History (4,530 posts)

Sexual abuse by superintending staff in the nineteenth-century lunatic asylum: medical practice, complaint and risk

Reflections on the heart: medicine, emotion and history

In Matters of the Heart: History, Medicine, Emotion (Bound Alberti, 2010), I posited that the heart of culture and the heart of science became disconnected in the nineteenth century; that the heart which had for centuries been the centre of life, emotions and personhood lost out to the brain as the organ par excellence of selfhood. This process was not clear-cut or definitive. There had been interest in craniocentric versions of the self in the ancient world, and there is continued emphasis in the emotional heart in the present day, as Josh Hordern’s article explores through such examples as the organ scandal at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital in Liverpool. So, what is it about the heart, that peculiar, emotive and sensorially charged organ, that continues to be associated with some essence of the self? After all, in medical terms, it is a mere pump.

Except that the heart-as-pump is…

Read the full article ›

A Queer New York: Geographies of Lesbians, Dykes, and Queers

Women’s words, women’s bodies: late nineteenth century English feminisms in the ‘Interview’ column of the Women’s Penny Paper/Woman’s Herald (Oct. 27, 1888–Apr. 23, 1892)

The mentally ill and how they were perceived in young Israel

Working in cases: British psychiatric social workers and a history of psychoanalysis from the middle, c.1930–60

The Folk Singers and the Bureau: The FBI, the Folk Artists and the Suppression of the Communist Party USA, 1939-1956

Urban Regeneration and Neoliberalism The New Liverpool Home

Great Depression social work story has lessons for today

Jewish Exponent | Women in Peace

Dorothy Kahn

The Fall of America Journals, 1965-1971

Lost Souls: Women, Religion and Mental Illness in the Victorian Asylum

Wolfenden’s Women: Prostitution in Post-war Britain

Mothering in the frame: Cinematic microanalysis and the pathogenic mother, 1945–67

Afterlives: Testimonies of Irish Catholic Mothers on Infant Death and the Fate of the Unbaptized

The history of mental health policy in Turkey: tradition, transition and transformation

Women in black: the surprising history of widows

Negotiating Memory and Restoring Identity in Broken Families in Eighteenth-century Denmark

‘Dear Mrs Brown’: social purity, sex education and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union in early twentieth-century South Africa

Eating disorders during the Edo period between 1603 and 1867 in Japan

Encounter with Saul Alinsky – Part 1: CYC Toronto

This photo of children living in poverty caused shock waves in 1992. Where are they now?

The Guardian | C Easton

Katrina aged four (1992).

Overlooked No More: Rosa May Billinghurst, Militant Suffragist

NYT | LSE Library

May Billinghurst, center, in 1908. She used a tricycle wheelchair, which she was known to ram into police officers at protests. As a young woman she took up social work, assisting women at a workhouse, an institution for people who could not support themselves.