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supervising, controlling, and disciplining individual bodies. 3 With regard to ‘child rescue’, the moniker given to evangelical attempts at ‘improving’ the lives of children living in poverty in the late nineteenth century, the scholarship is less complete, especially when it comes to the sick and disabled. 4 By considering the treatment and experience of the impaired/disabled child in a voluntary organisation, the Church of England-sponsored Waifs and Strays Society, this
kinds of balance: moderation, physiological homeostasis and psychological stress responses. Through these case studies extreme environments emerge as sites where, firstly, notions of balance could be debated and reconstituted, and secondly where the white adult male's body became established as the norm for such research. This unquestioned centralisation of a very specific kind of body as a standard measure in balance research – particularly as it was a body not indigenous to extreme environments – had consequences for the practices of both science and exploration
such as Unani Tibb, Siddha, and Sowa Rigpa, to name only the most prominent ones. 11 Each of these medical modernities had their own specific accents, politics, and, above all, their distinctive body imaginaries. They were each shaped by their own historically specific trysts with what the practitioners themselves conceptualised as modernity. Each of these merits a devoted historical exploration. But in the present chapter, I shall focus exclusively on the Ayurvedic tradition, which has today emerged as not only the
sisters of the British Army were eventually posted to all war zones of the Second World War to care for combatants. The chapter maps the nursing practices on active service overseas that recovered men, including body care, feeding work, the management of pain and support for the dying. These four areas of nursing practice are commonly associated with nursing work, yet, in war zones, they demanded complex gendered brokery. The intimacy of body care, the moment when the single young female nurse meets the young male patient, required skilful negotiations in order to
Introduction In 1978 the Health Education Council (HEC), a centralised non-governmental body responsible for health education services, launched a campaign to increase public awareness of the health problems caused by overeating, inactivity and smoking. Their campaign used television, poster and newspaper advertisements to encourage people to ‘Look After Yourself’ by eating less, exercising more and quitting smoking. It was devised as a ‘better health’ campaign that could unite risk factors for coronary heart disease (CHD
populace in order to clear the way for new and better ones: Revolutions are, for the political body they shake, what medicines are for the impaired human body whose harmony they must restore. In both cases, the first effect is a disorder, the first sensation pain. 1 Petit thereby claimed that the ‘shock of all passions’ which had
Late nineteenth-century discourse on fatigue expressed a variety of concerns about modernity and its limits, and about social, political, and cultural decline. It did so in a language that drew on a range of scientific and cultural tropes. Crucially, this discourse relied on a new scientific understanding of the material world and of the body, grounded in the concepts of ‘energy’ and ‘work’. As Anson Rabinbach has shown, this new paradigm, inaugurated by the ‘discovery’ of the laws of thermodynamics, exerted a pervasive influence across Europe in the second half of
politics, practices, and body imaginaries, stress, fatigue, and nervous exhaustion were generally deemed to be the inevitable corollaries of the pressures and pace of modern civilisation. ‘Life at high pressure’ was, according to the eminent London-based physician Thomas Stretch Dowse, ‘the prominent feature of the nineteenth century’, and tracing this concept across nineteenth-century cultures affords new insights into both popular and medical understandings of the body and mind. Dowse declared in his 1880 study of brain and nerve exhaustion that
’s College, London, and served on several professional and regulatory bodies. During the 1990s he was a founding member of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics and chaired a public inquiry into human– animal ‘xenotransplants’. His contribution to British bioethics has 106 The making of British bioethics led one lawyer to claim that he ‘virtually invented the field in the United Kingdom’.2 In 2002 the Labour government endorsed this view when it awarded him a knighthood for ‘services to bioethics’.3 On the one hand, there was little particularly new in Kennedy’s call for
profession of medicine. Women’s bodies and minds were mainly, and naturally so, determined and preoccupied by the heavy demands of menstruation, reproduction and lactation. Their nervous system was much more delicate than that of men, as the exclusive occurrence of hysteria among women made clear. In order to become a physician, masculine qualities were needed. The rare woman who by