WordPress.com
| | No. 59, November 2012 |
|[pic] |
|ISSN 0962-7839 |
| | |
|[pic] |Contents |
|Cover Star Simon Forman of London, the Elizabethan astrologer, occultist and herbalist. See p. | |
|41. | |
| | SSHM Sponsored Events |
| |(i) Calls for Papers |
| |(ii) Meeting reports |
| |Conferences: Calls for Papers Conference |
| |Notices |
| |Workshops/Symposia/Seminars Notices |
| |Postgraduate Events |
| |Lectures |
| |Calls for Articles |
| |Awards/Grants etc |
| |Library/Archive News |
| |Online |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| |
|Correspondence should be sent to: |
|Dr Andrew Hull, Department of Inter-Professional Studies, Centre for Philosophy, History and Law in Healthcare, College of Human and Health |
|Sciences, Swansea University, Singleton Park Campus, Swansea SA2 8PP |
|Email gazette@ |
|web |
| |
• SSHM Sponsored Event
Call for Papers
SSHM Conference 2014
Health, disease, and the state
The Society for the Social History of Medicine hosts a major, biennial, international, and inter-disciplinary conference. In 2014 it will explore the relationships between health/disease, and the state. Responses to disease and concerns about health contributed to the development of the state, yet disease and medicine have also challenged and disrupted state authority.
We invite proposals for papers, sessions, and round-tables that examine, challenge, and refine the history of disease, health and the state. Suggested themes include local and global understandings of health, medicine, and governance; the consolidation, breakdown, or absence of state power in the midst of health and medical crises; and the experience of health and medical bureaucracies in the past. From discussions on the health of the body politic, the role of public health in imperial governance, the nature of military medicine, environmental regulations, to socialised medicine, we welcome approaches from a variety of disciplines and time periods.
Call for papers loses: 1 January 2014
Please see for more details.
__________________________________
|[pi|[pic] SSHM Sponsored Event ReportS |
|c] | |
SSHM Conference 2012:
Emotions, Health, and Wellbeing
Queen Mary University of London
10-12 September 2012
[pic]
The Society for the Social History of Medicine (SSHM) hosts a major, biennial, international, and interdisciplinary conference. The 2012 SSHM conference in London built upon the success of its predecessors, the most recent being the 2010 SSHM conference in Durham, to provide a stimulating and enjoyable few days for all delegates. It was held in conjunction with the Queen Mary (QMUL) Centre for the History of the Emotions, on the theme of ‘Emotions, Health and Wellbeing’. The theme attracted a broad range of international papers on diverse subjects such as psychiatry, gender, war, literature and crime. With three keynote speakers and a panel discussion, the three days were characterised by lively discussion and a varied intellectual program. However, it was not all work and no play. The conference also included a packed social schedule with events to suit all tastes, ranging from drinks at the Wellcome library to museum visits. This conference report seeks to give a flavour of the dynamic conference.
Keynotes and Key Themes
Joanna Bourke. ‘Learning to suffer: the body-in-pain from 1760 to 1960’.
The conference was kicked off by Professor Joanna Bourke (Birkbeck University of London), who is the principal researcher on the Birkbeck Pain Project. She began her plenary lecture by reflecting upon some quotes about the pain of a nineteenth-century physician, Peter Latham, which she used as a starting point for exploring her theoretical framework to study pain historically.
Instead of approaching pain as an ‘it’, an entity, Bourke proposed to approach pain as a kind of event. Using the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein about the complicated relation between language and experience, she argued that the naming of events is not only personal but is also determined by common languages and thus by social and cultural norms. Because of this mediation our narratives about pain are not about pain itself, but about the way we perceive the event or what it is to feel pain. Bourke’s keynote speech was a promising sign of things to come, both in relation to the quality of the research presented at the conference and to her forthcoming book about the history of pain.
William Reddy. ‘Striving to feel: the centrality of effort in the history of emotions’.
[pic]
A key contributor to the field of the history of emotions, Professor William M. Reddy (Duke University – pictured here with Thomas Dixon) responded to recent critical re-evaluations of the distinction between emotion and reason in his keynote. The paper spoke to current debates on the place of the history of medicine and the history of human experience in the neurosciences. Whilst outlining the strengths and weaknesses of various approaches to the study of the emotions, Reddy demonstrated the conflicts within neuroscientific thought itself.
Discussing whether emotions are constructed or inherent, Reddy explained that whilst emotions are common sense actions, they also depend upon localised and community norms of experience. Advocating the use of ‘emotion’ as a concept, he explained that it was not enough to study ‘historical emotions’, instead urging historians to consider localised concepts of the self. A postscript to this paper can be found on the History of Emotions blog.
Mark Jackson. ‘The secret places of the heart’.
[pic]
In his keynote paper, which made reference to a 1922 novel of the same name by H. G. Wells, Mark Jackson (University of Exeter - pictured here with SSHM Chair Gayle Davis) discussed past theorisations of emotions as products of both the mind and body. Jackson took the year 1922 as an interesting moment when this idea was widely debated, following the trauma of World War I. Not only did Wells take the protagonist of his novel on a physical voyage to attain a better understanding of his heart and mind, but medical practitioners began to theorize a relationship between stress, emotion, and disease at this time, with emotions serving as the link between mental disturbance and physical illness. Jackson focused particularly on American physiologist Walter Cannon’s 1922 text on traumatic shock, which expounded on this notion of a mind-body unity. In considering the impossibility of separating the emotions from their various interdependent factors, Jackson suggested in the end that perhaps a ‘history of emotions’ is not possible. Alternatively, given its ubiquity, perhaps it is unavoidable – a thought underscored by the breadth of presentations offered at the conference.
Roundtable, Impact and Public Engagement
Contributors included: Virginia Berridge (LSHTM), Natalie Banner (KCL), Simon Chaplin (Wellcome Library), Thomas Dixon (QMUL), Brian Hurwitz (KCL), Mark Jackson (Exeter), Helen King (OU), Clare Matterson (Wellcome Trust).
[pic]
Fay Bound-Alberti speaking at the Roundtable
As the round table discussion on ‘impact’ unfolded, delegates were encouraged to consider how historical research can reach beyond academia and thus to confront some of the most immediate and concrete concerns of the conference. As contributors from a range of disciplines and professions problematised issues surrounding open access journals, interdisciplinary research collaboration, REF assessment and social media, it became clear that the impact of historical research upon society within politics, economics and culture is a desirable, indeed necessary outcome of academia, but that it is nonetheless a contentious matter. Between the production, dissemination and impact of historical research, panellists stressed the dangers of historical knowledge being misrepresented, diluted and re-appropriated. As historical research is freely publicised within the realms of politics, journalism and online blogging, how do we, as historians, both popularise and promote our work, whilst retaining the credibility, complexity and quality of our research once it enters the public domain? The panel’s concluding remarks stressed the imperative of boundaries being broken between academia and the public and that access to knowledge should be stripped of monetary and disciplinary barriers. However, whether these kinds of engagement should be fast, free and immediate, or cautious and critical is clearly open to debate.
Panels and Papers
With up to five parallel panels across three days, it is impossible to engage fully with the breadth and depth of research that was presented at the SSHM conference. However, we hope to give some sense of the diverse and engaging conference papers in the following analysis of a selection of its key subjects and themes: ‘Before Emotions’, ‘It’s all in the Mind?’, ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’, ‘The Bigger Picture’ and ‘The More Emotional Sex?’.
Before Emotions: Medieval and Early Modern Passions
The four sessions on Medieval and Early Modern Passions were a true ‘meeting of the minds’, bringing together speakers from the UK, Europe, Canada, Japan and Australia. The Medieval England session featured Katherine Harvey, who showed how excessive weeping by medieval bishops could fill precise political functions and only appeared in certain contexts. The three Early Modern sessions were well attended, and attracted a considerable number of insightful questions from the audience. The papers raised some recurring themes that drew together medicine and emotion. They considered the nature and role of balancing the humors in medical treatment, thus highlighting that ‘balance’ was only ever an ideal state and that in reality treatment consisted of counteracting an excess of one humor with an excess of another. A second theme that emerged was the tension between historical accounts of change and those of continuity. We were also reminded that great care must be taken when asserting that ‘this is what people believed’ at any time in the past, because doubt certainly existed about the value of any medical treatment even when that treatment is understood to have been the dominant belief of the time. These points were made in papers as diverse as an analysis of the role of laughter and the ‘fool’ in the court of King Henry VIII; the humours as metaphor in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar; the role of emotion in plague epidemics, and consideration of the emotions of anger, melancholy and joy.
It’s all in the Mind? Emotions and Psychiatry
Historians of psychiatry played a special role in the conference through their investigations of the profound relationship between emotions and mental disorders. Bringing together scholars from different areas and interests, the psychiatry panels were an exciting exploration in the labyrinth of the mind. The papers included a variety of interesting topics which ranged from the ‘pathologies of emotion’ to the ‘chemistry of emotion’, passing through old and new psychiatric categories. Research into categories such as schizophrenia, agoraphobia, hysteria and moral insanity explored the medical construction of psychiatric concepts. Presenters also employed varied analytical frameworks from which social, spatial, economic, political, theoretical and phenomenological histories of mental illness emerged. For example, Vicky Long’s exploration of ‘de-institutionalisation’ was entangled with economic, governmental and societal concerns, whilst Claire Sewell’s analysis of the language of emotion situated the care of the mentally ill within families. Felicity Callard and Hazen Morrison analysed how psychiatric patients’ identities were inextricably linked to the geographical and spatial locations in which they were defined. Chris Milnes and Emilia Musumeci demonstrated that pathologies of emotion, ranging from the heights of ecstasy to a sheer lack of empathy, are not only bound to minds and bodies but also to changing psychiatric discourses, cultural contexts and historical time periods. Whilst covering a wide range of areas of interest (including many that we have been unable to consider here), these papers underlined the value of employing a consideration of the emotions in the study of the history of psychiatry. This approach allows for new insights into not only the history of the experience of mental illness, but also historiographic revisions to the broader concerns of the field.
Keep Calm and Carry On: Emotions and War
The subjects of wartime and warfare provided fertile historical ground from which to develop discussions of emotional responses to war, psychology and medical care. Papers presented by Julie Anderson and Katherine McEnroe on the history of nursing explored the interrelationship between gender, space, and emotions. Mark Honigsbaum explained how mass media employed patriotic discourse to quell fears over the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic in Britain, while Alexia Moncrieff’s presentation on venereal disease in the Australian Imperial Force demonstrated how its management was shaped by the need to maintain an effective fighting force and by public ideas about the moral purity of the military. Papers on war also highlighted how the two World Wars drew the attention of army doctors to links between physical and emotional wellbeing. Strong emotions were seen as one possible reason for medically unexplained phenomena like shell shock and post-traumatic stress disorder. Addressing this subject, Edgar Jones highlighted the precarious status that explanations of psycho-somatic disorders had in the first half of the twentieth century. In the case of permanently wounded soldiers, Kellen Kurschinski argued that the emotional condition of these soldiers was seen as important for their capability to ‘overcome’ disabilities. Accordingly, the management of emotions was important in rehabilitation centres. This range of papers demonstrated some of the tangible consequences, both social and medical, that arose from politicised and public wartime discourses of emotions.
The Bigger Picture: Emotions beyond England
The papers about the history of emotions and wellbeing outside Britain showed a broad range of approaches, from which we will highlight two as examples. Firstly, the papers highlighted the strategic use and manipulation of emotions for different purposes across time and place. This approach was particularly evident in the papers of Susanna Ferlito and Ayesha Nathoo. Ferlito used a photograph of Countess Virginia Verasis di Castiglione to investigate questions such as ‘how can a choice of dress be analysed as a fierce political statement?’. Nathoo discussed the emotional appeal of the campaign of the Disaster Emergency Committees in East Africa in 2011 in television advertisement and social media, in which selected social and political facts were apparently exaggerated while others were conveniently ignored. Secondly, the papers emphasised that emotions are intertwined with other issues of global importance such as class, politics and race. This theme emerged particularly from the papers of Annelie Drakman and Rampaul Chamba. Drakman investigated the fraught relationships between state-appointed country doctors and local peasants in Sweden in the nineteenth century. Chamba spoke about African immigrants in the Caribbean in the 1990s, in relation to the subject of how racial stigma shaped diagnoses of ‘schizophrenia’. These papers on global emotions highlighted the importance of bearing in mind the socially- and culturally-contingent nature of (histories of) emotions.
The ‘More Emotional Sex’?: Emotions and Gender
In 1900, the British Medical Journal described women as the ‘more emotional sex’. Such gendered historical and historiographical ideas about emotions were a consistent theme of the conference as the gendered experience of emotions, as well as emotions between the genders, was broached in several panels. In her study of the changing experience of childbirth in post-war Britain, Laura King argued that men’s increasing presence in the delivery room created a new kind of intimate union for the family, ultimately transforming ideas on what it meant to be ‘manly.’ Rosemary Wall discussed the deployment of single British female nurses overseas as part of a larger social agenda to balance the gender ratio in the colonies, examining the retention problem that arose as these nurses entered romantic relationships abroad. In a panel on ‘feeling female’ Lesley Hall, Katherine Angel and Martha Kirby addressed the explicitly female aspects of the history of emotions. Hall, for example, presented a paper on anxieties surrounding intense female friendships in interwar Britain. Angel paid attention to the medical diagnostic category of female sexual dysfunction and how it has shaped understandings of sexual desire since the 1960s. In a panel which compared Dutch and British crime and punishment, Victoria Bates and Willemijn Ruberg both discussed the emotional ‘scripts’ that men and women were expected to demonstrate in response to being the victim or alleged offender in criminal cases. Jade Shepherd also spoke about the cultural norms and gendered expectations surrounding jealousy and insanity in Victorian England. The subjects of gender and emotions were thus addressed from a range of perspectives, which took into consideration issues such as the complexities of gender relations and the role of medicine in shaping sexual feelings and behaviour.
