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The Peterloo Massacre was more than just a Manchester event. The attendees, on whom Manchester industry depended, came from a large spread of the wider textile regions. The large demonstrations that followed in the autumn of 1819, protesting against the actions of the authorities, were pan-regional and national. The reaction to Peterloo established the massacre as firmly part of the radical canon of martyrdom in the story of popular protest for democracy. This article argues for the significance of Peterloo in fostering a sense of regional and northern identities in England. Demonstrators expressed an alternative patriotism to the anti-radical loyalism as defined by the authorities and other opponents of mass collective action.
Soaking up the rays forges a new path for exploring Britain’s fickle love of the light by investigating the beginnings of light therapy in the country from c.1890-1940. Despite rapidly becoming a leading treatment for tuberculosis, rickets and other infections and skin diseases, light therapy was a contentious medical practice. Bodily exposure to light, whether for therapeutic or aesthetic ends, persists as a contested subject to this day: recommended to counter psoriasis and other skin conditions as well as Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) and depression; closely linked to notions of beauty, happiness and well-being, fuelling tourism to sunny locales abroad and the tanning industry at home; and yet with repeated health warnings that it is a dangerous carcinogen. By analysing archival photographs, illustrated medical texts, advertisements, lamps, and goggles and their visual representation of how light acted upon the body, Woloshyn assesses their complicated contribution to the founding of light therapy. Soaking up the rays will appeal to those intrigued by medicine’s visual culture, especially academics and students of the histories of art and visual culture, material cultures, medicine, science and technology, and popular culture.
This book can be described as an 'oblique memoir'. The central underlying and repeated themes of the book are exile and displacement; lives (and deaths) during the Third Reich; mother-daughter and sibling relationships; the generational transmission of trauma and experience; transatlantic reflections; and the struggle for creative expression. Stories mobilised, and people encountered, in the course of the narrative include: the internment of aliens in Britain during the Second World War; cultural life in Rochester, New York, in the 1920s; the social and personal meanings of colour(s). It also includes the industrialist and philanthropist, Henry Simon of Manchester, including his relationship with the Norwegian explorer, Fridtjof Nansen; the liberal British campaigner and MP of the 1940s, Eleanor Rathbone; reflections on the lives and images of spinsters. The text is supplemented and interrupted throughout by images (photographs, paintings, facsimile documents), some of which serve to illustrate the story, others engaging indirectly with the written word. The book also explains how forced exile persists through generations through a family history. It showcases the differences between English and American cultures. The book focuses on the incidence of cancers caused by exposure to radioactivity in England, and the impact it had on Anglo-American relations.
Isle of Man. The ‘internment of aliens’ – a peculiar and rather hysterical measure taken by the British government after Dunkirk. He had only been married for four months. But I suspect he really enjoyed the ironic freedom of that year. This is my father as an alien. He is alien to Britain and to English culture. Surrounded by those who are not alien to him, he is captured in an alien environment. And this image of him as the central figure is one which is entirely alien to me. His existence on the edges of my childhood, his refusal to engage with me or to challenge
treatment of some diseases by exposure of the skin to the action of light, natural or artificial, has in a marvellously short space of time leaped from the obscure position of a somewhat contemptuously neglected specific to the status of one of the most valued and even invaluable weapons in the medical armoury. 2 (Royal Institute of British Architects
tend to the flower beds surrounding the cemetery. They work for the British Commonwealth War Graves Commission and take care of the many military cemeteries that dot the region. “These people came to help the English during World War I and lived here, in Calais, and Dunkirk,” said one of the workers. “They didn't fight but unloaded munitions, repaired roads or buried soldiers. Not far away from here, many Chinese men died in a train explosion, you can still see a barren area in what is now a field.” After our visit to this cemetery, Leleu and I had a conversation
Hospital of c. 1938, is an unusual and mysterious work, now contained in the closed stores of the Wellcome Library. Little is known about Langdon, and there is no evidence as to why she made this painting. 3 Produced almost four decades after the institutionalisation of light therapy in Britain (1900), Langdon’s painting depicts the original, and by now obsolete, versions of Finsen’s carbon arc lamp at a moment when the London Hospital was to refit
Finsen, the Danish researcher, Nobel laureate, and inventor of phototherapy. While not British, this photograph was reproduced and discussed by light-therapy practitioners internationally, and it provides a point of origin for the British images I analyse in this chapter. From its amateurish quality, especially those misty areas that are likely the result of clumsy ‘fixing’ during the development process, one might simply
volumes I still have on my shelf testify to the continuation of a careful, obedient and dutiful childhood. Half a century later it has become possible to understand something of the complex familial, social and psycho-dynamic aspects of what now seem, in retrospect, to be rather sad successes. hH Austerity baby [ 87 ] [ 88 ] Prize bookplates Austerity baby [ 89 ] Austerity baby [ 90 ] The British journalist Anne Karpf, daughter of Holocaust survivors, has written movingly about her anxious childhood in London. Her parents came to England from Poland in 1947
make for an image so ‘natural’ and informal as to seem suited equally to the family photo album or to the mass-produced advertisement. As the cover of a pamphlet catering to a middle-class British clientele, it curiously communicates nothing about the actual product, the ‘Homesun’ mercury vapour lamp ( Fig. 4.11 ). Instead, as with the ‘Vi-tan’ pamphlet cover we encountered in Chapter 4