The bones of the insane
This article examines alienist explanations for fracture among British asylum patients in the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries
The Sick Child in Early Modern England, 1580-1720
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The myth of neglected sick children in the past was deconstructed during the last few decades by diverse authors of both medical and social history. Families saw children as worthwhile members, and assisted them in sickness and misery. Hannah Newton’s book The Sick Child in Early Modern England stands in this tradition. But she achieves more than to affirm the results of earlier research.
The Last Refuge of the Scoundrel: Debating between History and Theory
Red Cottages and Swedish Virtues: Swedish Institutional Drug Treatment as an Ideological Project 1968-1981
This article investigates Swedish drug treatment as an ideological project, from the establishment of the first treatment centres in the late 1960s up until the change in legislation and management in the early 1980s.
Hospital for Insane, Northampton
W.B. Gay/Gazetteer of Hampshire County, Mass. | UMass Amherst Libraries
The Northampton State Hospital was opened in 1858 to provide moral therapy to the “insane,” and under the superintendency of Pliny Earle, became one of the best known asylums in New England. Before the turn of the century, however, the Hospital declined, facing the problems of overcrowding, poor sanitation, and inadequate funding. The push for psychiatric deinstitutionalization in the 1960s and 1970s resulted in a steady reduction of the patient population, the last eleven of whom left Northampton State in 1993.
From psychiatric symptom to diagnostic category: self-harm from the Victorians to DSM-5
Careless raptures and Newhouse traps: conversations with Daniel Aaron on the Sixties, aging, and utopian communities
Did unemployed workers choose not to work in interwar Britain? Evidence from the voices of unemployed workers†
Demographic socialization and reproductive behavior in a transitional context: a macro–micro perspective
This paper analyzes the impact of individuals’ socialization in a given demographic context on their later reproductive behavior in 19th century Geneva.
Public Science of the Savage Mind: Contesting Cultural Anthropology in the Cold War Classroom
“What is human about human beings? How did they get that way? How can they be made more so?” These three questions formed the basis of a fifth-grade social studies curriculum project developed in the 1960s called Man: A Course of Study, or MACOS.
City Women: Money, Sex, and the Social Order in Early Modern London. By Eleanor Hubbard (New York, Oxford University Press, 2012) 297 pp. $125.00
How autism became autism: The radical transformation of a central concept of child development in Britain
This article argues that the meaning of the word ‘autism’ experienced a radical shift in the early 1960s in Britain which was contemporaneous with a growth in epidemiological and statistical studies in child psychiatry.
The theoretical root of Karl Jaspers’ General Psychopathology. Part 1: Reconsidering the influence of phenomenology and hermeneutics
The present paper investigates the methodology involved in Jaspers’ psychopathology and compares it with Husserl’s phenomenology and with Dilthey’s cultural science.
Building the counterculture, creating right livelihoods: the counterculture at work
The men and women dedicated to building an alternative society in the United States in the Sixties era began without a blueprint.
From the EEL to the EGO: Psychoanalysis and the Remnants of Freud’s Early Scientific Practice
While numerous historiographical works have been written to shed light on Freud’s early theoretical education in biology, physiology, and medicine and on the influence of that education on psychoanalysis, this paper approaches Freud’s basic comprehension of science and methodology by focusing on his early research practice in physiology and neuranatomy.
The Institutional Framework of Russian Serfdom
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Cultivating a Chairside Manner: Dental Hypnosis, Patient Management Psychology, and the Origins of Behavioral Dentistry in America, 1890–1910
Discussions regarding the use of hypnotism in dentistry featured prominently in dental journals and society proceedings during the decades around the turn of the twentieth century. Many dentists used hypnotic suggestion either as the sole anesthetic for extractions or in conjunction with local and general anesthetics for excavation and cavity filling.
Doubting Sex: Inscriptions, Bodies, and Selves in Nineteenth-Century Hermaphrodite Case Histories
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Capitalism Takes Command: The Social Transformation of Nineteenth-Century America
The Criminalization of Abortion in the West: its Origins in Medieval Law
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The law on abortion in present-day Ireland was recently described as ‘medieval’; a word intended to convey the meaning that the law was unsophisticated and insufficiently considerate of the interests of pregnant women. This book, however, shows clearly that medieval law on abortion was far from unsophisticated, and nor was it always as ‘pro-life’ as one might have imagined.
Raising Racists: The Socialization of White Children in the Jim Crow South
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Transitioning labor to the ‘lean years’: the middle class and employer repression of organized labor in post-World War I Chicago
A Tale of Two American Cities: Disaster, Class and Citizenship in San Francisco 1906 and New Orleans 2005
The history of San Francisco’s Chinatown following the 1906 earthquake and fire and New Orleans’ public housing following Hurricane Katrina in 2005 reveal how powerful class interests collude with the fog of disaster to lay claim to the urban spaces of the poor and marginal.
Ambiguous Gender in Early Modern Spain and Portugal: Inquisitors, Doctors and the Transgression of Gender Norms
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Over the last few years the gender history of Renaissance Europe has increasingly turned to the malleability of the body and its connection to unstable gender identities.
Health Care for Some: Rights and Rationing in the United States Since 1930
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Bachelors and Bunnies: The Sexual Politics of Playboy
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A Disability History of the United States
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Violence between parents and children: courts of law in early modern Finland
This article studies the attitudes and significance of violence between parents and children as they appear in court records of lower courts and Courts of Appeal in early modern Finland.
