“Deliver Me From This Indignity!”: Cottage Hospitals,Localism and NHS Healthcare in Central England, 1948-1978

Victorian and Edwardian cottage hospitals, compared to infirmaries and workhouse institutions, have been neglected by social historians. Yet, they provided an infrastructure dedicated to localism and healthcare for the aged under the new National Health Service (NHS) after World War Two. This article focuses on two renowned Midlands cottage hospitals built in mid-Northamptonshire at Pitsford. In their patient case-histories we can engage with: dignity standards, medical regime, ward designs, staffing levels, budget provisions, and patient voices. These popular institutions had a well-deserved reputation for delivering high-quality geriatric medicine from 1948 to 1978. Human vignettes detailing the physical indignities of ageing nonetheless proliferate in the records. The longevity of these basic issues was to prove to be a recurring tension in NHS financial planning. Budget models lacked enough funds for aged patients to receive ‘stable’ bedside care. Instead, NHS accountants allocated resources to ensure the future ‘sustainability’ of the system itself. A new paradigm highlights the inherent financial contradictions and empty political promises that those needing geriatric care often experienced, and still do. Throughout, the rediscovered cottage hospital records contain important historical lessons for the present impasse about how to define, deliver and secure dignity for elderly patients in today’s NHS.     

Examining the Potential of Indigenous Institutions for Development: A Perspective from Borana,Ethiopia

This article examines an institutional approach to development in which indigenous institutions are viewed as a resource for achieving development. It concentrates on indigenous natural resource management (NRM) institutions which have been seen by some development agencies to be a means to address the needs of people and the environment in a way that is also participatory. Using material from Borana, Ethiopia, the article describes the indigenous NRM institutions and examines the outcome of one attempt to work with them. In the process, it shows that partnerships between development agencies and indigenous NRM institutions are often fragile, and tend to dissolve when they fail to meet the preconceptions of the developers. Through an examination of this approach to development, the article also examines the usefulness of recent broad approaches to institutions.     

Mitochondrial DNA from 3000-year old chickens at the Teouma site,Vanuatu

Chickens were part of the Lapita cultural complex, transported into and through the Pacific by prehistoric colonists; as such they can be used as a proxy for tracking prehistoric migration and interaction. The Lapita site of Teouma in Vanuatu is well known for the recovery of complete dentate stamped pots and a cemetery containing the largest collection of Lapita period skeletons ever found. Chicken bones recovered from these excavations provide the first ancient DNA sequences from any commensal organism directly associated with a Lapita context. The ancient mtDNA sequences obtained from two Teouma chicken bones are compared with previously published archaeologically derived ancient DNA sequences to extend our understanding of the spread of chickens in Pacific prehistory. The results also show that the haplogroup E signature was present in very early populations of chickens transported into Remote Oceania. This study also adds to the suite of available data relating to isotopic signatures for commensal animals during the early settlement of Vanuatu and may reveal a different diet for Teouma chickens than those from other early prehistoric assemblages in the Pacific.     

'The Body Evidencing the Crime': Rape on Trial in Colonial India, 1860–1947

The history of rape on trial in colonial India sheds new light on the colonial civilising mission and the claims made by white men about saving brown women from brown men. Through an analysis of almost a century of case law, this article concludes that the modernisation of law and the development of a new medico-legal understanding of rape introduced evidentiary standards that placed a heavy burden on Indian women seeking judicial remedy in colonial courts. The fear imported from Britain of false charges combined with colonial views about Indian culture to make native female complainants doubly dubious. The colonial jurisprudence has survived to devastating effect in postcolonial India and Pakistan in ways that are explored and explained by the author.