Abstract Medieval discourses on ageing—in learned, popular, and literary contexts alike—tend to posit extreme decline as an ordinary part of old age. But what happens to critical notions of ‘disability’ when physical and mental degeneration are a normative age expectation? This essay uses the notion of ‘debility’ to explore how medieval constructs of senescence challenge the borders between disabled and nondisabled embodiments, and between age-related decline and chronic illness. Focussing on two vernacular texts by the Italian-born Francophone Cypriot writer Philippe de Novare, which respectively highlight the status of the elderly as legal subjects and as bodies on the precipice of decline, this essay argues for a decentring of the modern and a recentring of the medieval as a vital impetus for novel thinking about configurations of disability, illness, and normativity.
Abstract Between 1900 and 1948, hundreds of patients from Palestine travelled north to the Lebanon Hospital for Mental Diseases outside Beirut for treatment, a pattern of psychiatric mobility that endured the collapse of the Ottoman empire and the colonial partition of the Levant by the British and French. Drawing on the hospital’s records and the archives of the British mandate government of Palestine, this article examines why so many Palestinians travelled for treatment, and how this pattern of mobility was rearticulated in the wake of war, anti-colonial revolt, and colonial repression. As well as underlining the need to escape methodological nationalism in the history of psychiatry and to track continuities across conventional chronological boundaries, this case study emphasises the agency of families of patients as they navigated new borders and the seismic social and political developments of these pivotal decades in the making of the modern Middle East.
Abstract This article offers a comparative analysis of poliomyelitis vaccination policies in Italy and Spain from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, examining the transition from Salk’s inactivated poliovaccine to Sabin’s oral polio vaccine as a politically negotiated process rather than a linear scientific progression. Drawing on documents from the Albert Sabin Archives, the Rockefeller Foundation Archives, and other international organisations, it situates Sabin at the centre of a transnational network linking scientists, national public health authorities, pharmaceutical producers, and international agencies. Comparing democratic post-war Italy and authoritarian Francoist Spain, the article places vaccine adoption within broader political and institutional contexts, showing how contrasting regimes shaped the institutionalisation of expertise, international collaboration, and vaccine governance. In both cases, Sabin’s authority and alliances facilitated access to vaccine strains, while regime-specific contexts conditioned how vaccination was tested, produced, and mobilised for national public health objectives.
Abstract The translation of smallpox inoculation from the Ottoman Empire to Britain is typically said to have depended upon social and medical luminaries—especially Mary Wortley Montagu and Hans Sloane—overcoming ethnocentric cum ethical objections to the protocol’s adoption. Yet it remains puzzling that scores of people during the 1720s took the seemingly counterintuitive step of deliberate infection with the virus before there was much evidence of reduced morbidity or proof of the greater risk of dying after incidental exposure to variola major. This paper re-examines the surgical procedure, which was central to the protocol. Opponents claimed that the procedure, initially tested on felons and orphans, was barbaric. Yet, ironically, in adapting Eastern techniques, British surgeons made it more invasive. Indeed, the procedure’s very designation as ‘inoculation’ indicates that they were not so much attempting to forestall a severe, possibly lethal infection as cure what they considered an underlying malignancy.
This paper examines how the eugenics movement, led by Leonard Darwin, mounted an unsuccessful campaign to introduce eugenic ideals into national school curricula and teacher training programmes in early twentieth-century England. In 1913, eugenic schemes for education, marriage, and parenthood were presented at the Eugenics Education Conference but received a hostile reception from the National Union of Teachers as doubts emerged about teaching children sexual knowledge in classrooms. The paper also considers how eugenics was implicated in sex as a gendered identity and as a discourse of female sexual empowerment by examining the reach of eugenic ideas among female schoolteachers and other women educationalists. It concludes hesitancy about teaching eugenics in schools was in part rooted in an acute reluctance to give children direct access to sexual knowledge and in the diffuse or polymorphic nature of eugenic ideology itself.
This article examines the functions and roles of physician societies in the professionalisation of medicine in Late Imperial China. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw the gradual emergence and spread of medical societies at the regional and interregional levels. In the early sixteenth century, medical practitioners in Xin'an and Beijing began to engage in intensified interaction and collaboration. Throughout the seventeenth century, Zhejiang physicians established local societies, and these growing networks eventually culminated in the formation of an empire-wide association based in Hangzhou. These associations played a crucial role in the professionalisation of medicine: they elevated the status of medicine and its practitioners, fostered a sense of professional identity, and contributed to the development of a medical canon, standardised curricula, and clinical ethics.
This is the first systematic study of plague pesthouses in early modern England, based on a comprehensive survey of municipal and parish records. It demonstrates that pesthouses were used in England earlier, more widely and more persistently than historians have recognised. Their development was locally driven. New establishments peaked between c.1550 and c.1624-decades before the national Plague Orders of 1666 made their provision compulsory. In contrast to celebrated Italian responses, English pesthouses were integrated into wider containment regimes centred on household quarantine. Pesthouse patients were defined by the absence of available domestic care. Account books and staffing lists indicate that pesthouses operated less as punitive sites of confinement than as rudimentary hospitals, routinely employing nurses, surgeons, and apothecaries. By reinterpreting pesthouses as centres of isolation and organised care, the article revises narratives of English plague governance and reframes these institutions as practical expressions of Christian charity.
What does the Wasteocene look like when gazed at from the point of view of Africa's colonial history? How is it linked to other scales of analysis, and how can we engage with it in ways that are relevant to simultaneous understandings of toxic waste and power dynamics in contemporary global and local systems? This paper engages with the Wasteocene from the perspective of gold mining in colonial Zimbabwe and discusses narratives and knowledge regimes deployed by racial capitalism to domesticate and extirpate African experiences of slow chemical violence. The paper integrates the Wasteocene in discussing extraction, toxic waste, and human bodies in colonial Africa and argues that the racialized molecular violence constituted a 'slow genocide' and scholarship must illuminate on these experiences and how they are linked to contemporary forms of managing hazardous waste and toxic residues in Africa. The article uses archival material, secondary sources, and scientific articles.
This article demonstrates how global bodily ideals exemplified in visible muscularity came to be entrenched among men in late colonial India. Its source material is men's "physique photographs," (images tied to the exposition and promotion of physical culture) embedded in personal albums, health handbooks, and advertisements in vernacular sports periodicals, which attest to the growing uptake of exercise and bodybuilding amongst city-based men. It argues that in a climate of intense experimentation and research, the therapeutic effects of exercise were foregrounded, and notions of male bodily beauty were transformed. Through a close reading of textual and visual material, this article underlines the role of fitness entrepreneurs and provides evidence for the early beginnings of the commercialized fitness industry in India. Whilst academic scholarship has hitherto focused on the consumption of new health products, this research demonstrates that gyms and fitness services were critical in the promotion of muscular manliness in India.