Social and Networking Events: Trips, Talks and Toasts
The conference was not only full of lively discussion and debate, but also daily and varied social events for delegates to attend. On the first evening, the Wellcome library hosted a generous reception – in the words of one tweeter, ‘I can't believe the Wellcome Library is allowing so many drinks near so many books! #sshm12’. The following day also included a fantastic evening at QMUL itself, which involved a reception with live music, a three course meal, speeches and a chance to reflect on the day’s proceedings. Other networking opportunities were providing throughout the conference itself, including meetings with editors of SSHM’s book series with Pickering & Chatto and with the editor of Social History of Medicine. The conference also saw the first postgraduate lunch, which provided an opportunity for early career scholars to meet and to talk to members of the SSHM Executive Committee.
One of the highlights of the conference’s social schedule was a range of museum trips, which took advantage of London’s extensive medical history. Visits were offered to the following museums: Ragged School Museum; Museum of the Order of St. John; St. Bartholomew-the-Great; Bishopsgate Institute; Centre of the Cell; Hunterian Museum (Royal College of Surgeons); Royal College of Physicians; Wellcome Collection; Whitechapel Gallery; and St. Bartholomew's the Less and the West Smithfield Museum. As it is not possible to do all of these museums justice here, a brief summary will be provided of three museum trips in order to provide a sense of the wider opportunities that were provided for delegates to learn about medical history. Firstly, an official tour was provided of the Museum of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, which houses the historical legacy of the order from its inception for hospice care at the height of the Crusades. Apart from being a museum, the complex is also a functioning headquarters for the order, as well as a religious and ceremonial centre for the St. John Ambulance organisation. Secondly, a number of delegates visited the Royal College of Physicians which houses collections of ceremonial silvers, medical artefacts, and an archival library. The RCP preserves five hundred years of medical fellowship and ritual – from the Censors’ Room to the winding staircase where candidates ascend to their peers. Finally, the Donnaich Gallery provided an opportunity to see the skeleton of Joseph Merrick, the ‘Elephant Man’. The visit provided delegates with an insight into the tension between keeping Merrick’s skeleton available to researchers and being sensitive to his unease at his status as a ‘curiosity’.
Final Comments
Over the course of three days this stimulating conference proved that the history of emotions, indeed the history of medicine, truly operates at the intersection of different disciplines. With delegates speaking from perspectives as wide-ranging as the geographical and the literary, ‘Emotions, Health and Wellbeing’ highlighted the value of meetings such as this for bringing together and sharing different approaches to shared interests.
If you missed it, be sure to keep an eye out for the 2014 conference on ‘Disease, Health, and the State’, which will be held in Oxford from 10-12 July 2014. You can also read some of the highlights that various attendees tweeted while at the conference at . More conference reports and discussions of the history of emotions are available at QMUL’s blog .
[pic]
The editor is extremely grateful to Victoria Bates for organising and editing individual reports from SSHM bursary recipients into such a effective whole.
Contributors: Victoria Bates; Elizabeth Connolly; Annelie Drakman; Niklaus Ingold; Arnel Joven; Kellen Kurschinski; Alexia Montcrieff; Hazel Morrison; Emilia Musumeci; Sun-Young Park; Clare Parker; Claire Sewell; Paul van Trigt.
More Reports
(these are from Thomas Dixon’s emotionsblog (and are reproduced here by kind permission):
1.
Posted by Jane Mackelworth, a PhD student at the Queen Mary Centre for the History of the Emotions. Her research examines the meaning of home, family, love and belonging for women living in romantic relationships together in the first half of the twentieth century.
The 2012 SSHM conference, recently hosted here at Queen Mary, took over 130 delegates on a giddy tour of some of the most cutting-edge research in the social history of medicine. Attendees were spoilt for choice with lectures and seminars touching upon topics as diverse as the implications of Wittgenstein’s theory in our understanding of pain; the chequered social history of Ritalin; men’s involvement in childbirth; and an imaginary bowler hat.
The conference opened with a dazzling plenary lecture from Joanna Bourke, who drew on the ideas of Wittgenstein and others to explore the nature of pain. Bourke encouraged us to think of pain as a ‘type of event’. Whilst beginning her definition of pain with the individual’s own subjective experience she quickly departed from this to emphasize the cultural and social norms that mediate our meaning and understanding of pain. She was keen to underline that this cultural mediation of pain takes place from birth. It is through language (both verbal and symbolic) that we are able to culturally make sense, not of pain itself, but of our own experience of pain. As always, Bourke was compelling and engaging and she served a strong reminder to us all to keep probing and digging at our everyday understandings of things, of feeling and of emotions.
Following the plenary delegates were offered a wide range of themed panel sessions, excellently pulled together by Professor Colin Jones, Emma Sutton and Jen Wallis. There is simply not the space to touch on all of these and so I want to highlight just one or two key themes. One prevalent theme was gender. Papers explored the ways in which definitions, diseases and ‘disorders’ became associated historically with masculinity or femininity. There were some excellent debates on the impact of feminism, and the role of post feminist theory on issues such as female sexual dysfunction. Katherine Angel in particular engaged with the thorny issue of feminism and post-feminism. She raised the challenge of how best to unpick feminist discourse without accusations of attacking or undermining the whole feminist cause. For example, is FSD purely a cultural patriarchal construct, created by doctors? Where does this leave women who may be experiencing symptoms, which cause them problems in their daily lives? Angel suggests that researchers must examine the fault-line between feminist theory and women’s own experiences, and indicated that this is what she had attempted herself in her recent Penguin book Unmastered: A Book on Desire Most Difficult to Tell.
The importance of gender in the social history of emotions and sexuality was also considered. Lesley Hall posed intriguing questions for historians of sexuality as a result of her work looking at literature in the interwar period. Most historians are familiar with the cultural images of the lesbian in sexology and also in the much quoted Radclyffe Hall’s Well of Loneliness. In these, the lesbian woman is depicted as unfeminine, as mannish. She is seen as having an inverted gender. Yet Hall demonstrates that in interwar British literature close friendships with other women became seen as dangerous or troubling when marked by an excess of emotion, which was seen as a feminine trait. Relationships were marked with a jealous intensity. This hyper-femininity is particularly interesting, as it challenges the familiar cultural depiction of ‘female inverts’ as excessively masculine. I found this particularly interesting in terms of my own research (on love, desire and ideas of home between women in Britain from 1900-1960).
Other scholars explored ways in which men and masculinity, have featured in medical discourse. One theme which emerged was the importance of interrogating historical statistics. For example, women have long been recognized as outnumbering men in being diagnosed with depression and many other mood based disorders. Yet Alison Haggett problematizes this in her compelling research. For example, her extensive oral history study of retired doctors reveals that men’s problems often only came to light when reported by female members of the family. Similarly men often show higher levels of alcohol abuse and this can be considered a way of ‘self-medicating’ for troubling emotions. Haggett’s work, in particular helps highlight the important role that historians can play in effecting change. Her research has a social purpose. She reminds us that, in fact, it is young men who feature highly in suicide statistics. To this end she is involved in policy- making panels to help promote understanding of the complicated relationship between men and what we think of as depression.
The role of men and emotions was also explored by Jade Shepherd in her work looking at the link between jealousy, insanity and crime at Broadmoor prison in the nineteenth century. She shows how, as the nineteenth century progressed, lawyers became less sympathetic to the notion of provocation in cases of murder or sexual assault. As this happened the defence of feelings of jealous passion leading to insanity became invoked much more frequently. This theme was also discussed by Adrian Howe who discussed how in the current day ‘diminished responsibility’ is still used as a defence by men who have murdered their partners. This lead to a discussion of the troubling split, still there in popular culture, which posits reason and emotion at opposite poles.
Yet, in addition to serious debate, there was also room for laughter. Laura King at Warwick is looking at the increasing role of men in childbirth across the twentieth century through oral histories of midwives. She shared an anecdote of the man who sat with his head behind a newspaper throughout his wife’s labour, popping his head up only once to tell his beloved wife ‘not to grunt now’ as she was about to deliver. The midwife said that this image has stayed with her throughout her career with the chap even gaining an imagined bowler hat (which sadly he was not actually wearing at the time).
2. Imbecility, Stress, Panic: Another View of SSHM 2012
Posted on September 24, 2012 by Hazel Croft
Hazel Croft is a PhD student at Birkbeck, University of London, where she is supervised by Professor Joanna Bourke. See:
Attending conferences as a part-time PhD student over the last three years, I have discovered that you can often learn the most from the papers you were the least expecting to or which seemed far removed from your own topic. Yet as someone researching the history of psychiatry in the Second World War, when I pored over the programme ahead of the recent SSHM conference on ‘Emotions, Health and Wellbeing’, I felt here was conference that had been designed for me.
Although the topics at the conference were diverse and wide-ranging, and covered the early modern period to the present, I honed in on the papers on twentieth-century psychiatry, an area of research which less than a decade ago historian of psychiatry Andrew Scull had bemoaned as ‘unexplored territory.’ That is certainly no longer the case – here we were presented with exciting new research on key developments through the century, ranging from patient narratives from the 1920s to the development of psychoactive drugs, and from medical treatments for obesity to the construction of new psychiatric categories, such as ‘panic disorder’. Here I’ve picked just a few of my highlights.
A Patient’s Voice: Historians of psychiatry have often attempted to follow Roy Porter’s famous exhortation to do medical history from the patient’s point of view, but have frustratingly found little trace of the psychiatric patient’s voice in the archives. Hazel Morrison, however, has found a wonderful resource in the surviving archives of the Gartnavel Hospital in Glasgow. Letters, and other snippets of patients’ writings, have been preserved in the case notes of some of the female patients diagnosed as ‘moral imbeciles’ in the 1920s. The writings were kept in the records as examples of the patients’ emotional instability and to confirm the diagnosis of moral imbecility. For Morrison, however, the patients’ words provide a new, and seldom explored, account of the meanings patients attached to their experiences in the hospital.
In a captivating talk, Morrison read from the writings of two young women patients, against a backdrop of an atmospheric photograph of one of the hospital’s wards from the period. Listening to one woman’s articulation of her desires to leave the locked ward and the ways in which she attempted to escape in her imagination, not only added a new dimension to more traditional analyses of medical discourse, but also brought, as Morrison put it, ‘emotion, movement and light’ to the patient’s story. Morrison’s talk was perfectly complemented by Vicky Long’s account of the more recent experiences of long-stay psychiatric patients at the same hospital. Histories of post-war psychiatry have tended to focus on services for those with more minor psychiatric disorders in the process of ‘de-institutionalisation’. Long argued passionately that this history needed to include the experience of those with severe and enduring mental disorders, and gave a fascinating account of attempts to develop psychiatric rehabilitation in the context of government cost-cutting and the low priority assigned to the needs and well-being of long-term patients.
A genealogy of stress: Today ‘stress’ seems ubiquitous. It permeates everyday language, and there can be few of us who have not at some point felt we were suffering from stress, whether at work or home. The development of the concept of stress as psychiatric category was the product of specific set of historical circumstances, argued Chris Millard in his absorbing presentation. Using the example of ‘cry for help’ suicide attempts, he argued that the psychiatric category of stress bridged the gap between psychopathological and social environmental understandings of mental states. Cutting across traditional diagnostic categories, the concept of ‘stress’ and perhaps more pertinently, ‘distress’, enabled those who attempted suicide to be understood as mentally suffering without necessarily being labelled as mentally ill. Millard skilfully linked the construction of the concept of ‘stress’ to the post-war reorganisation of mental health care, the move from the asylum to the community and the consequent shifting boundaries between what was constituted as mental illness/ abnormality and mental health/normality.
The genealogy of the concept of stress was also addressed by Mark Jackson, in his stimulating plenary lecture ‘Secret Places of the Heart: Stress and Emotion in 1922’. Although not claiming the year 1922 was a watershed, Jackson highlighted that this year saw the publication of several important works on stress, emotion and disease, including by Walter Canon, George Crile, the report of the Committee of Enquiry into Shell-Shock, Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, as well as T. S. Eliot’s poem The Wasteland and H.G. Wells’ novel, Secret Places of the Heart. Historians have often characterised the period from the late nineteenth century through to the mid-twentieth century as one which saw a shift from physiological understandings of ‘nerves’ to a focus on the psychology of the mind. Jackson contended that although there were many differences of approach in the 1922 works he cited, they were linked by an understanding of stress that still relied on a physiological model. Like Millard’s earlier paper, Jackson suggested that the reshaping of physiological understandings of stress did not take place until during and after the Second World War. These papers resonated with questions raised in my research about understandings of the ways in which ‘psychological resilience’ was understood by psychiatrists in the Second World War, and have prompted me to probe a little deeper in my analysis of the ways in which wartime mental disorders were conceptualised and diagnosed.
Alive and Kicking: The papers I’ve highlighted were of course only a small part of an extremely wide-ranging conference covering all aspects and time periods of the history of medicine and emotions, including discussions of its relevance and applicability for social policy and public practice. Yet the papers I’ve discussed here highlight what I found most inspiring about this conference – the depth of the analyses offered and the way that connections and dissonances between different contexts and time frames were discussed and debated. Perhaps most impressive of all was the engagement of the audience and the diverse, but always informed, debates following the talks, the buzz of which continued well into the coffee breaks.
Just before I started my PhD three years ago I remember coming across various articles debating the possible demise of the social history of medicine, following first the ‘cultural turn’ and more recently what some have called the ‘neuro-turn’. Whatever the merits of those arguments, on the evidence of this conference, the social history of medicine is alive and kicking and the organizers of the conference are to be congratulated for providing this forum to highlight the vibrancy of the field.
See also:
__________________________________
40th International Congress
World Association for the History of Veterinary Medicine
Utrecht, Netherlands,
22-25 August 2012
[pic]
It has been suggested to me that in academic circles not many people think about vets. Given the prolific and nuanced scholarship surrounding human medicine, and the interest in public health which often crosses disciplinary boundaries, this seems an odd omission from historical enquiry. Yet whilst it is still an emerging field in Britain, The Congress of the World Association for the History of Veterinary Medicine (WAVHM) demonstrated that across the globe there is significant interest in the history of veterinary medicine. 112 delegates from 22 countries, a mixture of both active and retired practitioners and academics working in the field, met from 22-25 August to deliver a packed and impeccably organised schedule.
