Perkins’s patent metallic “Tractors”: Development,adoption, and early dissemination of an eighteenth-century therapeutic fad

ABSTRACT

The metallick Tractors were patented by Elisha Perkins, a Connecticut physician, in 1796, for the treatment of various ailments, particularly those associated with pain. They were subsequently rapidly and widely disseminated on the basis of testimonials and aggressive marketing tactics. Dissemination was facilitated by endorsements from prominent physicians, politicians, and clergy, by quasi-theoretical explanations of efficacy based on then-current experiments of Galvani and others, and by the apparent simplicity and safety of the procedure. Abandonment of this ineffective therapy was later prompted by the application of blinded placebo-controlled trials using sham devices.     

A complex Neolithic economy: isotope evidence for the circulation of cattle and sheep in the TRB of western Sweden

We report here the results of strontium, oxygen and carbon isotope analysis of teeth from domestic animals at two Neolithic settlement sites in Falbygden, Sweden. The main result is the high mobility of domestic animals, particularly of cattle but also of sheep. More than half of the analysed cattle teeth show strontium isotope signals indicating that they were raised in an area of Precambrian rock, outside the sedimentary Cambro-Silurian rocks found in Falbygden. This is in marked contrast to pigs, which were mostly local to Falbygden. The mobility of cattle is much higher than that of humans, for which the frequency of immigrants is about 25%.     

Family stories,public silence: Irish identity construction amongst the second‐generation Irish in England

Formal narratives of history, especially that of colonial oppression, have been central to the construction of national identities in Ireland. But the Irish diasporic community in Britain has been cut off from the reproduction of these narratives, most notably by their absence from the curriculum of Catholic schools, as result of the unofficial ‘denationalisation’ pact agreed by the Church in the 19th century (Hickman, 1995). The reproduction of Irish identities is largely a private matter, carried out within the home through family accounts of local connections, often reinforced by extended visits to parent/s ‘home’ areas. Recapturing a public dimension has often become a personal quest in adulthood, ‘filling in the gaps’. This paper explores constructions of narratives of nation by a key diasporic population, those with one or two Irish‐born parents. It places particular emphasis on varying regional/national contexts within which such constructions take place, drawing on focus group discussions and interviews for the ESRC‐funded Irish 2 Project in five locations — London, Glasgow, Manchester, Coventry and Banbury.