Parading the green – Procession as subaltern resistance in Manchester in 1867

This paper discusses the use of procession as a technique of subaltern resistance in a situation where hegemonic power is particularly dominant. After a review of the literature on hegemony, resistance and the origin and nature of processions, it discusses the situation in Manchester in late 1867 following the execution of the three Irishmen who became known as “The Manchester Martyrs”. Using contemporary British and Irish newspapers of varied outlook, it analyses processions of sympathy held on 24 November and 1 December. The organisation, route and composition of the processions and the dress and behaviour of the participants are analysed to demonstrate how procession can express resistance. The case study demonstrates how hegemony and resistance are closely intertwined and that spaces for resistance exist even in the most difficult circumstances, provided those organising resistance show sufficient understanding of the opportunities offered by national and local cultural traditions and local power relationships, and are able to persuade their followers to tailor their act of resistance to that context.     

Robert Graves,Marshall Hall,and reflex action in 1837

ABSTRACT

In several issues of the London Medical Gazette during June–July of 1837 there was an interchange of letters between Robert Graves, Regius Professor of the Institutes of Medicine at Trinity College, Dublin, and the London physician and experimental physiologist Marshall Hall, often considered the discoverer of the phenomenon of reflex activity. Graves asserted that he, rather than Hall, was the originator of the idea of reflex action as a disease mechanism. Hall rejected that assertion and, after exchange of some verbal “pleasantries,” began a tirade about a somewhat different, although not unrelated issue into which the journal editor interjected some not exactly dispassionate comments. Graves soon let the matter of priority lapse, and Hall continued his war with the Council of the Royal Society, but examination of the contemporary and earlier literature suggests that Graves probably was correct, by a narrow time margin, in relation of his claim for priority in using the concept of reflex action in explaining neurological disease mechanisms (not a claim for discovering reflex action), that Hall had used the phrase “reflex action” earlier than Graves, and that others before Hall had gone a long way in studying reflex mechanisms, although Hall’s writings had familiarized the medical profession with the concept.     

William Rutherford Sanders (1828–1881) and his neurologically fertile years (1865–1868)

ABSTRACT

William Rutherford Sanders (1828–1881) was an Edinburgh physician who occupied the Chair of Pathology at the University of Edinburgh from 1869 to 1881. All of his published output between 1865 and 1868 was concerned with neurology. In arguing that a patient did not have paralysis agitans, Sanders (1865) employed the term “Parkinson’s disease” for the first time in the English-language literature to distinguish between the disorder that Parkinson (1817) termed “paralysis agitans” and other types of shaking palsies. He contributed a major chapter on the same topic to Russell Reynolds’s A System of Medicine (1868). Sanders also investigated the innervation of the palate and facial muscles (1865), and in 1866 recorded the autopsy findings in two cases of aphasia. Here, for the first time in the English-language literature, he described findings that supported Broca’s location of the representation of speech to a particular area of the left cerebral hemisphere.     

An East Cretan LM IA Vase at Knossos

A fragment of a jug published from recent excavations at Palaikastro in E. Crete resembles very closely, in its decoration of double-axes and in its size and shape, a bridge-spouted jug from Evans's excavation in the House of the Frescoes at Knossos. The excavators, who noted the resemblance, were concerned about the date of the vase, LM IA: but implications go beyond this chronological aspect. Stylistically, the lavish use of subsidiary white paint for details of the decoration is without parallel at Knossos. This is, however, a feature of the E. Cretan style where it was practised extensively. These provide firm grounds for believing that the vase found at Knossos is an import from the area of Palaikastro. As such, it is not unique, since similar imports (though few) have been identified in Central Crete, and some others can be added to them. This evidence testifies to hitherto undocumented interrelations between the two regions of the Island at the LM IA stage.