To mark the 150th anniversary of the Royal Netherlands Veterinary Association, this year's theme was the history of veterinary associations. Examples as diverse as Britain, Germany, Switzerland, Norway, Australia, Romania, Mexico, the US and the Netherlands, demonstrated a trend in associations emerging in the mid-nineteenth century in response to the changing circumstances of their profession. The keynote speech delivered by Wijnart Mijnhardt, head of Utrecht University’s Descartes Centre for the History and Philosophy of the Sciences and Humanities, anticipated many of the other contributions in highlighting the national associations’ role in raising professional standing and standards and gaining legal protection in the face of unqualified practice. Tjeerd Jorna, Past President of the World Veterinary Association, emphasised the role that organisation had played in bringing together these national organisations to understand epizootic diseases and their relationship to public health, as well as veterinary education and training. There were also a number of papers given about student societies and their relationships not only to their national associations but also with the national governments, most notably in Korea in the 1970s and 1980s where they became heavily involved in the anti-dictatorship movement.
The Free Communication strand of the Congress produced some of the most interesting papers. Susan Jones of the University of Minnesota focused on the work of the veterinarian Karl F. Meyer and his role in contributing to the theories of disease “endemnicity” during the early 1900s, emphasising how the plague could be carried by wild rodents as well as humans. This theme of ‘One Health’ was a continual reference point for many of the papers, most explicitly in one given by Abigail Woods of Imperial College London. In detailing the ‘reports of specimens from the lower animals’ submitted by human doctors to the Pathological Society in London, she argued that interest in animal diseases were not confined to vets, but were rather a legitimate pursuit of medical doctors. An intriguing paper given by Jasmine Dum-Tragut of the University of Salzburg revealed a beautiful manuscript which promises to give further insights in late medieval Armenian Horse Medicine. It was a timely reminder of the long lineage of veterinary medicine, but also of the impressive detective skills of those working outside the field of modern history. Given my work on the feminisation of the veterinary profession in Britain, I was also particularly interested in the paper given by Daria Deraga on the role of women in equine medicine in Mexico. Due to both cultural boundaries and the strength required, women have been routinely excluded from professional work with horses in Mexico and whilst this has relaxed in recent years, their own testimony would suggest that women still seem to prefer to ride rather than treat horses. With equine medicine still regarded as one of the most prestigious specialisms in Britain, and one in which women found it particularly difficult to break in to, it was an important reminder to me to think about whether women exclude themselves based on their own preferences, rather than simply being ‘excluded’.
The Congress was an interesting and well-organised event. The cattle bell calling delegates to the hall became a familiar sound throughout the week, and the buzz of the timer ensured the schedule did not overrun; even during an enjoyable evening at the Railway Museum on Thursday night for dinner and dancing, the tour guide ably marshalled his group through the use of his whistle. Being in an environment with not only academics but also practitioners was particularly instructive: Gerhard Weissengruber’s paper on the history of castration of female pigs was accompanied by illustrations which made the informed audience both laugh and wince, and a show reel of veterinary movies produced by the Spanish Ministry of Agriculture between 1909 and 1961 caused ripples of discussion about how priorities and techniques have shifted over the years.
The next congress will be held in 2014 and hosted by the British Veterinary History Society and held at Imperial College London. With current interest in One Health running so high, this has been selected as one theme. This will include the history of zoonotic diseases, comparative medicine, veterinary public health, antimicrobial resistance, the animal as experimental model, veterinary-medical relationships, examples of particular individuals and institutions whose work exemplified a ‘One Health’ approach, and the recent history of the movement for One Health. The second topic is war, animals and the veterinary profession. Potential topics include the use of animals in warfare, their management in health and disease, the war-time roles of vets in military and civilian settings, and the relationship between war and the development of veterinary knowledge and institutions. More details will be posted soon at :
Julie Hipperson (Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, Imperial College London)
___________________________________
Workshop Report
Publishing and Funding for Early Career Historians
Centre for the Social History of Health and Healthcare, Glasgow
27 June 2012
This one-day workshop allowed early career historians of health and medicine to discuss the process of establishing a career in this field with experts from academic, publishing and funding bodies. The topics for discussion were postdoctoral funding, publishing journal articles, turning a doctoral thesis into a monograph, writing an effective book proposal, and submitting a successful postdoctoral application to the Wellcome Trust. It was a well-attended event, with early career historians and doctoral students from all over the British Isles present.
Five speakers gave short papers on their area of expertise, followed by a question and answer session chaired by Professor Peter Kirby (Co-Director of CSHHH, Glasgow). Two papers were given on funding opportunities for early career historians. Professor Jim Mills (University of Strathclyde) gave a dynamic presentation which aimed, as he himself put it, to put the ‘fun’ back into postdoctoral funding; alas for many, the process has been far from fun. His efforts were not completely in vain, however, as he showed what personal and environment building grants are available, and provided a very useful funding timeline that covered the entire period from early career to senior scholar years. Dr Nils Fietje (Wellcome Trust Medical History and Humanities Funding Advisor) gave a very useful paper on how to write a successful funding proposal to the Wellcome Trust, with excellent tips from the ‘inner sanctum’. He guided attendees through the application process from the initial contact stage, through to the dreaded interview. He also encouraged attendees to persevere with the Wellcome Trust if their application is unsuccessful. They should ask the office for feedback, amend and try again.
With regard to publishing, three papers were given by different editorial experts. Professor Bill Luckin (University of Bolton) gave practical advice on writing and submitting journal articles. This ranged from finding the correct journal for a paper, structuring an article, and responding to criticisms from peer-reviewers and editors. As a former editor of Social History of Medicine, Professor Luckin’s advice was thoroughly digested by attendees, all of whom respected his experience in this area. Dr Keir Waddington (University of Cardiff and series editor for the Society for the Social History of Medicine series with Pickering and Chatto), explained how to turn a doctoral thesis into a monograph, and encouraged early career historians to question as to whether their thesis would be suitable either as a book or rather a series of articles. He explained how to write an effective book proposal to Pickering and Chatto, and what aspects of the thesis to revise before submission. Ms Emma Brennan (Manchester University Press, Editorial Director, Commissioning Editor: History) presented a paper on how to write an effective book proposal to the Manchester University Press. She stated that many section editors will not accept a thesis-based book unless it has been broadened chronologically or thematically. Ms Brennan also explained that proposals for textbooks are always welcomed by Manchester, and encouraged the audience to write their own. All speakers were thoroughly questioned by those in attendance and their papers were well received.
The day was rounded-off by a wine reception, kindly sponsored by the Society for the Social History of Medicine, which allowed those in attendance to engage with the speakers further and to establish contacts. This workshop was considered a success by all involved, and would not have been possible without the generous sponsorship of the Centre for the Social History of Health and Healthcare, Historylab+, the Society for the Social History of Medicine, and the Wellcome Trust. More events like this should be organised across the country on an annual basis, as they provide excellent advice and information for those ready to make the transition from doctoral student to the world of work. Special thanks should be given to Dr Janet Greenlees, Dr Annie Tindley and Ms Rhona Blincow (Glasgow Caledonian University) for organising this excellent workshop.
Lynsey Shaw
DPhil Student
University of Oxford
_____________________________________
Learning from Lister
RS/RCSE/Centre for the Humanities and Health, King’s College
London
March 2012
This conference took place at three London institutions with which Joseph Lister was associated, to mark the centenary anniversary of his death. It demonstrated why we should celebrate Lister in the 21st century. Learning from Lister: antisepsis, safer surgery and global health, commenced at the Royal Society, where Lister was President (1895-1900), moved on day-2 to the Royal College of Surgeons, where he was Vice President (1886-88), and moved again on day-3 to King’s College London, where he was Professor of Clinical Surgery (1877-1892). Organised by the Centre for the Humanities and Health at King’s College London (see: ) the meeting attracted a multidisciplinary audience of surgical practitioners, medical academics, pathologists, historians of medicine, infection and medical safety, and over a dozen members of the Lister and Watson Cheyne families. It generated 35 academic papers, presenters ranging from Richard Horton, the editor of The Lancet, Liam Donaldson, the Chairman of the National Patient Safety Agency and former Chief Medical Officer for England, practising surgeons and medical academics, to medical historians and museum professionals. The quality of presentations was excellent and much enthusiasm was apparent from participants, including a group of children from the Lister Community School (situated close to the site of Lister’s family home in East London), who collectively gave a paper about Lister’s life and achievements.
Papers re-mapped the tensions existing between different viewpoints concerning hygiene and antisepsis, and theories of germs contemporary with Lister and re-emphasized many facets of Lister’s research and practice, including his life-long zeal for searching out evidence across a wide medical terrain, and ‘his penchant for seeing the sort of experiment necessary to clear a doubtful point’. (1) Papers also developed fresh lines of enquiry into Lister’s work, scrutinised his insatiable curiosity and pervasive experimentalism across a broad swathe of medical work, which went far beyond surgical practice, leading to work on the microstructure of inflammation, the nature of fermentation processes and the properties and behaviour of micro-organisms, tasks to which Lister brought a distinctive style of thinking as well as an array of innovatory techniques. We also heard papers on his relationship with his patients, his students, his rhetoric, nursing, midwifery, antispesis, and his influence on surgical practices in Canada, Germany, the UK and its Empire, as well as means of commemorating his life. The continuing relevance of much of this work today was apparent in papers on the global burden of sepsis, the over-emphasis on antibiotics in surgery in some quarters, and in the continuing importance of a culture of surgical and hospital safety, and clean-air operating theatres. (full programme: ).
In tandem with the Conference, King’s College Special Collections developed an exhibition of Lister’s life and work spanning student days at University College London, his surgical career in Scotland, culminating in chairs in surgery at Glasgow and Edinburgh, and his time at King’s. The exhibition benefited from borrowings from the Science Museum, the Royal College of Surgeons of England and University College London, and included examples of Lister’s student anatomical drawings (1847-1852), his King’s Inaugural Lecture on 1st October 1877 (manuscript by a member of the audience), and a copy of the testimonial given to Lister by his Glasgow students (1860).
The Royal Society’s Notes and Records has agreed to publish a Lister special issue of the journal, comprising a selection of Conference papers, to appear next year. We would like to thank Dr Sam Alberti, Curator of the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons for help in planning and staging the Conference, as well as the following funders: SSHM, KCL, King’s College Hospital Charity, the Lister Institute and the Lister Hospital, London.
Brian Hurwitz, KCL
Marguerite Dupree, University of Glasgow
1. Cuthbert Dukes, Lord Lister (1827-1912) (London: Leonard Parsons, 1924), p. 177.
_____________________________________
|[pic] |Conferences: Calls for Papers |
7th Annual Southern Regional Conference
for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine (SoHoST)
Mississippi State University
March 22-23 2013
SoHoST provides a welcoming environment for presentations by graduate students and more established scholars in a collegial setting. In the tradition of the Midwest Junto and the Joint Atlantic Seminars in the History of Biology and Medicine, SoHoST seeks to foster community and scholarship in the HoST(M) fields in the South.
Junior faculty, post-docs and graduate students are invited to submit paper proposals on any theme in the history of science, technology, medicine and nursing. Proposals should be no more than 300 words and should include your name, title, affiliation, and contact information.
Submission deadline: December 3rd, 2012.
Proposals and questions should be directed to Jessica Martucci, sohostconference@
For more information and details, visit the conference website at:
_____________________________________
British Psychological Society
History & Philosophy of Psychology Section
Annual Conference 2013
DSM: The History, Theory, and Politics of Diagnosis
University of Surrey, Guildford
25-27 March 2013
Keynote Speaker: Professor Ian Parker
2013 marks the 40-year anniversary of the vote by the members of the American Psychiatric Association to remove ‘homosexuality’ from its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM). 2013 is also the publication date of the fifth edition of the DSM.
To mark this anniversary and this event, the History and Philosophy Section have themed the 2013 conference 'DSM: The History, Theory, and Politics of Diagnosis.' Individual papers or symposia in any area dealing with conceptual and historical issues in Psychology, broadly defined, are invited. The conference is open to independent and professional scholars in all relevant fields, not just Section or British Psychological Society members. A limited number of bursaries will be available to students
who have had their paper accepted for presentation. All submissions (abstracts of 200 words) should be sent via email to
Dr Geoff Bunn: g.bunn@mmu.ac.uk by Friday 14 December 2012.
Further information is available on the Section's website:
_____________________________________
Western Social Science Association
Section on Chronic Disease and Disability
Denver, Colorado at the Grand Hyatt, Denver.
April 10-13 2013
The Section on Chronic Disease and Disability (the precursor of the Society for Disability Studies) encourages research and papers on policies, problems, health issues, cultural representations, and experiences that involve people with disabilities and/or chronic illness. We hope you can join us in 2013 to present your latest work.
The WSSA conference provides an affordable opportunity to present at a peer-reviewed national conference. In addition to scholars, graduate students and junior faculty are particularly welcome because of their fresh perspectives. Mentors of junior faculty and graduate students are encouraged to offer joint papers. In addition, self advocates, community advocates, providers, and government agency personnel are especially welcome to submit proposals. If you can write a decent abstract relating to the presentations, it will be accepted subject to room.
Attached to this email, you will find an Abstract Form Call for Papers.doc and other conference related material (WSSA-Abstract Form Call for Papers 2013.pdf). To look at past or future conferences or explore more about WSSA, please visit .
Your abstract must be received either via e-mail or post-marked regular mail by December 9, 2012. Please include the following information:
Title of Presentation, First author’s name, affiliation, mailing Address, telephone number and email address; Other author’s names, affiliations, and emails, and an abstract that does not exceed 200 words.
Mail or e-mail your abstract to Gary Linn, Steve Brown, or Debra Wilson, at the following addresses:
James G. Linn, Ph.D.
