Coming to Grips with a “New” State of Consciousness: The Study of Rapid-Eye-Movement Sleep in the 1960s
The recognition of rapid-eye-movement sleep (REM) and its association with dreaming in 1953 by Aserinsky and Kleitman opened a new world to explore in the brain. Discussions at two major symposia in the early 1960s reveal that a state with characteristics resembling both wakefulness and sleep was overturning accepted views of the regulation of the two states.
Behind the Mask: The Singular Life of James Dean’s Analyst
Spiegel
In 1947, Muensterberger emigrated from Holland to the US, where he treated celebrities such as James Dean and Nelson Rockefeller and counted Pablo Picasso, Walt Disney and Andy Warhol among his social circle.
WPA sign at Glenmora carrying legend praising President Roosevelt and his new deal program (1938)
WPA Photographs | Parishes Outside Orleans
How children of the world united at a Soviet school
BBC | Interdom
In 1933 a unique boarding school was set up in Russia to provide a home for the children of revolutionaries around the world – the children of Mao, Tito and La Pasionaria passed through its doors. It still exists, though few of its pupils today are foreign.
The Day Wall Street exploded: a story of America in its first age of terror
Whitney M. Young, Jr. (1921-1971)
CSWE
He taught social work at the University of Nebraska and Creighton University. In his next position as dean of social work at Atlanta University, Young supported alumni in their boycott of the Georgia Conference of Social Welfare, which had a poor record of placing African Americans in good jobs.
75 years of social security
New Zealand Herald
Prime Ministers Rt Hon M J Savage at his desk, Parliament Filed 20 October 1938
Nostalgia: The bittersweet history of a psychological concept.
The concept of nostalgia has changed substantially both denotatively and connotatively over the span of its 300-year history. This article traces the evolution of the concept from its origins as a medical disease to its contemporary understanding as a psychological construct.
The archaeology of class war: the Colorado Coalfield strike of 1913–1914
The Fabian window
Nineteenth and Twentieth Century American Asylums and Hospitals: Postcards, Public Perception, and Purpose
The process of American psychiatric care started with the development of lunatic asylums during the early nineteenth century. There were 122 state supported lunatic asylums opened in the United States before 1900. Most histories of early asylums have been lost except for the significant or unusual ones. Tracing the history of these early institutions, which emphasized care for the common patient, will allow current researchers to understand the actions and attitudes that previously doomed such programs, saving time and money.
WPA workmen are protected by safety practices. This view shows safety sign on WPA job near Monroe (1936)
WPA Photographs | Parishes Outside Orleans
The birth and death of Villa 21
From 1962 to 1966 David Cooper ran an experimental hospital ward in Villa 21 of Shenley Hospital, Hertfordshire, England. In the histories of mid-twentieth-century psychiatry and anti-psychiatry, this ward has been almost entirely forgotten, overshadowed by the figure of R.D. Laing and his Kingsley Hall experiment.
The woman behind the New Deal: the life and legacy of Frances Perkins – social security, unemployment insurance, and the minimum wage
Nuisances and community in mid-Victorian England: the attractions of inspection
Contagion: How Commerce Has Spread Disease
Their Fathers’ Daughters: Women’s Social Identities in Fifteenth-century Florence
Based on an analysis of how the identities of women were recorded in legal and familial documents, this article argues that women’s social identities were primarily and permanently linked to that of their natal families, particularly to their fathers.
Hyperactive: The Controversial History of ADHD
Thumbnail
‘Pauper Lunatics and their Treatment’, by Joshua Harrison Stallard (1870)
In the pamphlet reproduced here, Stallard draws attention to the build-up of lunatics in workhouses due to lack of asylum beds. He also argues for the increased use of home care for lunatics instead of continually expanding asylum provision, and points to the need for training of asylum doctors.
Containing disorder in the ‘Age of Equipoise’: troops, trains and the telegraph
Cannabis Nation: Control and Consumption in Britain, 1928-2008
Thumbnail
Cannabis Nation is a sequel to James Mills’ earlier book Cannabis Britannica, published ten years ago. He pointed out in that earlier book that cannabis and its regulation had always been prey to issues wider than the simple harms of the drug.
At the Instigation of the Devil: suicide and its records
A case study in Gantt charts as historiophoty: A century of psychology at the University of Alberta.
History is typically presented as historiography, where historians communicate via the written word. However, some historians have suggested alternative formats for communicating and thinking about historical information. One such format is known as historiophoty, which involves using a variety of visual images to represent history. The current article proposes that a particular type of graph, known as a Gantt chart, is well suited for conducting historiophoty.
Battling demons with medical authority: werewolves, physicians and rationalization
This paper attempts to construct a conceptual history of werewolf beliefs and their respective medical responses.
Rural migration in Korea: a transition to the modern era
In this paper, we examine the migration patterns of the rural Korean population during Japanese colonial rule (1910–1945), the period immediately preceding full-scale industrialization.
Disease Class and Social Change: Tuberculosis in Folkestone and Sandgate 1880-1930
Thumbnail
This book is a detailed history of the treatment of tuberculosis in Folkestone and its suburb Sandgate during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, roughly up to the mid 1930s. It describes the development of Folkestone in the nineteenth century as a fashionable seaside resort becoming more accessible due to the development of the railway.
A child of the empire: British sociology and colonialism, 1940s–1960s
The theoretical root of Karl Jaspers’ General Psychopathology. Part 2: The influence of Max Weber
Both Weber and Jaspers began from empathic understanding, but at the same time aimed for a rational and ideal-typical conceptualization. In addition, their methodologies were similar with respect to their detailed terminology.
