The political impact of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras

This paper evaluates the political impact of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, now in its fifteenth year. The paper summarises the evolution of Mardi Gras from a protest march into a month long festival, culminating in a street parade. It traces the development of governance and organisational arrangements. The impact of this event in five contexts is then discussed: the political consciousness and organisational mobilisation of the gay and lesbian community; public attitudes; the major political centres; and the state. In particular the evolution of relations with the NSW state government, at political and executive levels, and with the police is reviewed. The paper concludes Mardi Gras has played a pace‐setting role in each context The success of Mardi Gras, at least in terms of attracting public attention, does however create new strategic challenges for its sponsors.     

Concepts of illness and disease: Two‐way communication

Helman, Cecil. Culture, Health and Illness: An Introduction for Health Professionals. Bristol, London, Boston: Wright‐PSG, 1984. xi + 242 pp. including figures, appendix, references, index. $33.00 cloth, $16.50 paper.

Hudson, Robert P. Disease and Its Control: The Shaping of Modern Thought. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1983. xvii + 259 pp. including abbreviations of journals, appendix, bibliographic notes, index. $29.95 cloth.     

Sparse,Inconsistent and Unreliable: Tax Records and the World Inequality Report 2018

This article reviews the World Inequality Report 2018, a large collaborative data project based on the work of Thomas Piketty and the late Anthony Atkinson, which critiques the entire literature of inequality measurement from survey data and purports to provide superior, unprecedented and reliable coverage of income and wealth inequalities over the entire world, based primarily on tax records. The article examines three major issues: the coverage provided by tax data in the world economy, the consistency of tax data with other sources of information on income inequality, and the peculiarities of tax‐based measurement of inequality in the United States. Then a comparison is made with measures drawn from other forms of administrative data — specifically payroll records — which are generally more consistent with records of inequality measured in household surveys than are tax records. Following this, the article discusses the analysis of wealth and wealth inequality before offering a few closing remarks about policy.     

The elusive role of scientific medicine in mortality decline: diphtheria in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Philadelphia

The designation of the Klebs-Loeffler bacillus as the cause of diphtheria in the early 1890s and the subsequent development of the antitoxin treatment in the years immediately following were at the time and continue to be viewed as triumphs of scientific medicine. I focus on these two developments to illustrate the problems that arise in attempting to answer the questions regarding the role that changes in medical practice--in this case, the use of antitoxin as a cure--played in lowering death rates at the time. Changes in diagnostic techniques, the selection of cases to be included, and ultimately the agendas of the persons constructing them affected the numerators and denominators of these rates. The data suggest that the antitoxin had some effect on already declining diphtheria death rates, but because of changes in understandings of the disease and contemporaries' presentation of the data, the size of that effect and its role in mortality decline more generally elude us. Our analysis of the past depends on numbers that reflect not only changing treatments but also changing understandings of disease at the end of the nineteenth century.