of the industrial revolution in England

This article examines the life and works of Robert Blakey, author of the first English-language history of political thought. Studies of Blakey have typically concentrated on one aspect of his life, whether as an authority on field sports or as an historian of philosophy. However, some of Blakey’s lesser-known ventures, particularly his early Radical politics, his hagiographies, and his attempts to write a biography of Charlemagne, heavily influenced his more famous works. Similarly, Blakey’s upbringing in a Calvinist tradition, rooted in the Scottish School of Common Sense philosophy helps makes sense of his philosophical and theological commitments, yet has been largely ignored. This article provides a sketch of Blakey’s life, tying these disparate strands together, and explaining their influence upon, and relevance to, the first history of political philosophy.     

山西省稷山县农村公共卫生事业述评(1949～1984年)——以太阳村(公社)为重点考察对象

山西省稷山县太阳村(公社)是集体化时代闻名全国的卫生红旗单位,其公共卫生工作及合作医疗制度建设成绩斐然,具有明显的典型意义和时代特征。不过,这种农村公共卫生事业是建立在计划经济体制和高度集中的政治体制以及较低医疗保障水平基础上的,并与历次政治运动关系密切。改革开放后,经济体制逐渐向市场经济过渡,稷山县公共卫生事业因难以适应新的社会经济体制而最终走向了衰落,但其经验和教训可为今后创新农村公共卫生事业、建立新型合作医疗体系提供有益的借鉴。     

Francis Slade on Political Forms and Their Formation

The task of the article is to introduce the reader to one of the essential teachings of Francis Slade's understanding of political philosophy. After a brief presentation of why Slade examines political philosophy through the lens of form and what the principal political forms are, this article presents the form of premodern political philosophy by explicating what of its fundamental teachings modern political philosophy rejects and denies. The remainder of the work presents the modern form of the political by means of tracing the essential moments of the genesis of this form in Machiavelli's Prince and in Hobbes’ Leviathan. The argument focuses primarily on their revolutionary understanding of the human condition and its need to be transformed, or how man is no longer understood as a political animal and has necessarily become the subject of the state.     

Cancer, quackery and the vernacular meanings of hope in 1950s America

Hope was central to cancer control in twentieth-century America. Physicians placed great store in its power to persuade people to seek medical help as early as possible in the development of the disease, when it was most amenable to treatment; to maintain patients' loyalty through what could be a long, painful and uncertain course of therapy; and to encourage doubts about alternative healers. Some also argued that hope could have beneficial therapeutic and psychological effects for patients. However, we know very little about its meanings for the public. Focusing on a large collection of letters written to the Food and Drug Administration in the 1950s concerning an anti-quackery campaign, this article explores how men and women responded to the competing messages of hope promoted by orthodox cancer organizations and by alternative healers. It asks: What did hope mean to such men and women? How did they construct this meaning? How did they decide which treatments were hopeful and which were not? And, how did they use hope to imagine the social world of cancer? In short, this article explores the vernacular meanings, epistemologies, and imaginative uses of hope among Americans in the mid-twentieth century.     

Epidemiologists explain pellagra: gender,race, and political economy in the work of Edgar Sydenstricker

Between 1900 and 1940, at least 100,000 individuals in the southern United States died of pellagra, a dietary deficiency disease. Although half of these pellagra victims were African-American and more than two-thirds were women, contemporary observers paid little attention to these gender and racial differences in their analyses of disease. This article reviews the classic epidemiological studies of Joseph Goldberger and Edgar Sydenstricker, who argued that pellagra was deeply rooted in the political economy of cotton monoculture in the South. The methods that Sydenstricker brought to epidemiology from early work on political economy obscured the role of gender inequalities in pellagra, and his focus on economic underdevelopment led him to ignore the prominent role of African-Americans as pellagra's principal victims. Research methods and traditions, no less than more overt ideologies, played a role in maintaining the subordinate social position of women and African-Americans in the southern United States.     