Mental health issues of Maria I of Portugal and her sisters: the contributions of the Willis family to the development of psychiatry
Contemporary accounts credit Dr Francis Willis (1718–1807) with facilitating the recovery of King George III from his major episode of acute mania in 1788–9.
Poor Relief in England 1350–1600
Unequal desires: race and erotic capital in the stripping industry
The Bavarian royal drama of 1886 and the misuse of psychiatry: new results
The deaths of King Ludwig II of Bavaria and Bernhard von Gudden, Professor of Psychiatry in Munich, in Lake Starnberg near Munich on 13 June 1886 have often been mentioned in the psychiatric-historical literature and in fiction. Von Gudden had written a psychiatric assessment of the King, rating him permanently mentally ill and incapable of reigning.
The social sciences, philosophy, and the cultural turn in the 1930s USDA
One of the more unusual attempts by the American state to mobilize academic expertise unfolded in the late 1930s, when the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) hired scholars in the “culture and personality” fields and philosophy to aid its efforts to promote economic, social, and cultural change in the countryside.
Maggie Thatcher, Milk Snatcher
In These Times
Russell Brand, a young comedian and actor who was born the year Thatcher became leader of her party, testifies to the effect she had on him as he was growing up in the 1980s, as he worries about his “inability to ascertain where my own selfishness ends and her neo-liberal inculcation begins. All of us that grew up under Thatcher were taught that it is good to be selfish, that other people’s pain is in fact a weakness and suffering is deserved and shameful.”
The Testing of Sanocrysin: Science, Profit, and Innovation in Clinical Trial Design, 1926-31
This article provides a detailed analysis of the origins and significance of the 1926 clinical trial of Sanocrysin, a gold compound thought at the time to be useful in the treatment of tuberculosis. This experiment is generally considered to be the first clinical trial in the United States that used a formal system of randomization to divide research subjects into treatment and nontreatment groups; it was probably also the first clinical trial in the United States to use placebo shams in a nontreatment control group to overcome the problem of what researchers at the time called “psychic influence.”
Save Your Child From Autocracy and Poverty
Library and Archives Canada, Acc. No. 1983-28-2556 | H Paus
1914-1918
Lotions, Potions, Pills, and Magic: Health Care in Early America
Thumbnail
Many histories chronicle American medicine’s transformation from its chaotic and disorganized beginnings into “scientific medicine” in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.1 By synthesizing secondary sources in a tightly packed two hundred pages, Elaine Breslaw resists retelling this triumphalist narrative and instead focuses much needed attention on medicine and health in America before the Civil War.
Psychiatric nurse C. Chisholm comforting patient (c.1955)
Health and Welfare Canada/Library and Archives Canada/e002504597
Profiles of international archives: Les archives Jean Piaget, University of Geneva, Switzerland.
This research report provides a look behind closed doors at the Jean Piaget Archives in Geneva, Switzerland. It situates the potential visitor, contextualizes the Archives in its own history, and then describes what scholars can expect to find.
Psychodynamics in child psychiatry in Sweden, 1945-85: from political vision to treatment ideology
In this article, changing treatment ideologies and policies in child psychiatric outpatient services in Sweden from 1945 to 1985 are examined. The aim is to discuss the role played by psychoanalytic and psychodynamic thinking in this process of change.
Equal Justice for All, Welfare Rights Group, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan
Harris/Library and Archives Canada/1992-483-3
Equal Justice for All (EJA) was started in 1985 by a group of people who were very concerned with the fact that low-income citizens did not always receive fair treatment under the laws and regulations from the organizations set up to serve them.
Wilbur J. Cohen – Government Official, Educator, Social Welfare Expert
Social Security Administration History Archives | www.socialwelfarehistory.com
Wilbur Cohen being sworn in as Secretary of HEW. Looking on are President Johnson (r), Vice-President Hubert Humphrey (l) and Cohen’s wife and three sons.
Eros and ironic intoxication: Profound longing, madness and discipleship in Plato’s Symposium and in modern life
The Symposium addresses the relation between desire, beauty and the good life, while indicating the fascination that strong teaching arouses in followers. For Plato, unlike for moderns, power, desire and ethics are interrelated.
The Inevitable Hour: A History of Caring for Dying Patients in America
Thumbnail
While many Americans in the nineteenth century accepted death as a common and inevitable part of life, the experience and meaning of dying changed between 1880 and 1965 as the growing prestige of medicine led both patients and doctors to reject the inevitability of death and to emphasize the fight for recovery instead.
From movement to organization: constructing identity in Swedish trade unions
This study argues that re-formation of working-class identity was crucial for the construction of a cohesive labour movement in Sweden. Analysis of the materials used in trade union study circles in the 1920s and 1930s reveals that the organizational identity constructed by the leadership was closely linked to the organization as a phenomenon rather than to the class structure on which it was based.
When is the State’s Gaze Focused? British Royal Commissions and the Bureaucratization of Conflict
Scholars have long documented changes in knowledge regimes and power relations characteristic of state-centric drives to pacify conflicts and govern populations. But the mechanisms through which social conflicts are “made legible” in routine policy processes – as well as the reasons why some ongoing conflicts are pacified and others are persistent – have remained less clear.
Female serial killers in the early modern age? Recurrent infanticide in Finland 1750–1896
This article examines multiple infanticide in early modern Finland in which the same woman killed several newborns after repeated hidden pregnancies and childbirths.
Born Together—Reared Apart: The Landmark Minnesota Twin Study. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012. 410 pp. $49.95 (hardcover). ISBN-13: 978-0-691-01715-0.
Breadwinners: working women and economic independence, 1865–1920