Optimal Solutions in Healthcare & International Development
1406 Beechwood Avenue
Nashville, TN 37212, USA
Phone: 615-415-6943/ email: jlinn87844@
Steven E. Brown, Ph.D.
Center on Disability Studies
University of Hawaii at Manoa
1776 University Ave. (UA-4-6)
Honolulu, HI 96822
e-mail: sebrown@hawaii.edu
Debra Rose Wilson, Ph.D. RN
Middle Tennessee State Univ.
303 Luna Drive
Nashville, TN 37211-4120
debrarosewilson@
_____________________________________
Civilising Bodies: Literature, rhetoric, and image,
1700 to the present day
Centre for Medical History at the University of Exeter
25-26 April 2013
The narratives, discourses, and imagery of bodies and their relationship with civilisation have affected a diverse range of media, from novels, poetry, and political tracts to art and film, and we are eager for submissions examining a wide a range of sources from 1700 to the present day.
We welcome abstracts that examine issues surrounding the themes of bodies and civilisation and their relationship to literature and the arts from researchers of any discipline, including History, Art History, Film Studies, Cultural Studies and Literature.
Topics and themes may include:
• Discourses of progress
• Concepts of savagery and barbarism
• The science of race
• Ailments of civilisation
• Medicine and modernity
• Mental health
• Sexuality and the body
• Issues of class and gender
• The politics of medical language
• Theoretical or speculative pieces
Guest Speakers
• Dr Lesley Hall (Wellcome Library)
• Professor Mark Jackson (University of Exeter)
We invite applicants to submit abstracts of up to 300 words for 20 minute papers (previously unpublished), sent civilisingbodies@ by 14th January 2012 with the subjec of the email as ‘Civilising Bodies abstract’.
Sarah Jones & Jessica Monaghan
Centre for Medical History
University of Exeter
College of Humanities: civilisingbodies@
Visit the website at
_____________________________________
Histories of Medicine
in the Indian Ocean World
Indian Ocean World Centre (IOWC)
McGill University, Montreal, Canada
26-27 April 2013
Organiser: Anna Winterbottom (IOWC, McGill University)
The IOWC is looking for papers that address any aspect of medicine in the region of the Indian Ocean world, including Northeast, East and South Africa; the Middle East, the Indian Ocean islands; South, Southeast and East Asia, in any historical period. The aim of the conference is to interrogate the concept of the Indian Ocean as a "world" using the exchange of medical goods, texts, instruments and ideas as a lens through which to examine how far the region may be regarded as a cultural entity. As well as being an article of trade, medicine is associated with religious, spiritual, and cultural ideas about the body and its relation to the environment. These ideas both govern the acceptance, modification or rejection of medicines and medical ideas, and are altered by them. Medical exchanges can thus be used to provide a cultural perspective on historical events and trends, such as the spread of Islam and other faiths, the movement of migrant and diaspora communities, free and enslaved, and the rise and fall of empires in the region. The conference being multidisciplinary, papers from geography, sociology, anthropology and area studies as well as the history of medicine and science are welcome.
SUBMISSION AND REGISTRATION
Papers should be in English or French. Each paper will be grouped according to theme. Individual authors will have a certain amount of time to present their papers, to be followed by a summary presentation by a discussant during sessions devoted to each theme, followed by general discussion.
A registration fee of $110 CAD ($65 CAD for students) will be charged. The fee for late registration is $130 CAD ($75 CAD for students).
Deadline for submission of abstracts is 14 January 2013.
Deadline for payment of registration fees is 1 March 2013.
Abstracts should be submitted to the following address: iowc@mcgill.ca.
Enquiries may be directed to anna.winterbottom@mail.mcgill.ca.
Methods of payment for registration, locations and accommodation will be available online by the end of September.
_____________________________________
[pic]
4th Global Conference
9-11 May 2013
Prague, Czech Republic
What is pain? What is the meaning of pain? How can we attempt to make sense of it—and should we? Pain is a complex multi-layered, multi-leveled phenomenon. Standard definitions of pain view it primarily in physical terms as being a life-preserving response to negative stimuli in sentient beings. It is something that happens to and/or in parts of the body. It is described in terms of physical qualities, as an object to be observed, assessed, analysed, managed, overcome and/or eliminated.
At the same time, pain is something we experience, endure, live through and, at times, die from. It is something which intrudes into our sense of who we are, our sense of embodiment, our desires and our fears. It becomes the basis of stories, narratives, reports and observations we tell to others. The telling is addressed and attuned to the context of the other – the clinical, the professional, the social.
Pain also sits as a nexus at the centre of innumerable intersecting relationships. In cultures for whom self-inflicted pain is a means of experiencing vitality, pain, body and self are critically linked. This principle recognizably appears in aspects of ritual, of consumption, of sexuality, of psychological pain, of dissociation and body dysmorphia. In so many ways, in sickness and in health, pain is the means by which we navigate the vulnerable, permeable boundary between ourselves and others—the inside and outside of our bodies and minds.
What tools can we bring when grappling with and trying to make sense of, pain? This inter- and transdisciplinary conference provides a forum for inquiry into the vicissitudes of pain: its nature and significance biologically, anthropologically, historically, culturally and socially. More specifically, as a means of probing the boundaries, this conference aims to create a dialogue between disparate as well as overlapping fields of study: the boundaries of disciplines as well as the boundaries of sensation—our suffering, our pleasure, ourselves.
We particularly welcome the perspectives of medical anthropologists, medical humanists, medical historians, professionals, physicians, care-givers, patients, and those exploring the boundaries between creative arts and healing, narrative and medicine.
The following themes are suggested as guides to the formulation of topics for presentations, papers and workshops:
• Pain of the physical body
• Pain and the animal body—sentience and the experiences of pain in animals
• Pain and ability/disability—chronicity; disability. Associated perspectives – social policy, architecture, law
• Pain of the psychological and psychosocial self
• Pain as action/reaction—pain as a weapon. Torture, sadism, self-harm, neglect, abuse and disregard
• Pain in/as dissociation
• Pain as a pleasure principle
• Pain and sexuality studies—sexual identity, transgender and LGBTA, as well as sexual practices
• Pain as Communication – expressing pain, understanding pain, describing pain, pain as metaphor, silences about pain
• Representations and expressions of pain—in art, music, cinema, theatre
• Illness Narratives/Perspectives on pain – patients’ and professionals’
• The nexus of pain—creative and destructive relationships: suffering and affliction; anguish, torment; illness and disease
• Practices, philosophies and dilemmas of overcoming pain– should it be overcome? Personal, professional, cultural, economic and political (macro and micro) perspectives
The Steering Group particularly welcomes the submission of pre-formed panel proposals. Papers will also be considered on any related theme.
What to Send:
300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 4th January 2013. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by Friday 8th March 2013. Abstracts should be submitted simultaneously to both Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats with the following information and in this order:
a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract, f) up to 10 keywords.
E-mails should be entitled: PAIN4 Abstract Submission.
Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using footnotes and any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend.
Organising Chairs
Brandy Schillace: bschillace@inter-
Rob Fisher: pain4@inter-
The conference is part of the Making Sense Of: Hub series of ongoing research and publications projects conferences, run within the Probing the Boundaries domain which aims to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore innovative and challenging routes of intellectual and academic exploration.
All papers accepted for and presented at the conference will be eligible for publication in an ISBN eBook. Selected papers may be developed for publication in a themed hard copy volume.
_____________________________________
1st Global Conference
Probing the Boundaries of Reproduction:
Origins, Bodies, Transitions, Futures
12-14 May 2013
Prague, Czech Republic
This conference seeks to explore the boundaries of reproduction, not merely as physical birth but more broadly as an agent of change, of bodily, sexual, cultural (and even viral) transitions.
From iconic images of the incarnation to depictions of monstrous births, the cultural rituals and mythologies of reproduction continue to fascinate us. Bodies that copulate, bodies that reproduce, bodies that replicate, change, decay—or divide—produce anxiety about the boundaries of self and identity. Reproduction, like evolution, reminds us that we are ever in flux, that change is inevitable. Birth, like death, forces us to acknowledge the limits of our bodies and our ‘selves.’ Additionally, this age of epidemics and viral warfare incites dystopic visions of a future where the effective reproducers are micro-organisms, where humans have been replaced by a replicating other. We seek to explore not only the biological imperative of preserving a species, but also our search for origins, our search for ourselves, our desires, our sexual identities, our gods.
We invite perspectives that explore identity, bodies, boundaries, sexuality and futurity. We likewise invite reflections on whether the nature of our origins tells us anything about who and what we are; whether it lays the ground for understanding what we will become and how our future will unfold. What is the nature of our transition from birth through life to death? Is the end present in the beginning, and does this complicate our notions of evolutions and transitions as forward progress? What does it mean to be pregnant? To impregnate? What concerns are raised about a woman’s body historically, culturally, politically, her ability to feed, grow and harbour new life, as well as her control over her own reproductive destiny? What about bodies that replicate without sex? Cloning? Hermaphroditic reproduction? What about non-human reproduction, about invasive species, about viral epidemics?
We encourage scholarly contributions from inter, multi and transdisciplinary perspectives, from practitioners working in all contexts, professionals, NGOs and those from the voluntary sector. We will entertain submissions drawn from literature, medicine, politics, social history, film, television, graphic novels and manga, from science to science fiction.
Topics may include but are not limited to:
• Historical medical discourses about reproduction
• The monstrosity of birth: monstrous births
• Birth in the dystopic narrative
• Freak(s) – of nature; of technology; accidents of birth
• Religious discourse of reproduction
• Gender and biomedicine
• Queering reproduction
• Motherhood/fatherhood/parenthood
• Technologies of and for the body
• Reproduction and ethical practice
• Managing reproductive bodies: law, health care and medical practice
• The “changing” body: rebirth and metamorphosis
• Invading and possessing bodies
• Eugenics, social biology and inter-racial generation
• Genetic engineering and “nightmare” reproductions
• Science fiction: inter-species reproduction: non-human reproduction
• Viral reproduction and pandemic
What to submit:
The Steering Group particularly welcomes the submission of pre-formed panel proposals. Presentations will also be considered on any related theme. 300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 4th January 2013. 300 word abstracts should be submitted simultaneously to both Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats with the following information and in this order:
a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract, f) up to 10 keywords.
E-mails should be entitled: BR1 Abstract Submission
Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using footnotes and any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend.
Organising Chairs:
Brandy Schillace: bschillace@inter-
Rob Fisher: br1@inter-
The conference is part of the Probing the Boundaries programme of research projects. It aims to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore various discussions which are innovative and exciting. All papers accepted for and presented at the conference will be eligible for publication in an ISBN eBook. Selected papers may be developed for publication in a themed hard copy volume(s).
_____________________________________
AfterShock: Post-traumatic cultures since the Great War.
University of Copenhagen, 22-4 May 2013.
Please see the link below for further details:
Dr Peter Leese
Translating health: Cultures of Prevention
and (Bio)Medicine in Europe after 1945
Mainz, Germany
23-25 May 2013
The central aim of this conference lies in its focus on translation and transfer of knowledge in (bio)medical cultures of prevention. Underlying such approach are proposals stemming from cultural analysis and history of science approaches, which have shifted the view from understanding a one-way dissemination of knowledge production (or of preventive concepts) to one that rather allows for an “integrated” history by stressing the travelling character of knowledge dissemination. Thus, while we are in need of research into comparative studies on cultures of prevention on a national or medical disciplinary level in the second half of the century, the conference specifically calls for considering the transfer and translation of knowledge as a base from which to rethink knowledge dissemination on health and cultures of prevention after WWII. Drawing upon pertinent suggestions to take stock of how we employ analysis of concepts of dissemination and translation to medical history, the conference offers a venue for disconcerting preventive health stories.The conference offers a venue to critically reflect upon research that is producing "readings from the center" which make universalizing claims and do not reflect enough on their own geopolitical and historical specificity, with major shifts taking place in the political, environmental, economic and socio-cultural settings in Europe after WWII. We are thus interested in scholarship that investigates the limitations, ruptures, fault lines or expansion of cultures of prevention when concepts of health have travelled in Europe after 1945. We explicitly ask these considerations to be conducted with sensitivity to the notions of gender, class, race, and age. Considering recent stress on the relevance of these categories with regard to social determinants of health, we think it is timely to return to the advocacy and impact of these categories on the meanings of bodies and prevention. Understanding health and prevention as travelling concepts at the crossroads (entangled histories of) of the history of knowledge, medical history and public health, the conference focuses on the perspective of translation from several interrogating angles.