Russia,China, and the universalism of modernity: the “Account of the Reforms of Peter the Great” by Kang Youwei

ABSTRACT

This paper analyzes a short essay by Kang Youwei (1858–1927) – one of the intellectual and political protagonists of late imperial and early Republican China. In it, he interpreted the historical experience of Russian modernization under Peter the Great (1672–1725) and used it as a “success story” for the renewal of Chinese monarchical institutions. It was written in 1898 and presented to the Manchu throne under the title “Account of the Reforms of Peter the Great”, and for our purposes will be the departing point for a “global intellectual circuit” through which the following questions will be addressed: Why was seventeenth and eighteenth century Russia considered as a model for China by the author? How did he manage to adapt the historical experience of Russia into a social and political conceptual framework for China? What was Kang’s historiographical method, and what kind of philosophy of history framed his reflections? What does this short essay tell us about Kang’s view on “Westernization”, on the concept of “modernity” itself, and on its use for historiographical purposes?     

An epidemic on wheels? Road safety,public health and injury politics in Africa (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

Anthropologists have showed only marginal interest in road safety, despite the loss of some 1.3 million people killed in road crashes every year, the bulk of which occurs in ‘developing’ countries. 2011 marks the beginning of a UN Decade of Action for Road Safety. Its scope is ambitious: to save five million lives and fifty million injuries by the end of the ‘decade’ in 2020. In this article, the author examines the way public health professionals and educators have appropriated the language of epidemiology to argue that road death and injury can be viewed as an ‘epidemic on wheels’ or a ‘disease of development’, to mention two often cited epithets among participants in the global road safety lobby. One major consideration of interest to anthropologists and policy makers is to what extent this effectively essentializes road death in Africa and depoliticises its injury politics. Bearing in mind the historical context of medical interventions in Africa, the article examines the global road safety lobby and its affinity with public health as a form of transnational governance, arguing alternatively that if the UN Decade of Action on Road Safety is to have any significant impact, it must recognize more clearly the political stakes being raised in claims to reduce deaths and injuries caused by automobility.     

The Abstraction of Care: What Work Counts?

Nurses provide essential health care labor, but their work, a mix of caregiving and clinical expertise, is often undervalued and unacknowledged by health care administrators and the policies and practices that govern health care more broadly. Based on interviews with nurses working in the New York metropolitan area and through pairing feminist political economy with literature on abstraction and politics of the possible, I show that the ways in which nurses’ work is measured creates a value hierarchy of tasks. Examining various tools of measurement, I argue that methods for measuring work are rooted in an historical and continuous hierarchy of what counts as work and what has value. For nurses, these processes obscure the essential care work they perform. I argue that bringing an explicit politics of social reproduction to the politics of measuring and accounting for work makes visible necessary and often‐obscured tasks, spaces, and social relations.     

Europe in the nineteenth-century American mind: The literary perspectives

This article evaluates Karl Popper's contribution to analytic philosophy, and outlines some of the contradictions in his work which make it difficult to locate in any particular tradition. In particular, the article investigates Popper's own claims to be a member of the rationalist tradition. Although Popper described himself as a member of this tradition, his definition of it diverged quite radically from that offered by other supporters of rationalism, like, for example, Mach, Carnap, and the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle. The reason for this was that Popper believed the rationalist tradition, if it were to remain coherent and relevant, needed to overcome the dilemma posed by Hume's problem of induction. Popper believed that this problem rendered conventional understandings of rationalism, science, and inductive reasoning incoherent. This article suggests that Popper's principal contribution to modern philosophy was to reconfigure the rationalist tradition in such a way as to circumvent the problem of induction while preserving the rationalist commitment to reason, rational debate, and objective knowledge. Popper's reconfiguration of the epistemological bases of the rationalist tradition challenged dominant understandings of rationalist and analytic philosophy, and may be appropriately understood as part of a wider move among philosophers like Quine and Putnam to challenge conventional understandings of analytic philosophy, and of what philosophy itself could and could not achieve. It also informed a vision of social and political life (and of the social and political sciences) as rooted in principles of freedom, equality, and rational debate, but which cannot be fit within the traditional ideological landscape.     

The Medical Periodicals of J.C. Tode and the Idea of Public Health

In 1770 ‘Den medicinske Tilskuer’ (The Medical Spectator) was published in Copenhagen. The man behind it was the surgeon, physician and poet Johann Clemens Tode. This was the first of 16 journals in total on health and medicine that Tode was to write, edit and publish until his death in 1806. With his journals, Tode contributed significantly to making health a public issue. This implies conceptualizing health and medicine as reaching beyond the private sphere and individual lives, to rather concerning society at large. To understand the late 18th century, it is equally important to see that the idea of ‘public health’ also implies the existence of a public sphere. The article argues that Tode’s journals contributed to the making of such a public and that he did so by addressing its health. It investigates how the readers and – more generally – the public were staged and produced in Tode’s medical periodicals. The object of investigation is not primarily the medical advice given by Tode as much as the way it is given, the figures or personae that it is given to and the public that it helped to create.     