Socialist emulation in China: worker heroes yesterday and today
Chinese labour heroes represent an idiosyncratic expression of a broader twentieth-century phenomenon of promoting worker emulation through the hailing of model labourers.
Public affairs, privacy, and family stress: a case study in rural northern Sweden in the mid-nineteenth century
Our Little Patients: A Case Study of Hospitalized Children at the University of Michigan, 1890-2011
Perceptions of hospitalization for children shifted from late nineteenth-century care designed to uplift poor children and create better citizens to mid-century attention to children’s emotional and medical needs.
Neopositivism and the DSM psychiatric classification. An epistemological history. Part 1: Theoretical comparison
Science in a communist country: The case of the XXIInd International Congress of Psychology in Leipzig (1980).
The XXIInd International Congress of Psychology (ICP) in Leipzig in 1980 is a case that illustrates the mutual relationship between science and politics, specifically of the role of science in a communist state.
Condom Nation: The U.S. Government’s Sex Education Campaign From World War I to the Internet
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Negotiating Ethnicity, Class and Gender: German Associational Culture in Glasgow, 1864–1914
One feature of nineteenth-century German migrant communities was a dense network of religious and secular ethnic institutions in virtually all destination countries. The article is a microhistorical study of a representative German community in Britain.
Parenthood, child-rearing and fertility in England, 1850–1914
Fertility declines across Europe and the Anglo-world have been explained as the result of reversals of intergenerational flows of wealth. According to this theory, the child was transformed from an economically-useful household asset to an emotionally-valued parental burden.
Headship, Household Burden, and Infant Mortality in Taipei (1906-1944)
The purpose of this article is to explore the connection between household composition and infant mortality in the first half of the twentieth century in Taiwan.
From Galaxies to Universe: A Cross-Disciplinary Review and Analysis of Public Values Publications From 1969 to 2012
The study of public values (PVs) is generating growing interest in public administration and public management, yet many challenges and unanswered questions remain. For the study of PVs to progress, we need to go beyond the traditional boundaries of public administration and management, to explore how and why scholars in different disciplines use the concept, and how and where approaches to the concept differ and overlap.
The fascination with eros: The role of passionate interests under communism
German towns at the eve of industrialization: household formation and the part of the elderly
This study shows that in pre-industrial towns life-courses were already different from those in the countryside, and that elderly rather lived without kin. These findings are further detailed, and the gender-specific impacts of the urban and rural, pre-industrial and industrial urban environments are discussed.
People and the car: the expansion of automobility in urban Britain, c.1955–70
This day in Jewish history / KKK kills three activists during Freedom Summer
Haaretz | Wikimedia Commons
FBI poster seeking information after the disappearance of Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner. Schwerner, the oldest of the three victims, had grown up in a middle-class Jewish family in Pelham, New York. At the time of his murder, he was a graduate student in social work at Columbia University.
“Light from the East”: travel to China and Australian activism in the “long Sixties”
Throughout the “long Sixties” a diverse array of Australian activists traveled beyond what was popularly known as the “bamboo curtain” into the People’s Republic of China (PRC). This paper will argue that they found not the monolithic “red menace” presented by media and government, but an often contradictory set of images mediated by their own political agendas and the changing nature of Chinese politics.
Robert Moses and the Visual Dimension of Physical Disorder: Efforts to Demonstrate Urban Blight in the Age of Slum Clearance
In the 1950s, the Committee on Slum Clearance of the City of New York, headed by Robert Moses, published twenty-six site-specific slum clearance brochures. A major portion of each one of these brochures attempted to demonstrate the blighted conditions that prevailed in the area to be redeveloped.
Mapping the Boston Poor: Inmates of the Boston Almshouse, 1795–1801
Documentary and geographical evidence about Boston from 1795 to 1801 reveals distinct patterns in poor people’s use of the Boston Almshouse and in their areas of residence within the city. A much higher percentage of Almshouse inmates came from Boston’s densely populated North End than from less urban areas with lower population densities.
A ‘German world’ shared among doctors: a history of the relationship between Japanese and German psychiatry before World War II
This article deals with the critical history of German and Japanese psychiatrists who dreamed of a ‘German world’ that would cross borders. It analyses their discourse, not only by looking at their biographical backgrounds, but also by examining them in a wider context linked to German academic predominance and cultural propaganda before World War II.
Moving beyond the critical synthesis: does the law preclude a future for US unions?
This retrospective essay on Tomlins’ The State and Unions assesses the durability of his observations in light of developments over the past quarter century. The decline of unions in the context of minimal protections offered under contemporary labor law seems to fit Tomlins’ thesis that the New Deal offered only a counterfeit liberty to labor.
Marital cruelty: reconsidering lay attitudes in England, c. 1580 to 1850
The mid-eighteenth century is seen as a turning point after which English legal and lay attitudes to cruelty expanded from life-threatening violence to include a wider range of behaviours.
Wendy D. Churchill, Female Patients in Early Modern Britain: Gender, Diagnosis, and Treatment
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Wendy Churchill’s impressive new book, Female Patients in Early Modern Britain: Gender, Diagnosis, and Treatment, joins this resurgence. The first ‘comprehensive study of female illness and treatment in early modern Britain’, it analyses an unprecedented number of medical casebooks, observations and letters, to ‘reveal how sex and gender influenced medical diagnosis and treatment for female patients during this pivotal period in British medicine’ (p. 14), 1590 to 1740.