Programme
Thursday, 23. May 2013
KEYNOTE I
Virginia Berridge (London)
Panel I: Translating health between Political and Social-Cultural Systems
Chair: Hans Georg Hofer (Bonn)
Donna Harsch (Pittsburgh)
Translating Smoke Signals: East and West German Responses to Anglo-American Research on Tobacco and Cancer
Henning Tümmers (Tübingen)
AIDS and AIDS prevention in the two Germanys
Philipp Osten (Heidelberg)
"Who wants to be indoctrinated?" Health education in the East German TV series "Du und Deine Gesundheit"
Sabine Schleiermacher (Berlin)
Translating Prevention: Public Health in a Divided Germany in the 1950s
Christian Sammer, M.A. (Bielefeld)
Where colleagues meet:
How health exhibitions and teaching material fairs served as spaces of knowledge interchange between the GDR and the FRG in the field of health education, 1950-1970
Commentary Ulrike Lindner (Bielefeld)
PANEL II TRANSLATING HEALTH INTO SOCIAL RELATIONS: THE CASE OF GENDER
Chair: Cay-Rüdiger Prüll (Mainz)
Elianne Riska (University of Helsinki)
Masculinity as a risk factor for men's health: Diagnoses and prevention
Jeannette Madarász-Lebenhagen (Mainz)
Gendered approaches to the Prevention of Cardiovascular Diseases in Germany, 1949-2000
Annette Timm (Calgary)
TBA
Commentary Tracy Penny Light (Waterloo)
Friday, 24. May 2013
Panel III: Translating health among experts
Chair: Donna Harsch
Anna Geltzer (Independent Scholar)
Surrogate epistemology and the erosion of Soviet biomedicine
Sophie Meyer (Berlin)
Translating Utopia: Immune RNA research in the GDR around 1970
Beat Bächi (Bern)
Artificial Insemination as a Technology of Prevention and Reproduction: Translations between Veterinary Medicine, Cattle Breeding, Sanitary Institutions, and Population Genetics
Antje Kampf (Mainz)
"Placing age on the map: Translating risk and disease in cancer registers in two Germanys"
Cay-Rüdiger Prüll (Mainz)
„Potentially an Early Leaver“? – Translating disease or how Diabetics became Government Officials
Alexander von Schwerin (Braunschweig)
Crises of Limit Value Policy and Prevention as Immunization of the body
Commentary Christoph Gradmann (Oslo)
Panel IV: TRANSLATING HEALTH BETWEEN LABORATORY AND BENCHSIDE
Chair: Sybilla Nikolow (Bielefeld)
Carsten Timmermann and Michael Worboys (Manchester)
”Translational Medicine”: An introduction to its introduction
Robert G W Kirk (Manchester)
‘A pointless experiment’? Translating from Monkey to Human and Human to Monkey in the development of Constraint Induced Movement Therapy, c.1981-
Stephanie Snow (Manchester)
‘We brought those criteria home and worked them up into our plan’: Translating Knowledge from the Laboratory to the Bedside in the UK and the US
Duncan Wilson (Manchester)
‘Alzheimer’s Epidemiology and “The Natural History of Mental Disorder” in 1960s and 1970s Britain’
Commentary Steve Sturdy (Edinburgh)
Saturday, 25. May 2013
KEYNOTE II
Ilana Löwy (Paris)
Panel V: TRANSLATING HEALTH BETWEEN MEDICAL KNOWLEDGE AND TREATMENT
Chair: Axel Hüntelmann (Mainz)
Gabriele Moser (Heidelberg)
One Language, Different Objectives? Translating (Occupational) Health in Germany in the 1950s
Zsófia Tóth (Budapest)
“Dr Bubó and his clients Drug use and policy in Hungary from the 1970s through the 1990s - Translating health in doctor-patient relationships”
Carsten Timmerman (Manchester)
Treating Lung Cancer, or: how to write the history of a recalcitrant disease
Commentary Martin Lengwiler (Basel)
Round table discussion
Chair: Hans-Georg Hofer
Participants: Steve Sturdy/ Virginia Berridge / Illana Löwy / Ulrike Lindner / Sybilla Nikolow / Martin Lengwiler / Christoph Gradmann
Organisers: Antje Kampf (Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz) , Donna Harsch (Carnegie Mellon University) , Jeannette Madarász-Lebenhagen (Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz)
Scholars interested in attending this conference, should contact the conference office:
translating-health@unimedizin-mainz.de
Canadian Society for the History of Medicine
Canadian Association for the History of Nursing
Annual Conference
University of Victoria
1-3 June 2013
In 2013, a joint CSHM/CAHN annual meeting will be held in conjunction with the Congress for the Social Sciences and Humanities. Abstracts on all topics relating to the history of nursing, medicine, health and health care are welcome.
Please submit your _abstract and one-page c.v._ for consideration by
30 November 2012 to: Kristin Burnett and Jayne Elliott, program co-chairs
kburnett@lakeheadu.ca / jelliott@uottawa.ca
Abstracts must not exceed 350 words. The Committee will notify applicants of its decision by 15 January 2010. /All presenters must be members of one of the societies and, if invited to present at the meeting, must to provide a translation of their abstract for the bilingual program book.
_____________________________________
History of alcohol and drug regulation
London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
21-23 June 2013
PLEASE NOTE CHANGE OF LOCATION
Confirmed keynote speakers:
Professor Virginia Berridge (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine) Professor Paul Gootenberg (State University of New York) Professor James Simpson (Carlos III University of Madrid)
Panel proposals (3 x 20-minute papers) or individual papers (20 minutes) are invited. We will also consider proposals for fringe sessions using non-conventional formats e.g. screenings, debates etc.
Subjects may include (but are not limited to):
- Global drugs trade and the war on drugs
- Crime and policing
- Prohibition
- Tobacco control
- Regulation of drugs in art, film and literature
- Temperance and its influences
- Alcohol licensing and pricing
- Media regulation / advertising and marketing
- Religion and alcohol or drugs
- Dependency and treatment
- Policymaking and the political process
- Alcohol and radical politics / revolutions / social movements
- Use and control of drugs in premodern cultures
- Alcohol and drugs in sport and popular culture
Proposal formats:
Panel sessions: brief abstracts (c. 200 words) of each paper plus a brief statement (c. 200 words) outlining the panel theme and a brief biography of participants.
Single papers: brief abstract (c. 200 words) and brief biography Fringe events: Outline of proposed event (up to 500 words) including proposed content, technical requirements and rationale.
Please send all proposals to undercontrol2013@ Revised deadline for submission: 30 October 2012 For further information see: undercontrol2013.
Dr Alex Mold
Lecturer in History and Reviews Editor, Social History of Medicine Centre for History in Public Health Faculty of Public Health and Policy London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine
15-17 Tavistock Place
London
WC1H 9SH
Tel. + 44 (0)20 7927 2166
lshtm.ac.uk/history
_____________________________________
Australian and New Zealand Society of the History of Medicine
Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia
3-6 July 2013
The Society is a rich mixture of health professionals with an interest in history and professional historians with an interest in medicine and health. The papers presented at the conference will reflect that mixture. The conference will have the broad theme of Antipodean Health and papers are being called for now. See the conference web site for details ().
Each day of the conference will begin with a guest speaker and the guest speakers will lead a panel discussion on an emerging theme of the conference on the last day. As is customary for Society conferences, there will be a witness seminar on the afternoon of the last day. The Menzies School of Health Research, Australia’s leading research centre for Aboriginal and International Health, will be showcased at that seminar.
Darwin is Australia’s northernmost city and the one closest to Asia. It is a vibrant multicultural society. It is a prosperous city benefiting from its rapidly developing resources and tourist industries. The web site details the conference venue and directs you to the range of accommodation available. Darwin can be accessed by air from Singapore and from Darwin most other major destinations in Australia can be reached. Darwin has a tropical savannah climate and July is well into the year’s delightful dry season. It is an excellent time for exploring the many attractions of the Northern Territory.
Brian Reid
Convenor
_____________________________________
Food in History
82nd Anglo-American Conference in Histor1
Institute of Historical Research
Senate House, London
11-12 July 2013
From famine to feast, from grain riots to TV cookery programmes, dieting to domesticity, food features in almost every aspect of human societies since prehistoric times. At its annual summer conference in 2013 the Institute of Historical Research aims to showcase the best of current scholarly writing, research and debate on the subject. Our plenary lecturers include Ken Albala, Susanne Freidberg, Cormac O’Grada and Steven Shapin. The conference will include a publishers’ book fair, policy forum, film screenings and a historic food recreation event. Bursaries will be available enabling postgraduate students to attend.
Panel proposals (three papers each plus chair) and individual paper proposals are invited on topics across the full range of food history from ancient to contemporary times, and from all areas of the world: for example: food technology and regulation; global foods and the globalisation of food trade; migration and culinary culture; restaurants; food religion and status; diet and nutrition; individual commodities; agriculture, distribution and markets; retail, advertising and consumption. Early career researchers are particularly encouraged to participate.
Please send your proposal to Foodinhistory@lon.ac.uk by 15 December 2012. The finalised conference programme will be published in January 2013.
Ms Manjeet Sambi
Events and Publicity Officer
Room 322
Institute of Historical Research
University of London
Senate House (South Block)
Malet Street
LONDON WC1E 7HU
t: +44 (0)20 7862 8756
Email: manjeet.sambi@sas.ac.uk
Visit the website at
_____________________________________
More Manchester panels, calls for papers for
1. Panel on ‘Mathematical facets of measurement, measuring units, measured quantities and their uses’.
@24th The International Congress of History of Science, Technology and Medicine, Monday 22 – Sunday 28 July 2013, Manchester (UK),
Symposium organised by the ERC project SAW – Mathematical Sciences in the Ancient World ,
Endorsed by IASCUD (DHST – IUHPS)
The Symposium organisers now invite proposals for papers on the symposium topics. Please send your abstract (maximal length 2500 characters) in English or French to Karine Chemla, email chemla@univ-paris-diderot.fr , to arrive by Wednesday 31 October 2012.
Symposium abstract
Issues related to measurement are a key concern for the history, philosophy and sociology of the natural and social sciences. However, for mathematics hardly any attention has been devoted to them. Indeed, historians and philosophers of mathematics have dealt with measure, when it was a central notion in a mathematical theory (for instance, in Euclid’s Elements or Lebesgue’s measure theory). Historians and sociologists of mathematics have also addressed the symbolic or political meanings of systems of measuring units, their standardization, and their enactment. However, the knowledge involved in the production of measured quantities and the mathematical operations with these quantities has hardly been treated. In fact, mathematics studies (as in “science
studies”) seem to have shared the tacit assumption that the work with measured quantities was of no interest for the field, since past practitioners immediately converted any numerical value into an “abstract number” and their mathematical operations started when they were working with such “numbers.” Measuring units appear to have been transparent for this research field. The symposium aims at exposing the shortcomings of these assumptions and at exploring the mathematical facets of measurement, measuring units, measured quantities and their uses.
— What were the mathematical facets of the work engaged in the actual design of measuring units and material standards for them? How did these facets connect with other facets of the design of measuring units? Do mathematical texts reflect this work?
— How were measuring standards used? This question implies taking into account several types of actors. Can issues related to measuring standards help us perceive distinct social groups? Can they cast light on the distinct social uses of measuring units and show how different social groups interacted in this respect?
— How did actors measure and use measured quantities? Can we identify the knowledge involved in the activity of measuring and understand how this knowledge was acquired? We also intend to identify strategies devised by actors to deal with the values they obtained. How was the shift between measured quantities and abstract numbers conceptualized and handled in different contexts? Were instruments shaped to work and compute with measured quantities? We hope that such questions allow us to identify, through the variety of their practices, distinct social groups and the kinds of knowledge they shared.
— How can we assess the part played by measurement in the context of various types of activities and how practices of measurement were organized? In this respect tax payment and the organization of labour are as important as business or domestic activities.
We expect that this set of issues can bring mathematics studies closer to an anthropological study of actors of the past in their knowledge activities.
2. Panel on ‘Putting Knowledge to War: Place, Practice and Production in the Great War’.
In putting together this symposium we are interested in new perspectives on the history of science, technology and medicine during the Great War. While the symposium papers will not be comparative in nature, we expect that symposium discussions will take advantage of the opportunity afforded by the congress to draw together a range of speakers focusing on different disciplines, contexts and nations.
Possible topics under the general scheme of place, practice and production might include:
• The proliferation of research and development institutions.
• How wartime concerns shaped sites of scientific work, including laboratories, universities and learned societies.
• The transformation in the boundaries of scientific expertise, and the places it was brought to bear.
• The use and adaptation of scientific knowledge for national war efforts.
• The social history of the wartime scientific workforce.
• How wartime concerns shaped scientific practices.
• Models and cultures of research and development devised (and revised) during wartime.
• Locally contingent definitions of pure and applied science.
• How actors sought to legitimate ideas of science during wartime.
Please send abstracts (of up to 2500 characters) or queries to Don Leggett (D.W.Leggett@Kent.ac.uk) or Roy MacLeod (Roy.MacLeod@Sydney.edu.au). The deadline is 30 September.
______________________________________
Making love, making gender, making babies in the 1950s,
1960s and 1970s
CRASSH, Alison Richard Building,
7 West Road, Cambridge CB3 9DT
6-7 September 2013
By the end of the twentieth century, a combination of profound social changes and major techno-scientific innovations had reorganized ‘the sexual field’ into three separate systems. The early twentieth century distinction between sexual pleasure and reproduction was supplemented by one between biological ‘sex’ and social ‘gender’, in which the figures of ‘the transsexual’ and ‘transgender’ were central, with the category of ‘gender’ eventually peeling off to have an entirely different, surprising and important historical destiny. In retrospect, therefore, we can distinguish the ‘pleasure-system’, the ‘gender-identity system’ and the ‘reproductive system’ as increasingly separate but competing and interacting scientific research fields with major technologies developed within them, linking closely to new social categories and modes of living; these three systems emerged across the twentieth century through the interaction of several different historical processes, separate but interlinked, and each with its own pace and rhythm. While the phrase ‘Sexual Revolution’ once evoked changes in sexual mores and contraceptive practices of the 1960s and after, this well-known ‘revolution’ may have been part of a larger revolution in which an entirely new configuration of the pleasure-, gender- and reproductive-systems emerged.
This conference will allow a comparison of the contemporaneous political and ethical debates over medical innovations in ‘sex’, ‘gender’ and assisted conception.
Email: conferences@crassh.cam.ac.uk
______________________________________
Accidents and Emergencies:
Risk, Welfare and Safety in Europe
and North America, c. 1750-2000
Oxford Brookes University
9, 10 & 11 September 2013
(supported by the University of Portsmouth)
Keynote speakers
Professor Bill Luckin (University of Bolton, UK) Dr Arwen Mohun (University of Delaware, USA)
Context and aims
We live in a society obsessed with risk and safety. Via a medley of state-related and commercial agencies, we insure ourselves against the possibility of death, ill-health, accident, theft and unemployment, subjecting every facet of our lives to the calculus of risk. Meanwhile, a battery of signs, leaflets, manuals and adverts spread the message of ‘health and safety’, reminding us of the dangers lurking in our everyday actions.
Equally, notions of risk and safety go to the heart of our sense of collective welfare, and the complex relations of self, society and the State, and public and private agency. Indeed, for some sociologists, we live in a ‘risk society’, premised on the ‘reflexive’ processing of information, the prevention of the accidental and the unexpected, and the anxious desire to predict – even control – the future.