Political Philosophy,Education, and Statesmanship

How are we to understand the connection between political philosophy, education, and statesmanship? Using Harry V. Jaffa's Crisis of the Strauss Divided as a guide, the following essay explores this question by reflecting on a teacher-student lineage that stretches across the twentieth century. It explains and defends Jaffa's understanding of political philosophy but argues that one of Jaffa's students improved or perfected Jaffa's approach. In doing so, Jaffa's student did what Jaffa had done for his teacher, and Jaffa's teacher had done for his teacher. While at first glance the teacher-student lineage might appear to trace a descent, from another angle it appears to be an ascent, or at least the preparation for a possible ascent.     

Disease, Social Identity, and Risk: Rethinking the Geography of AIDS

The emergence of new diseases and the re-emergence of 'old' diseases necessitates a relook at what shapes vulnerability to ill health. A framework is proposed that combines a realist approach to mapping vulnerability with feminist and post-structural approaches that focus more attention upon the role of social identities and cultural framings of disease. Too often investigations of disease focus either upon structural determinants of risk such as political policy and the economy, or on discursive definitions of disease that impact its experience. A combination of these approaches would result in a more effective framework for evaluating vulnerability, and subsequently for generating effective disease prevention strategies. The social, economic, political, and cultural context of HIV/AIDS in Malawi is given as an illustration of this framework.     

The rationalist tradition and the problem of induction: Karl Popper's rejection of epistemological optimism

This article evaluates Karl Popper's contribution to analytic philosophy, and outlines some of the contradictions in his work which make it difficult to locate in any particular tradition. In particular, the article investigates Popper's own claims to be a member of the rationalist tradition. Although Popper described himself as a member of this tradition, his definition of it diverged quite radically from that offered by other supporters of rationalism, like, for example, Mach, Carnap, and the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle. The reason for this was that Popper believed the rationalist tradition, if it were to remain coherent and relevant, needed to overcome the dilemma posed by Hume's problem of induction. Popper believed that this problem rendered conventional understandings of rationalism, science, and inductive reasoning incoherent. This article suggests that Popper's principal contribution to modern philosophy was to reconfigure the rationalist tradition in such a way as to circumvent the problem of induction while preserving the rationalist commitment to reason, rational debate, and objective knowledge. Popper's reconfiguration of the epistemological bases of the rationalist tradition challenged dominant understandings of rationalist and analytic philosophy, and may be appropriately understood as part of a wider move among philosophers like Quine and Putnam to challenge conventional understandings of analytic philosophy, and of what philosophy itself could and could not achieve. It also informed a vision of social and political life (and of the social and political sciences) as rooted in principles of freedom, equality, and rational debate, but which cannot be fit within the traditional ideological landscape.     

Pepperoni or Broccoli? On the Cutting Wedge of Feminist Environmentalism

Feminist environmentalism has become a significant intellectual and social policy force across fields as diverse as public health, political economy, philosophy, science, and ecology. Feminist environmental theory and activism together are challenging and redefining foundational principles, from animal rights to the environmental economy of illness and well-being, from global political economy to the role of Big Science as the primary arbiter of the state of the environment. Animal rights is one of the most intellectually challenging and innovative areas of intellectual activity and social activism, and within feminist environmentalism is one of the most radical subfields. This paper provides an overview of activity in this subfield, starting from the observation that feminist environmental scholarship and grassroots activism on animal rights pivot around three concerns: elucidating the commonalities in structures of oppressions across gender, race, class, and species; developing feminist-informed theories of the basis for allocating "rights" to animals; and exposing the gendered assumptions and perceptions that underlie human relationships to nonhuman animals. At the same time, the serious contemplation of animal rights makes a considerable contribution to destabilizing identity categories and adds new dimensions to theorizing the mutability of identity.     

