History (4,530 posts)

Pages on cannabis from John Parkinson’s Theatrum Botanicum (1640)

Thoughtful history analysis allows social work students and educators to begin to reveal blindness in the past that could help provide insight into current implicit bias and unintentional injustice.

Empathy: A History tells the fascinating and largely unknown story of the first appearance of empathy in 1908 and tracks its shifting meanings over the following century. Despite the word’s ubiquity today, few realize that it began as a translation of Einfühlung (“in-feeling”), a term in German psychological aesthetics that described how spectators projected their own feelings and movements into objects of art and nature.

What are the real disease entities in psychiatry? This is a question that has bedeviled the study of the mind for more than a century yet it is low on the research agenda of psychiatry. Basic science issues such as neuroimaging, neurochemistry, and genetics carry the day instead. There is nothing wrong with basic science research, but before studying the role of brain circuits or cerebral chemistry, shouldn’t we be able to specify how the various diseases present clinically?

Dorothea Dix and the Condition of American Mental Institutions
in 1840

Defiant Geographies examines the destruction of a poor community in the center of Rio de Janeiro to make way for Brazil’s first international mega-event. As the country celebrated the centenary of its independence, its postabolition whitening ideology took on material form in the urban development project that staged Latin America’s first World’s Fair.

The influenza pandemic of 1918-1919 killed as many as fifty million people worldwide and affected the vast majority of Canadians. Yet the pandemic, which came and left in one season, never to recur in any significant way, has remained difficult to interpret. What did it mean to live through and beyond this brief, terrible episode, and what were its long-term effects?

Why were nearly 10,000 people killed in six weeks in Hamburg, while most of Europe was left almost unscathed? As Richard J. Evans explains, it was largely because the town was a “free city” within Germany that was governed by the “English” ideals of laissez- faire. The absence of an effective public-health policy combined with ill-founded medical theories and the miserable living conditions of the poor to create a scene ripe for tragedy.

On a grey winter morning in Seattle, in February 1919, 110 local unions shut down the entire city. Shut it down and took it over, rendering the authorities helpless. For five days, workers from all trades and sectors – streetcar drivers, telephone operators, musicians, miners, loggers, shipyard workers – fed the people, ensured that babies had milk, that the sick were cared for. They did this with without police – and they kept the peace themselves. This had never happened before in the United States and has not happened since.

Gilles Le Muisit: Black Death at Tournai, 1349

Walter Reed Hospital, Washington, D.C., during the great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 – 1919

Do we have an obligation to view the images in a different way if we know something more about the circumstances of their creation?

Rankin first wanted to go into social work, Bradbury shared, and attended a “school for philanthropy.” But Rankin was frustrated when she felt she couldn’t make a difference at the root of problems she saw.

Frances Perkins (above) was having tea with friends at Margaret Morgan Norrie’s home on Washington Square on Saturday afternoon, March 25, 1911 . . . The clang of fire trucks interrupted their conversation and they hurried across the Square to discover the cause. They reached the Asch Building, site of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, in time to see young women, many on fire, jumping to their deaths. 146 human beings perished.

This date marked the beginning of the Great Postal Strike in New York City. Postal workers hadn’t seen a raise since 1967. They were banned from collective bargaining and from striking. Nevertheless, in spite of the law and their own union’s attempt to quell the unrest, the postal workers voted to strike, marking the first time in the nearly 200-year history of the Postal Service that postal workers went on strike.

LSD in the ’60s; ecstasy in the ’80s; ‘smart’ drugs today: how we get high reflects the desires and fears of our times

An emergency hospital in Brookline, Massachusetts, where patients were cared for during the 1918 influenza epidemic