The aim of this conference is to take stock of the present by focussing on modern Europe and North America from roughly 1750 onwards. It welcomes:
· historians from all sub-fields (social, medical, cultural, etc.) · scholars from other disciplines such as sociology and cultural studies.
Risk, welfare and safety have long been sites of historical inquiry.
This conference takes this literature as its point of departure, and encourages both general and trans-national appraisals of the history and nature of modern ‘risk societies’, as well as accounts which focus on particular technologies, practices and discourses.
In sum, the aim of ‘Accidents and Emergencies’ is to:
· rethink the history of risk, welfare and safety; · encourage a more integrated approach to their empirical study and conceptualisation; · open up new historical and sociological perspectives through which we might better grasp the present.
Format and themes
We intend that the papers should be pre-circulated, in a draft form of around 5,000 words (though we appreciate this will not be possible in all cases).
Papers – conceptual and empirical – are invited which address one or more of the following themes:
1. Conceptualising and historicising ‘risk society’: the work of Beck, Giddens, Luhmann and Ewald – and others 2. The politics of risk and solidarity: liberalism, social democracy and neo-liberalism 3. Selling risk and safety: mixed economies of welfare, and the insurance and safety industries 4. Statistics, temporality and the calculus of risk: histories of actuarial probability 5. Industrial risks (i): pollution and the environment 6. Industrial risks (ii): technology and workplace accidents 7. Shock, trauma and sensation: representing accidents and emergencies 8. Logistics of risk and safety: emergency services and technologies 9. Preventing accidents (i): surveillance, inspection and maintenance 10. Preventing accidents (ii): health and safety education 11. Transnational risks and exchanges: policies, innovations and institutions 12. Key words: meanings of ‘safety’, ‘risk’, ‘probability’ and ‘accident’ in particular contexts Over the three days we would like speakers to raise the salient issues of their papers in order to leave as much time as possible for discussion and feedback. The conference language will be English.
We intend to publish a selection of the papers in the form of an edited volume or special issue of a journal.
Contacts
Expressions of interest to: mike.esbester@port.ac.uk.
These should include:
· a brief ‘bio’ (detailing institution, publications, research interests, etc.)
· a proposal/abstract (of roughly 300 words), indicating the theme or
themes for which you wish to be considered.
The deadline for the submission of abstracts is 31 January 2013.
Alternatively, if you are interested in attending as a delegate please
email to reserve a place.
Conference organisation enquiries: tcrook@brookes.ac.uk
Organisers: Dr Tom Crook (Oxford Brookes University) and Dr Mike
Esbester (University of Portsmouth).
_____________________________________
Medical History of WWII
Center of History and Heritage
Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences
Army Medical Department Museum
San Antonio, Texas
March 2014
|Deadline 9/1/2013 | |
In March 2014, the Army Medical Department will be co-sponsoring a conference on the medical history of WWII. Presentations on all facets of medicine and the war are welcome, including consideration of the repercussions of the war on the practice of medicine, medicine in various campaigns, effects on the home front, and related topics.
Presentations should be 30 minutes long, and two-paper panels are welcome.
Further enquiries please email:
Dr Sanders Marble, Office of Medical History, US Army
sanders.marble@us.army.mil
Visit the website at
____________________________________
|[pic] |Conference AnnouncementS |
1st Global Conference
Body Horror: Contagion, Mutation, Transformation
Sydney, Australia
11-13 February 2013
The body. My body. This thing which is with me all day, every day, from my birth to my death. This flesh which is me. My intimate life-long friend.
In our day-to-day living we have no reason to question or to doubt our bodies. Until the bond of trust is shaken or broken. Something happens. To my body. Something inside: going wrong. A betrayal: a turning against: an unwelcome and unwanted change. From which there is no escape, no running away, nowhere to hide. This is happening to me.
This inter- and transdisciplinary forum aims to explore the many layers and levels of body horror, and the ways in which bodies can become horrifying. Given the diversity and scope of this theme we welcome
~ papers, panels, workshops, reports
~ case studies
~ performance pieces; dramatic readings; poetic renditions; short stories; creative writings
~ works of art; works of music
Key aspects for discussion will include, but not be limited to:
Biological horror. Organic horror
Betrayal; the body turns against you
Something inside; no escape
Change and transformation: the role of time
Pain, suffering, agony, the scream, contortion
mutation and mutilation
Obscene bodies
Disease. Infection, contagion, invasion, virus, the parasite Surgery, cosmetic surgery, body sculpture; huffing, tattooing, piercing; body art
Pleasure, perversion, fetish
Deformity; disability, affliction
Hybridity
Violence, brutality, torture
Rape
Innards guts, organs
Dismemberment; instruments of the body’s destruction
Wounded bodies, dying bodies
More details from Organising Chair, Rob Fisher: bh1@inter-
The conference is part of the ‘At the Interface’ programme of research projects. It aims to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore various discussions which are innovative and exciting.
For further details of the conference, please visit:
Please note: Inter- is a not-for-profit network and we are not in a position to be able to assist with conference travel or subsistence.
Priory House
149B Wroslyn Road
Freeland, Oxfordshire OX29 8HR
United Kingdom
Tel: +44 (0)1993 882087
Fax: +44 (0)870 4601132
Email: bh1@inter-
Visit the website at
_____________________________________
Scientiae 2013: Emergent knowledge practices of the early-modern period (ca. 1450-1750)
Warwick University, UK
18-20 April 2013
Building on the success of Scientiae 2012 (Simon Fraser University, Vancouver) which brought together over 100 scholars from around the globe, the premise of this new conference is that knowledge during the period of the Scientific Revolution was inherently interdisciplinary, involving complex mixtures of fields and objects that had not yet been separated into their modern "scientific" hierarchies. As such our approach needs to be equally wide-ranging, involving Biblical exegesis, art theory, logic, and literary humanism; as well as natural philosophy, alchemy, occult practices, and trade knowledge. Scientiae is for scholars working in any area of early-modern intellectual culture, with the emergence of modern natural science serving as a general point of reference. The conference offers a forum both for the sharing of research and the sparking of new investigations, and is open to scholars of all levels.
Topics and questions may include, but are by no means limited to:
-- Theological origins and implications of the new science
-- Nature and scripture: which interprets which?
-- What do images contribute to our understanding of early modern knowledge?
-- Genealogies of "reason", "utility", and/or "knowledge"
-- Humanism and the scientific revolution
-- Paracelsianism, Neoplatonism, alchemy: where are we now?
-- What were the relations between the new science and magic and demonology?
-- Health and medicine: separable economies?
-- Morality and the natural world: an on-going relationship?
-- Period conceptions and practices of intellectual property
-- Poetics and science: habits of thought?
-- Renaissance philosophy and the development of a "new" cosmology and anthropology.
-- Information and knowledge: a clear divide?
-- Science and Medicine: Global Knowledges?
-- Early-modern literature and the new knowledge: friends, or foes?
-- Advances or reversals of period logic/dialectic The keynote speakers will be Peter Dear (Professor of the History of Science at Cornell University) and Stephen Clucas (Reader in Early-Modern Intellectual History at Birkbeck, University of London).
Other prominent speakers expected include: Constance Blackwell, Isabelle Charmantier, Judy Hayden, Kevin Killeen, Sachiko Kusukawa, Claire Preston, Jennifer Rampling, Anna Marie Roos
If you have any questions please contact the conference convenor David Beck- D.C.Beck@warwick.ac.uk
David Beck, Lecturer, History Department, University of Warwick Network Administrator, Early Modern Forum; Twitter @EModForum; Facebook - EMForum)
____________________________________
Space and Childhood in History
Society for the History of Children and Youth
6th Biennial Conference
The University of Nottingham
25- 27 June 2013
Direct queries to the co-chairs of the program committee: James Marten, Marquette University james.marten@marquette.edu, Marta Gutman, City College of New York mgutman@ccny.cuny.edu
French political philosopher Henri Lefebvre posits that for any person, including children and youth, there is a dynamic rather than a static relationship between a physical place, its social make-up, and childhood as an ideal or imagined condition. The production of space, as Lefebvre famously insisted, happens in the physical world, the social world, and the imagined world. Scholars are asked to investigate space not just as a backdrop for the lived experiences of children but as a tangible, social, and discursive construction, which shapes and is shaped by the lives and experiences of children.
Panel suggestions are closed but email the organisers to find out (November 2012) what panels are running and to see if your paper will fit.
_____________________________________
VariAbilit(ies)
The History of Disability (all periods)
Emory University, USA,
4-7 July 2013
Paul Kelleher and Chris Mounsey, are running a small but wide ranging, interdisciplinary academic conference on the History of Disability: VariAbilit(ies). It will focus on the body and how it was treated and represented throughout history.
It is no longer useful to distinguish people by the binary opposition able-bodied/disabled. We now recognize people on a continuum of ability on which no-one is entirely able-bodied or entirely disabled. But was it always true? And if it is true now, does this require that we reconsider the use of binary oppositions when understanding people and their capabilities?
Subject areas will include:
• Literary representations
• The Asylum
• The History of Poor Relief
• Gender/ Sexuality
• Disability and Aesthetics
• Disability and Race
• And anything else you are interested in
For further information please contact:
Chris Mounsey
University of Winchester
chris.mounsey@winchester.ac.uk
Paul Kelleher
Emory University
pkelleh@emory.edu
You can also find more details on our Facebook page
()
and follow us on Twitter
().
_____________________________________
Commemorating the disabled soldier: Comparative approaches to the
history of war, disability
and remembrance, 1914-1940
International conference
Ypres, Belgium,
4-6 November 2013 and
special issue First World War Studies
Organized/edited by Prof. Pieter Verstraete (KU Leuven), Dr. Martina Salvante (Trinity College Dublin) & Prof. Julie Anderson (University of Kent) – with the financial support of the Province West-Flanders, the In Flanders Fields Museum, the Centre d’Histoire des Sociétés, des Sciences et des Conflits & the Fund for Scientific Research Flanders.
2014 will mark 100 years since the outbreak of the Great War. On the occasion of this important anniversary the Centre for the History of Education of the KU Leuven (Belgium), the Centre for War Studies of Trinity College Dublin (Ireland) and the Centre for the History of Medicine of the University of Kent (United Kingdom) propose to organize an international conference aimed at reflecting on the impact of that specific event on soldiers’ bodies and minds. Millions of men all over the globe, in fact, returned home limbless, sightless, deaf, disfigured or mentally distressed.
In the last decades disability history has attracted an increasing interest in the scholarly community, thus becoming a well-established field, which has been highlighting, among others, the experiences of impaired people, medical and rehabilitative techniques, charitable institutions and welfare measures, public reception and private emotions. The First World War has somehow represented a watershed both in the visibility and the treatment of impairment and disablement owing to the massive amount of men who suffered physical injuries or mental disorder symptoms as a consequence of the conflict. These men happened, therefore, to embody the destructiveness of war and performed as human and living ‘sites of memory’. Because of their heralded heroism in the battlefields, shattered soldiers, however, were commonly considered worthy and in need of an (economic and medical) assistance that disabled civilians had not experienced beforehand. In spite of such considerations and of the yet numerous studies focusing on the interrelation between war and disablement (Julie Anderson, Joanna Burke, Ana Carden-Coyne, Deborah Cohen, David Gerber, Sabine Kienitz, Marina Larsson just to mention few), there has never been organized so far an international conference dealing exclusively with such a topic in an historical and comparative perspective.
Disabled veterans have always been involved in the commemorations of the Great War, but they have never been the focal point of any celebration. That is why we believe that the upcoming centenary of 2014 may provide us with an important opportunity to reflect upon the impact of war on the individual lives of those (and their families) who came back impaired, as well as on the institutions (charities, governmental agencies, ministries, associations, etc.) taking charge of their care and assistance during and after the conflict. Hence, we’d like to explore the question of the political, social, medical and cultural legacies of war disability in postwar society. The conference as well as the special issue will be specifically interested in strengthening comparative and transnational approaches. Contributions on rather unknown case studies and geographical/national areas are especially welcomed.
The gathering of international scholars coming from different countries would be, therefore, the occasion for in-depth discussions, reviews of previous studies, and outlining of future research perspectives. Potential topics might include, but are not limited to: medicine/surgery and treatment, rehabilitation and vocational retraining, associations and self-advocacy, charities and care-giving, war pensions, experience and memory, visual and textual representation (of the disabled themselves), suffering and pain, the place and function of the disabled body at inter-war commemorative activities, the international shaping of a global discourse on the mutilated body, the influence of war-related discourse on the over-all care for the disabled in general etc. Although the main conference will be focused on the First World War the call for papers, however, also is open for contributions that deal with the impact of subsequent conflicts on the soldier’s body and mind.
Besides the organization of an international conference which will be held on November 4th-6th 2013 the organizers also envisage first of all a special issue in the International Journal of the Society for First World War Studies. The Editor-in-chief already has approved the idea and the issue would be published in 2014. Furthermore, the organizers aim at publishing a book that would gather some/all of the papers presented at the conference. That would be the first book presenting a wide array of (trans)national cases on the subject of disability and the Great War, by getting together, thus, diverse hypotheses, methodologies and sources; In this way it would make European scholars as well as European citizens aware of the existence of disabled soldiers from the Great War and their particular place in the upcoming centennial celebration.
Practical & financial information
We are very pleased to announce that we will be able to accept and reimburse 13 scholars a sum of maximum 500 euro’s to cover their travel expenses to and from Ypres/Belgium where the conference will be held. Besides that the organizational committee will also pay for the accommodation (2 nights). Included also is a visit to the world famous and recently renovated In Flanders Fields Museum as well as a guided tour on the second day to the Western front line.
Please do also note that after the international conference “Commemorating the disabled soldier” will be ended, there will be another conference organized dealing especially with the relation between medicine and the Great War. Closely linked to this event two exhibitions will take place in Ghent and Ypres on the history of psychiatry and medicine in relation to the Great War. Unfortunately we will not be able to pay for additional nights.