Medical versus social work-places: constructing and compensating the personal support worker across health care settings in Ontario,Canada

This article explores the role of place in explaining variation in caregiver compensation. Using the labour category of Personal Support Worker (PSW) in Ontario, Canada, it contrasts wage rates across three health care settings: hospitals, long-term care facilities and private homes. An evaluation of current literature from disciplines spanning geography, gender studies, political science and sociology is combined with a critical analysis of policy documents and wage data to reveal that, despite holding similar qualifications and performing comparable job duties, hospital-based workers receive higher wages than home-based workers. I theorize that this wage disparity is partially attributable to the historical privileging of hospital settings in Canada, based on a medical-social continuum of health care valuation. Given that the hospital is constructed as a highly medical place, whereas the home is considered to be a social place, caregiving work enjoys greater financing protection in the former. I argue that these constructions stem from deeply gendered historical roots which view the marketplace as a male-dominated setting for productive waged labour, and the home as a female-dominated setting for unpaid social pursuits. Thus, when personal support services shift from public institutions into private homes, these activities become invisible to the state, and their provision beyond its purview. I conclude that the medical versus social nature of the duties performed by PSWs has become secondary to the medical versus social nature of the setting in which these activities take place. This has translated into lower wages for home-based PSWs, effectively resulting in wage discrimination.     

Empire, Internationalism, and the Campaign against the Traffic in Women and Children in the 1920s

This article assesses the inter-war campaign against traffickingin women and children, with a particular focus on the leadingrole played by British and British-dominated voluntary associations.This humanitarian campaign was conducted by social relief organizationssuch as the Association for Moral and Social Hygiene (AMSH)and the International Bureau for the Suppression of the Trafficin Women and Children (IBSTWC). While organized opposition totrafficking in persons was not new, these groups consciously‘internationalized’ their advocacy and lobbyingefforts in the 1920s and 1930s. Although their work againsttrafficking in the Straits Settlements, or the prostitutionrings operating in the Mediterranean, was driven in part bythe desire to protect Britain's national prestige, their moralimpetus and their cooperation with non-British bodies reflectedwider international concerns. The article also explores theuse of public diplomacy as a new political tool, with a particularfocus on the public-private cooperation evident in the Leagueof Nations' work to combat the trade. Finally, the article advancessome conclusions as to why British women's political organizationsin particular were some of the earliest ‘internationalists’,how successful internationalists were in combating transnationalsocial problems, and to what extent inter-war internationalistsestablished a precedent for the subsequent growth of internationalsocial relief organizations.     

Health Financing Systems,Health Equity and Universal Health Coverage in Arab Countries

This article provides an overview of health financing structures in Arab countries in the context of their preparedness for universal health coverage. Current arrangements have left large swathes of the population shouldering high financial burdens and facing hardships when using healthcare, with significant impoverishing and deterrent effects. Health protection schemes are most comprehensive for those who can afford healthcare; they are mainly based on contributions and formal employment and thus fail to cater for the poor and the rural and informal sectors. Financing systems also lack the operational bases and institutional prerequisites for effective resource pooling and risk sharing, with segmentation and fragmentation worsening horizontal and vertical inequities. The neglect of public health systems has reinforced inequities by widening the gap between needs and provision, and by emphasizing the ability to pay as a basis for accessing quality care. In a context of informality and poverty, focusing reforms on health insurance is not a panacea. Rather, moving towards universal health coverage and reducing health inequities will require changes in the level of political tolerance for social injustice, and a paradigm shift to a more equity‐based political economy which views health as an investment and an entitlement.     

Subcontracting Academia: Alienation,Exploitation and Disillusionment in the UK Overseas Syrian Refugee Research Industry

As the political economy of social science research has shifted, subcontracted research assistants have taken over an ever growing part of the research process. In this article, we report on a case study of the experiences of local research assistants employed on UK‐directed research projects on Syrian refugees in Lebanon. While refugee research is framed in the UK as a noble project of helping the world's most vulnerable, these assistants speak critically of their sense of alienation, exploitation and disillusionment with the research they work on. Such problems arise, we argue, not just from subcontracted labour relations in the workplace itself, but also the broader political economy of how overseas social science research is currently produced. Addressing these problems requires giving better recognition to the work, interests and concerns of research assistants, but also rethinking and restructuring the global production of social science research more generally.