National Fascist Party headquarters in Rome in 1934, decorated with the face of Benito Mussolini, calling for national approval with a ‘Si’ vote on a fascist referendum.
Fascism’s History Offers Lessons about Today’s Attacks on Education
‘Picture imperfect’: the motives and uses of patient photography in the asylum
History of Psychiatry, Ahead of Print.
In the nineteenth century, photography became common in psychiatric asylums. Although patient photographs were produced in large numbers, their original purpose and use are unclear. Journals, newspaper archives and Medical Superintendents’ notes from the period 1845–1920 were analysed to understand the reasons behind the practice. This revealed: (1) empathic motivation: using photography to understand the mental condition and aid treatment; (2) therapeutic focus on biological processes: using photography to detect biological pathologies or phenotypes; and (3) eugenics: using photography to recognise hereditary insanity, aimed at preventing transmission to future generations. This reveals a conceptual move from empathic intentions and psychosocial understandings to largely biological and genetic explanations, providing context for contemporary psychiatry and the study of heredity.
‘An astonishing human failure’. The influence of gender on the image of perpetrators of infanticide in the courtroom and crime reporting in the Netherlands, 1960-1989
Every right enjoyed by workers today was fought for
The Geography of Nonviolence: The United Nations, the Highlander Folk School, and the Borders of the Civil Rights Movement
UConn School of Social Work Celebrates 75th Anniversary
We the Elites Why the US Constitution Serves the Few
The Autonomous City: A History of Urban Squatting
Classic Text No. 133: ‘Maxwell Jones and the Therapeutic Community’, by David Millard (1996)
Our medical liberties: The aftermath of a nineteenth-century vaccination mandate
1981: Dammasch Is Being Emptied and Portland Can’t Handle All the Homeless, Jobless, Hopeless Mentally Ill
Willamette Week | Asylum Projects
Throughout the city an increasing number of chronically mentally ill are finding shelter in deteriorating hotels or boarding houses, many of which violate numerous fire and safety standards. Yet enforcement of those standards is sporadic and ineffectual. “Many limes I think, ‘My God, we’re sending people out who are not that well to begin with to these filthy places,’” says a Dammasch social worker, who tries to find housing for discharged patients. Above: Former Dammasch State Hospital (1961-1995)
New Histories of African and Caribbean People in Britain
Sirens, succubi & sex symbols: a history of female monsters
The rise of the Strangler
Boston Globe
Deep in an archive kept secret for decades, the author found a stunning trove: social workers’ notes gathered over many years on the early life of Albert DeSalvo, the admitted killer of 11 women and one of Boston’s few truly iconic criminals.
Environmental Blockades: Obstructive Direct Action and the History of the Environmental Movement
Pink Triangle Legacies: Coming Out in the Shadow of the Holocaust. By W. Jake Newsome
The Family Planning Association and Contraceptive Science and Technology in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain
All the love: transnational youth and disability in El Salvador’s civil war
Classic Text No. 134: ‘A case of Wernicke-Bostroem’s expansive autopsychosis’, by Ib Ostenfeld (1944)
History of Psychiatry, Ahead of Print.
Expansive autopsychosis, grouped with cycloid psychoses – an illness entity of double origin: (1) Morel’s notion degeneracy, reformulated by Magnan and Legrain (reflected in Wimmer’s concept: psychogenic psychosis); (2) Wernicke’s, Kleist’s, Bostroem’s (and later Leonhard’s) notion of these purportedly independent conditions. Locked in the Danish language, Strömgren and Ostenfeld provided important contributions to this field, exemplified by Ostenfeld’s casuistry, translated in this Classic Text.
A mad yearning for solitude: Timon the Misanthrope and his relevance to the study of ancient psychopathology
History of Psychiatry, Ahead of Print.
Ancient Greek and Latin medical authors considered a flight into solitude a compelling sign of mental disturbance, frequently described as misanthropia, a word fraught with meaning beyond the medical discourse. The fictionalised character Timon of Athens, the quintessential misanthrope, can shed light on ancient cultural concepts of self-imposed isolation from human contact. To cope with the sense of unease this deviant behaviour induced, misanthropia was explained as ‘madness’, ridiculed in various genres of humour, morally condemned in philosophy, and ultimately demonized in Christian cosmology. These various attempts at containment echo in the medical works of the age, making it impossible to comprehend the concept of misanthropia in ancient medicine without taking full account of the cultural context.
A question of equity? The ‘value’ of male and female virginity in late 18th and early 19th century Athens
Birth Control as a National Challenge: Nationalizing Concepts of Families in Eastern Europe 1914–1939
Health Education Against Malaria (US Office of Malaria Control in War Areas, 1944)
Queer Footprints: A Guide to Uncovering London’s Fierce History
‘We did what needed to be done’: Cherish, the first support group for unmarried mothers in Ireland
Founding regulation of the EMCDDA adopted 30 years ago
75 years on from the Children Act 1948: A short history of Serious Case Reviews
Social Work Today | Wonder Wall
Predatory Nuns: Sexual Abuse in North American Catholic Sisterhoods
The World Bank: A Critical History
The Quest for Sexual Health: How an Elusive Ideal Has Transformed Science, Politics, and Everyday Life
EpsteinStephenThe Quest for Sexual Health: How an Elusive Ideal Has Transformed Science, Politics, and Everyday Life, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2022. Pp. xii + 449. $30.00. Pbk ISBN 978-0-2268-1822-1.
Psychoanalytic practice in the light of psychiatric patient records: The elusive history of Freudian-inspired psychotherapy (Strasbourg, 1940s–1970s)
The Cancer Problem: Malignancy in Nineteen-Century Britain. Agnes Arnold-Forster
Arnold-ForsterAgnes. The Cancer Problem: Malignancy in Nineteen-Century Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. 272 pp.
How Frances Willard shaped feminism by leading the 19th-century temperance movement
The Republic of Fear: Mental Illness in the Finnish Civil War of 1918
Arcade Britannia: A Social History of the British Amusement Arcade
Marriage patterns of Irish convict women in nineteenth-century Tasmania
Plague hospitals and poor relief in late medieval and early modern France
Transitory inequalities: how individual-level cause-specific death data can unravel socioeconomic inequalities in infant mortality in Maastricht, the Netherlands, 1864–1955
Ingenious trade: women and work in seventeenth-century London
Love’s Next Meeting: The Forgotten History of Homosexuality and the Left in American Culture
“The Miracle Cure.” A Brief History of Lobotomies
‘And now you love me, and there is no way out of it’: marital engagement, misogyny and violence in the Victorian fin-de-siècle gothic short story
The Forgotten Lessons of the Recovered Memory Movement
Why Early Modern Mass Incarceration Matters: The Bamberg Malefizhaus, 1627–31
War, gender, and lasting emotion: letters and photographs of Masha Bruskina and Olga Bancic, 1941–44
Laboratory of deficiency: Sterilization and confinement in California, 1900–1950s Natalie Lira University of California Press, 2022. 284 pp. $29.95 (soft). ISBN 9780520355682.
Even the Women Are Leaving Migrants Making Mexican America, 1890–1965
Radical Roots: Public History and a Tradition of Social Justice Activism
Early Modern Wales, c.1536-1689: Ambiguous Nationhood (Rethinking the History of Wales)
Common Land in Britain: A History from the Middle Ages to the Present Day – Garden and Landscape History