Timeline & deadlines
Submission of abstract and short CV: December 1st 2012 – Abstract=600 words/CV=Maximum 20 lines
Letter of acceptance (abstract): January 2013
First draft of the manuscript: June 1st 2013
Comments by the editors: September 1st 2013
Conference at Ypres: November 4th-6th 2013
Second draft of the manuscript: December 1st 2013
Final manuscript for First World War Studies: February 1st 2014
Submission of abstracts
Abstracts containing no more than 600 words and a CV of no more than 20 lines should be sent to Pieter.verstraete@ppw.kuleuven.be before December 1st 2012.
Looking forward to some thought-provoking contributions as well as fruitful discussion.
The editorial committee,
Pieter Verstraete, Martina Salvante & Julie Anderson
_____________________________________
|[pic] |SYMPOSIUM, WORKSHOP, Seminar & AnnouncementS |
Workshop
Generation and Reproduction
in Medieval Europe
King’s College, Cambridge
8 December 2012
(organisers: Debby Banham, Peter Jones)
For programme and registration details:
Conception, pregnancy, childbirth, and the raising of healthy children (or animals) were high-risk endeavours in the Middle Ages, the focus of many hopes and anxieties. These emotions found expression in prayers and charms, in private letters, in hagiography and miracle accounts, in records of ecclesiastical and secular courts, as well as in advice literature and medical writings. Themes to do with generation and reproduction were also at the centre of imaginative writings, notably romance and fable, and of medieval art. The range of evidence available for historical investigation is thus very wide, though the private experiences of those involved are as always hard to plumb.
This meeting will explore the beliefs and practices that surrounded generation and reproduction and the frames of understanding that underlay these. One focus of interest is the tension between normative discourse, texts that tell people how they should believe and act, and other discourses that are resistant to or circumvent the injunctions of law, dogma and discipline. Another is the extent to which the development of scholastic methods of analysis in the medieval universities, as applied to philosophical issues in generation and reproduction, produced new interpretations of gender roles in conception, of ensoulment in the developing child, and of the responsibilities of church and state in promoting robust children and population numbers. A third area of interest is the extent to which generation and reproduction came to be thought of as health issues at all in the Middle Ages. How far did concepts of disease and disability seem to apply to mothers, fathers and children?
NB: on 7 December 2012 there will be a public lecture by Dr Marianne Elsakkers at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Free School Lane, Cambridge, at 5.30pm. Her title is: ‘What the small print in the early medieval penitentials tells us about abortion’. No registration required for this lecture.
_____________________________________
Symposium
Infertility in History, Science and Culture
(Cardiff and Edinburgh Universities)
University of Edinburgh
4-5 July 2013
The symposium is co-convened by Gayle Davis (University of Edinburgh) and Tracey Loughran (Cardiff University). An edited collection based on the presented papers is planned.
Proposals are invited that address the themes of the conference in any historical period and geographical context. Abstracts of c.250 words, for papers of 20-30 minutes, plus speaker contact details should be sent to LoughranTL@cardiff.ac.uk by 25 January 2013.
Context
The infertile woman is a familiar figure in popular culture. Soap operas dramatise the tragedy of infertility, right-wing tabloids threaten career women with the horrors of involuntary childlessness, and the news media greets each new breakthrough in reproductive technology with a strange combination of celebration and dread at the potential Brave New World we are sleep-walking towards. This portrayal of a realm where science fiction threatens to spill over into fact adds to our sense of infertility as a peculiarly modern condition. Yet there is a longer history of involuntary childlessness – a history which stretches back to the Book of Genesis and beyond – as well as many different potential experiences of infertility according to nation, class, gender, and race.
Aims
This symposium will explore the history of infertility, and the place of infertility in science and culture. Our primary focus is historical, but we welcome contributions from scholars in different disciplines and employing a range of approaches – social scientific, literary, feminist, psychological, and legal. We aim to bring together researchers working on this fascinating and under-explored field in order to better understand historical and contemporary representations and experiences of infertility across different cultures and from different perspectives. Potential topics for papers include, but are not limited to:
- the role of gender, class and race in shaping experiences and representations of infertility;
- individual, familial, and social contexts of infertility;
- infertility as a bodily and/or psychological experience;
- heterosexuality, homosexuality, and involuntary childlessness;
- reproductive science and access to reproductive technologies;
- the interplay of medical, scientific, and cultural understandings of infertility;
- the role of politics, law, and religion in shaping experiences of and attitudes towards infertility;
- changing experiences of infertility across time and space, including comparative histories;
- the relation of perceptions of infertility to beliefs about fertility control, the constitution and social role of the family, and sexuality;
- different disciplinary approaches to infertility.
|[pic] |POSTGRADUATE EVENTS |
The British Society for the History of Science Postgraduate Conference 2013
University of Kent, Canterbury
3 - 5 January 2013
This annual 3-day event gives postgraduates in the history of science, technology and medicine a chance to get to know each other and to present their work to a wider audience. The conference is organised by and for postgraduates, aiming to offer the opportunity of presenting a fifteen minute paper in a supportive environment. Our aim is for postgraduates to convene from a wide range of universities and disciplines to discuss our common interests, share experiences and network in a friendly and receptive environment.
Programme
The programme will see parallel sessions of papers spanning all three days. There will be a drinks reception on Thursday evening and a conference dinner on Friday evening. Additional sessions to be confirmed!
Venue and Travel
The University of Kent is located in South-East England, close to the M2 and the A28. Those travelling via rail can travel to either Canterbury West via London St Pancras International or London Charring Cross or Canterbury East via London Victoria (Canterbury West is slightly closer to the University, Canterbury East is slightly more convenient for the accommodation). For those from further afield, any of the London airports have excellent rail links, but London Gatwick probably involves the shortest journey.
Conference Fees
We expect the conference fee to be in the region of £20 (this will be confirmed when registration opens), and all delegates will be warmly invited to a formal dinner on Friday 4th January, which is an additional £30. Hotel accommodation on Thursday and Friday in the local hotel Best Western Abbotts Barton will be available on a first-come, first-served basis at a rate (subsidised by the BSHS) of between £20 and £32.50 per night. So the full conference cost will be around £105.
______________________________________
|[pic] |Lectures |
Lecture series
Here is the link to an AMAZING series of 10 (!) invited lectures throughout this year that our Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (CMRS) will do all focused on disability in the medieval and renaissance periods
_____________________________________
|[pic] |Calls for articles |
[pic]
Histories of Accounting and the Hospital
Hospitals are not only bastions of modern medicine but also major sites of economic activity. Together with other health services, they now account for more than 10 per cent of GDP in many developed countries. Amid increasing concerns about the cost of health services, the hospital has become a major focus of accounting research. Much emphasis has been placed on studying accounting practices in the contemporary hospital setting. The historical development of such practices remains substantially unexplored. A forthcoming special issue of Accounting History Review will focus on the history of hospital accounting to stimulate further research in this emerging field.
The special issue will adopt wide parameters in relation to the period and location studied. To encourage innovative and interdisciplinary research on hospital accounting papers drawing on a range of methodological and theoretical approaches will be considered and a definition of accounting will be adopted which extends beyond the mere recording of financial transactions. Moreover, reflecting historical notions of the hospital as a place offering moral and spiritual support as well as medical treatment, we encourage submissions focusing on institutions concerned with broader social functions such as the care of the poor and needy, both in terms of their physical and spiritual wellbeing.
Topics for the special issue may include, but are not limited to, historical aspects of the following:
▪ Accounting and the hospital economy
▪ Accounting for hospital organisation at the regional and/or national level
▪ Accounting for medical practice and accounting by medical and allied professionals
▪ Accounting in small or cottage hospitals
▪ Accounting in the pre-modern hospital
▪ Hospital accounting in its social and institutional contexts
▪ The state and hospital accounting
▪ Performance measurement in the hospital setting
▪ Issues relating to auditing and accountability in the hospital
▪ The relationship between financial and medical knowledge in the hospital
▪ The professionalisation of hospital accountants, and organisations of healthcare accounting and finance professionals
The submission deadline is 28th of February 2014, but earlier submissions are welcomed. Manuscripts should be sent electronically to the guest editors, Florian Gebreiter (f.gebreiter1@aston.ac.uk) and William Jackson (w.jackson@hw.ac.uk). Submissions should follow the style guidelines of Accounting History Review and will be subject to double-blind review. Potential contributors are encouraged to contact the guest editors at their earliest convenience.
Dr. Bill Jackson
Lecturer in Accountancy
Department of Accountancy, Economics & Finance, School of Management & Languages Heriot-Watt University Edinburgh.
[pic]
Liverpool City Hospital's account book - bearing the name of one E. Rigby.
______________________________________
|[pic] |Awards/Fellowships/stude-ntships |
Vanderbilt University
Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities
2013-2014 William S. Vaughn
Visiting Fellowship
[pic]
One year residential research fellowship for a scholar interested in participating in a broadly interdisciplinary seminar entitled “Diagnosis in Context: Culture, Politics, and the Construction of Meaning.” The fellowship pays a stipend of up to $50,000. The seminar is co-directed by Vanderbilt University faculty members Vanessa Beasley (Communication Studies) and Arleen Tuchman (History).
Applications must be submitted by January 15, 2013. For more information, see our website: .
_____________________________________
American Association for the History of Nursing
Grants for Historical Research
The American Association for the History of Nursing, Inc (AAHN) initiated a grant program in 2008. The H 15 Grant, for new researchers; and the H 31 Pre-doctoral Research Grant, designed to encourage and support graduate training and historical research at the Master's and Doctoral levels. The deadline for all Grants is April 1. Only AAHN members are eligible to apply for these grants.
H 15 Grant
Directions For Applicants
The American Association for the History of Nursing is offering a research grant of $3000 for historical research. (Indirect costs of 8% are also
available) Applicants must be members of AAHN and hold the doctorate. They may be faculty members or independent researchers. It is expected that the research and new materials produced by the award winner will help ensure the growth of scholarly work focused on the history of nursing.
Deadline for Submission of applications: April 1
Date of Award: June 1
Application
A copy of the proposal should be sent by email to AAHN Headquarters. Only word or pdf documents will be accepted.
The application should not exceed 6 pages double-spaced, excluding references, curriculum vitae and writing sample. The outline below specifies the information which should be included in your application.
The form and length of your application should be adapted to the research that you propose to do. If the study involves sources requiring approval by an Institutional Review Board protecting human subjects, funds will not be awarded until documentation is received.
Aims:
Begin with a concise statement of the aims of the research that you wish to do and relate these aims to your own long term historical research goals.
Background Significance:
Give a brief background of your research problem. This will enable reviewers to place your proposal within the context of the present state of historical knowledge about the study area. Explain the importance you expect your results to have. Please be sure to cite the published work of others which relates to your topic.
Previous Work:
Describe briefly any work that you have done in this area or in closely related studies. Cite your publications, if any. Be Sure to Enclose a Sample of Your Writing Whether Published or Unpublished.
Methods:
Explain how you intend to approach your study and, where appropriate, identify the collections or archives you will use to achieve your aims.
Facilities:
Describe existing resources at your disposal which will help you in carrying out this project.
Other research support:
Include an overview of your existing and pending research support.
Budget:
Outline and itemize the budget detailing the ways you will use the award and briefly justify each item. For example, travel, purchase of equipment, copying, or salary support may be requested.
Curriculum Vitae:
Please include a resume of professional accomplishments including education, research publications and other publications relevant to the project you propose.
Process of Review
Each application will be reviewed by three members of the AAHN Grant Review Panel. The Panel will make its decision about the award by May 15 and the recipient will be notified by June 1 of each year.
Funding will start July 1 of the grant year and last for one year. A no-cost extension may be granted on request. Grantees will be expected to submit a report on research when the project is completed.
Publications arising from AAHN funded research should acknowledge funding from AAHN. For example: Research for this work was funded by the American association for the History of Nursing.
H 31 Pre-doctoral Research Grant
This grant is designed to encourage and support graduate training and historical research at the Masters and Doctoral levels. The grant will be $2,000.
Eligibility Criteria
Proposals will focus on a significant question in the history of nursing.
The student will be enrolled in an accredited masters program or doctoral program.
The student will be a member of AAHN.
The research advisor will be doctorally prepared with scholarly activity in the field of nursing history and prior experience in guidance of research training.
Application: Form
Title Page
Narrative (four [4] double-spaced pages, maximum).
Include the following:
Purpose and focus of the study.
Secondary source background and primary source availability.
Any additional relevant facilities and resources.
Significance of the study.
Attachments
Curriculum vitae of the student.
Letter of support from advisor.
A copy of the proposal should be sent by email to AAHN Headquarters. Only word or pdf documents will be accepted.
The Award
Selection criteria include the scholarly merit of the proposal, consideration of the student's preparation for this study, the advisor's qualifications for guiding the study and the project's potential for contributing to scholarship in the field of nursing history.
If the study involves sources requiring approval by an Institutional Review Board protecting human subjects, funds will not be awarded until documentation is received.
Funds will be awarded directly to the student.
Publications arising from the research partially supported by AAHN should acknowledge this source of support.
Review
The Research Review Panel will review proposals.
Applications will be reviewed and recipients and other applicants will be notified of the selection by early summer.
Publications
Publications arising from the research partially supported by AAHN should acknowledge this source of support.
The proposal of the study selected for funding is not considered confidential.
The deadline for all Grants is April 1
AAHN
10200 W. 44th Avenue, Suite 304
Wheat Ridge, CO 80033
Phone: (303) 422-2685
Fax: (303) 422-8894
Email: aahn@
_____________________________________
The Lloyd Library and Museum (LLM)
Inaugural Curtis G. Lloyd Research Fellowship
2013-14
Named after the youngest Lloyd brother of Lloyd Brothers, Pharmacists, Inc. (1885-1936), the fellowship honors the work of Curtis Gates, pharmacist, botanist, and mycologist, in building the collections of LLM as Chief Acquisitions Officer. The fellowship is for a period of one to three months, with a possible extension of up to three months for work that is primarily based on resources within LLM collections. Research topics can include, but are not limited to the following:
• Medicinal Botany
• Organic/Botanical/Medicinal Chemistry
• Natural History
• Early travel and exploration
• Ethnobotany
• History of Science, Medicine, and Pharmacy
• Pharmacognosy/Natural Product Development
• Visual Arts
• Cultural, Ethnic, and Social history
• Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM)
Successful candidates will hold at minimum a Bachelor's Degree or equivalent. Fellows will be expected to work at LLM at least two full days per week for the duration of their fellowship. Applicants must be citizens of the United States or be a U.S. lawful permanent resident.
