In the April 1912 edition of Eugenics Review, an E. Schuster wrote about a new series of pamphlets, “New Tracts for the Times”: “We welcome the publication of this series, aiming as it does at awakening ‘an enlightened social conscience’…” (94)
Tag Archive: england
Digital Highlight: Bathing Medicine
The history of ‘alternative medicine’ does not begin in the twentieth century. The arguments between allopaths and homeopaths formed part of mainstream medical dialogue in the nineteenth century and alternatives to ‘heroic’ medicine or mainstream medical treatment have always enjoyed …
Digital Highlight: A History of Intoxication
In 1840 in Preston, in the north of England in Lancashire, Joseph Dearden published A Brief History of Ancient and Modern Tee-totalism, an apologia for the temperance movement.
Digital Highlight: The Fascination of Crime
Narratives of Remarkable Crimes, selected from the German works of Anselm Ritter von Feuerbach and published in 1846 in London, consists of 14 of the trials in Feuerbach’s original 1300 page work chosen and translated by Lady Duff Gordon. She …
Digital Highlight: Faces of the Insane
In 1843, Sir Alexander Morison published The Physiognomy of Mental Diseases, a compilation of observations and sketches of mental patients.
Images from the Library
From Mrs. H.R. Haweis’ The Art of Beauty (1883). As always, for more from the Medical Heritage Library, please visit our full collection!
Digital Highlight: York Retreat
The care of the mentally ill has been a current topic in medical discourse for centuries. In the late eighteenth century, a Quaker named William Tuke opened the York Retreat in York, England, as a new type of mental health hospital. …
Digital Highlight: Care for Ailing Sailors
Modern-day students of history learn the use of primary sources almost from the minute they enter an undergraduate program; some, from high schools with engaged history faculty or by taking part in programs like History Day in Massachusetts, before then. …
Digital Highlight: “I Do Believe in Spooks!”
John Harris’ Inferences from Haunted Houses and Haunted Men is a great read as we look forward to the Halloween season. Harris’ work is best approached in a kind of smorgasbord state of mind: there is no single through-line argument, rather Harris …
Digital Highlight: Abduction!
Tabloid-style stories have been popular for far longer than what we think of as tabloid journalism. A Narrative of the Seizure & Confinement of Ann Brookhouse from the end of the eighteenth century is just such a piece. Purporting to …
Recent articles in history of medicine
- "Confinement of the Higher Orders": The Social Role of Private Lunatic Asylums in Ireland, c. 1820-60
- "Spitting Is Dangerous, Indecent, and against the Law!" Legislating Health Behavior during the American Tuberculosis Crusade
- "They Increase in Beauty and Elegance": Transforming Cadavers and the Epistemology of Dissection in Early Nineteenth-Century American Medical Education
- A Radical Proposition: The Brief but Exceptional History of the Seattle School Clinic, 1914-21
- A Short History of Medical Genetics
- Alienists, Attendants and the Containment of Suicide in Public Lunatic Asylums, 1845-1890
- Arthur W. Frank’s: Letting Stories Breathe: A Socio-Narratology
- Bacteriology in the Service of Sanitation: The Factory Environment and the Regulation of Industrial Anthrax in Late-Victorian Britain
- Biological Aging and Social Characteristics: Gerontology, the Baltimore City Hospitals, and the National Institutes of Health
- Birth Attendants and Midwifery Practice in Early Twentieth-century Derbyshire