The stipend is $2,500.00 per month for the duration of the fellowship.
Any expenses incurred beyond the amount of the fellowship are the responsibility of the Fellow.
LLM collections are largely unparalleled in depth and breadth of topics relating to botany, pharmacy, and phytomedicine. Fellows will have work space provided and supervised stacks privileges as appropriate will be made available, along with photocopying and other imaging capabilities.
The library has a stellar reputation and is well-regarded by scholars throughout the world, all with a diverse range of expertise and interests. Please visit for further information about the library and its collections.
Upon completion of the fellowship, Fellows are expected to deliver a public lecture or presentation of an appropriate nature; an art show; or, a print publication with the approval of the Fellowship Committee on the Fellow's topic of research. Acknowledgement of the fellowship and LLM are expected in the chosen outcome.
Interested candidates should submit in writing, either via postal service or email, a resumé, unofficial transcripts (successful candidates will be asked to submit official transcripts), and a research proposal (at least two pages, single-spaced) about how LLM's collections are relevant to and will be used in the candidate's research.
Applications due by January 15, 2013. For questions, please email:
aheran@.
The Lloyd Library and Museum, located at 917 Plum Street, downtown Cincinnati, is a local and regional cultural treasure. The library was developed in the nineteenth century by the Lloyd brothers-John Uri, Curtis Gates, and Nelson Ashley to provide reference sources for Lloyd Brothers Pharmacists, Inc., one of the leading pharmaceutical companies of the period. Today the library is recognized worldwide by the scientific community as a vital research center. The library holds, acquires, and provides access to both historic and current materials on the subjects of pharmacy, botany, horticulture, herbal and alternative medicine, pharmacognosy, and related topics. Although our collections have a scientific focus, they also have relevance to humanities topics, such as visual arts and foreign languages through resources that feature botanical and natural history illustrations, original artworks, and travel literature, thereby revealing the convergence of science and art.
The Lloyd is open to anyone with an interest in these topics. Free parking is available for patrons and visitors behind the library building. For more information, visit the Lloyd website at .
Lloyd Library and Museum
917 Plum Street
Cincinnati, Ohio 45202
513-721-3707
Maggie Heran, MLS, Executive Director
Lloyd Library and Museum
Historical Research Center for the Natural Health Movement
mheran@
_____________________________________
|[pic] |LibraY, Digital Resources & Archive News |
News from the Wellcome Library
National Abortion Campaign archives now available
The archive of the National Abortion Campaign has recently been catalogued and is now available to researchers at the Wellcome Library.
The National Abortion Campaign (NAC) was formed in 1975 and the group defended the 1967 Abortion Act against several proposed amendment bills during the 1970s and 1980s. The collection covers a wide range of campaign material, conferences, publications and a variety of correspondence.
The group initially started when the Working Women's Charter called a demonstration against the Abortion Amendment Bill in February 1975. This Bill wanted to restrict the reasons why a woman could get an abortion and change which doctors could perform one. The demonstration was a success and the campaign was set up officially the following month. By June 1975 NAC was able to organise a large demonstration which was attended by 20,000 people, the biggest rally since the women's suffrage campaign. The Bill was not passed and the NAC campaigned against two more Abortion Amendment Bills by MPs in the 1970s: one in 1977 proposed by William Benyon and the other in 1979 by John Corrie. Large demonstrations and events were organised against them by the NAC, locally and on a larger national scale.
During the 1980s the NAC fought several campaigns and tried to launch more positive abortion legislation. In 1983 at the National Conference the group split into two: one continued as NAC and the other formed as the Women's Reproductive Rights Campaign. Eighteen months later NAC started the Reverse Gillick campaign, this was against the High Court ruling (instigated by mother of ten, Victoria Gillick in 1983) that children under 16 could not be prescribed or talk to doctors about contraceptives without their parents’ knowledge. The House of Lords overruled this in 1985, as long as doctors followed certain guidelines when discussing contraceptives with young people.
Another Abortion Amendment Bill was introduced in the late 1980s by the MP David Alton, and this focused on changing the time limit. This Bill got a large amount of support and several adverts were printed in national newspapers by the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC) asking MPs to vote yes. The NAC again held several large demonstrations and eventually the Bill failed. The NAC also campaigned against the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill in 1990. This was passed and it mainly concerned the regulation of fertility treatments, but the Abortion Act was also effected: the time limits were reduced from 28 to 24 weeks.
In 2003 the NAC merged with the Abortion Law Reform Association (ALRA), whose archives are also in the Wellcome Library, to form Abortion Rights, more information can be found on their website The National Abortion Campaign collection is part of the Wellcome Library’s Archives and Manuscripts collection. The catalogue can be searched on our online catalogue using the reference: SA/NAC.
For further information about our holdings on birth control and abortion see the relevant online sources guide.
Wellcome Film added to the Medical Heritage Library
We are delighted to announce the Wellcome Library has become a content contributor to the Medical Heritage Library, with Wellcome Film being added to the Medical Heritage Library’s online content.
An online digital collection of moving images from the collections of the Wellcome Library, Wellcome Film chronicles the history of medicine over the last hundred years and has been freely available in Internet Archive since 2010. The content of Wellcome Film includes rare footage of Sir Henry Wellcome (1853-1936) filmed at the archaeological digs he funded in the Sudan in 1910s, alongside films exploring the development of medicine in the twentieth century, including specific surgical techniques and drug treatments.
As a content provider, the Wellcome Library becomes the latest historical institution to make its collections available through the MHL. The MHL was established in 2010, with funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation via the Open Knowledge Commons, to digitize 30,000 rare medical books. Now, over two years later, nearly 40,000 books, videos, and audio recordings are freely available online, with content provided from many of the leading history of medicine libraries (a full list of the MHL’s content providers is available on their website).
Online Access to UK Medical Registers
The printed volumes of the UK Medical Registers are one of our key research resources, and are particularly utilised by genealogical researchers. After a successful trial period, all registered Wellcome Library users now have online access to the Registers through our new subscription to Ancestry Library Edition.
The Medical Registers were published annually, and list all the doctors who were licensed to practice in the UK, including foreign doctors who qualified here. Residence, qualification and date of registration are also included. The online version contains the Registers at four-yearly intervals from 1859-1959, and is available to our registered readers both within the Library and offsite.
The Registers are part of a suite of family history sources on Ancestry Library Edition, including census records, births marriages and deaths, and parish records – all now available online to our registered readers.
More details on how to access the Registers online are available through the Library catalogue.
Rare videos of Roy Porter now online
[pic]
Roy Porter (1946-2002) needs no introduction to the readers of the Gazette, but despite being a prodigious author, a frequent broadcaster on BBC Radio and a popular lecturer to a range of audiences, not many recordings of him remain.
Both the Wellcome Library’s catalogue and the Sound and Moving Image catalogue of the British Library, lists a number of items but very few recordings of him are freely available across the web (a notable exception being an appearance on Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time, available through the BBC Radio 4 website).
Given this, it’s with a great deal of excitement that we recently discovered a lecture given by Porter at the New York Academy of Medicine in 1999. It was recorded by C-Span, a US cable network which specialises in broadcasting federal government deliberations, and is free available through the C-Span website.
The lecture was in support of the Porter’s then newly published Greatest Benefit to Mankind, his one-volume History of Medicine and broadly consists of a discussion of the book’s themes. It also includes a detailed discussion of William Buchan’s Domestic Medicine, one of the most popular medical books ever published, which Porter situates in the political upheavals of the late 18th century.
We found this video while putting together a presentation for new students on the Society of Apothecaries Diploma Course in the History of Medicine. In a nice coincidence, a recording of Porter’s lecture to this course from 1990 is held in the Wellcome Library’s collections.
Such a discovery would be pleasing enough, but a search of C-Span’s archive has found another talk by Porter, also recorded in New York, this time in support of his title, The Creation of the Modern World (2000, published in the UK as Enlightenment). Again, this is also available through the C-Span website.
For regular updates on the work of the Wellcome Library, see our Blog () or follow us on Twitter ()
Ross MacFarlane
Research Engagement Officer
Wellcome Library
r.macfarlane@wellcome.ac.uk
_____________________________________
NIH Reports Included in Medical Heritage Library
The Medical Heritage Library () is proud to announce the inclusion of over 800 digitized reports from the National Institutes of Health Library, which is located on the NIH Campus in Bethesda, Maryland.
The NIH Library plays a key role in the mission of the National Institutes of Health - "science in the pursuit of fundamental knowledge about the nature and behavior of living systems and the application of that knowledge to extend healthy life and reduce the burdens of illness and disability." The NIH Library's large collection of online and print resources supports and advances the discovery efforts of NIH researchers and programs.
The NIH Library has scanned an important collection of over 800 annual reports and other program materials issued by NIH Institutes and Centers dating from the 1950s to the 1990s. Each annual report consists of a list of investigators, project summaries, and individual project reports that describe objectives, methods, and major findings. Annual reports created since the mid-to-late 1990's have already been searchable by the public online, however, these older reports remained limited to in-library usage.
Digitizing this material provides a historical perspective on the activities and accomplishments of the Institutes and individual researchers.
In order to carry out the project, the NIH Library initiated a partnership in 2009 with FedScan, a digitization effort operated by Internet Archive and hosted by the Library of Congress. All volumes were made available to the public at that time through the Internet Archive web site as well as linked through the NIH Library catalog.
Now these materials are also available in the Medical Heritage Library collection in Internet Archive, alongside 43,000 other titles from contributing libraries. Included in the NIH Library materials are important works such as the Report of Program Activities for the National Cancer Institute from 1954 and the program and paper abstracts for the Third International Conference on AIDS in 1987, which was sponsored by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the World Health Organization. The addition of these materials adds further depth to MHL's holdings, making us better able to support historical research into 20th-century topics.
|[pic] |online |
Blogs
Center for the History of Medicine and Public Health at the New York Academy of Medicine has a new blog: . The blog will carry news of events, activities, and developments in our collections. We welcome announcements for events in the New York region relating to the history of medicine, public health and the book, to be posted on our calendar.
_____________________________________
Grogs
It is with great pleasure that we present to you the summer 2012 edition of THE GROG. In our attempt to meet our standards of variety, we offer you original articles on: Navy Medicine in the War of 1812, A Look Medicine and Hygiene in the Royal Navy, A Brief History of the Navy Mobile Care Team Program, Notes on the first African-American in the Dental Corps, and much more. As always, we hope you enjoy this humble tour of the seas of Navy medical culture and heritage.
THE GROG is accessible through the link below. Feel free to share with anyone with an interest in history. If you prefer a PDF version to be sent directly to your inbox please let us know. For all those who have already requested to be put on the PDF mailing list a low resolution version will be sent to you shortly.
_____________________________________
Dissertations Online
The most recent dissertations pertaining to the history of science and medicine from the August 2010 volumes of Dissertation Abstracts can be viewed at:
You will notice the change in formatting-this is the new ProQuest platform-no more short versions but they do give you all the bibliographic information you will need.
______________________________________
Simon Forman’s Casebooks
The notorious London astrologer, recorded 10,000 consultations between 1596 and 1603. Most of these are medical. Forman's casebooks can now be searched by name (of any party involved), date, sex, age, topic of consultation and many other criteria. The edition includes images of all the manuscript pages of Forman's first volume, and more will follow soon:
Please send us feedback about how you are using the site--and about how you would like to be able to use it. hps-casebooks@lists.cam.ac.uk
Dr Lauren Kassell
Department of History & Philosophy of Science
University of Cambridge
Free School Lane
Cambridge CB2 3RH
hps.cam.ac.uk
_____________________________________
BAAS Reports
For those of you who might be interested, many of the annual reports of the British Association for the Advancement of Science are available in digital format on the Internet Archive at:
_____________________________________
U.S Nineteenth Century Periodicals Pathfinder
Visit the website at
The Research Services team at the Marist College Library recently published a new pathfinder listing full text nineteenth century periodicals that are freely available on-line . The periodicals are presented in three different groupings: chronological, geographic and by the topics listed below.
• Agriculture
• Arts & Fashion
• Children’s magazines
• Industry & Economy
• Literature
• Political Science
• Science
• Social Science
• Theology
• Women
The Nineteenth Century Periodicals Pathfinder offers access to hundreds of periodicals, the majority of which provide images and covers in addition to the full text of the articles. It is a wonderful collection of primary source material and I hope you find it useful.
Please contact Elizabeth Clarke with any comments or questions.
Elizabeth.Clarke2@marist.edu
. John Ansley
Head, Archives & Special Collections
Marist College
3399 North Road
Poughkeepsie, NY 12601
Email: john.ansley@marist.edu
Visit the website at
Disclaimer
Any views expressed in this Gazette are those of the Editors or the named contributor; they are not necessarily those of the Executive Committee or general membership. While every care is taken to provide accurate and helpful information in the Gazette, the Society for the Social History of Medicine, the Chair of its Executive Committee and the Editor of the Gazette accept no responsibility for omissions or errors or their subsequent effects. Readers are encouraged to check all essential information appropriate to specific circumstances.
The Society for the Social History of Medicine is a charitable body registered in the U.K. with the registration number 27841
Please visit the SSHM Website at [pic]
................
................
In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.
To fulfill the demand for quickly locating and searching documents.
It is intelligent file search solution for home and business.
Related searches
- wordpress passing data between pages
- wordpress business templates
- wordpress rss feed not working
- wordpress jquery is not defined
- create wordpress blog
- wordpress roles editor
- wordpress full rss feed
- wordpress rss feed settings
- wordpress rss feed plugin
- wordpress display rss feed
- wordpress rss feed link
- wordpress rss feed to post