Parkinson did not include personality or behavioural characteristics in his analysis of etiology but attributed the cause to pathology of the spinal cord. 14 He described each patient as having a different life story, their ages ranging from their mid-fifties to early seventies. Parkinson included contrasting psychological profiles of his subjects, but did not offer cultural characterisations comparable to contemporary medical discourses on gout or tuberculosis. 15 One
This collaborative volume explores changing perceptions of health and disease in the context of the burgeoning global modernities of the long nineteenth century. During this period, popular and medical understandings of the mind and body were challenged, modified, and reframed by the politics and structures of ‘modern life’, understood in industrial, social, commercial, and technological terms. Bringing together work by leading international scholars, this volume demonstrates how a multiplicity of medical practices were organised around new and evolving definitions of the modern self. The study offers varying and culturally specific definitions of what constituted medical modernity for practitioners around the world in this period. Chapters examine the ways in which cancer, suicide, and social degeneration were seen as products of the stresses and strains of ‘new’ ways of living in the nineteenth century, and explore the legal, institutional, and intellectual changes that contributed to both positive and negative understandings of modern medical practice. The volume traces the ways in which physiological and psychological problems were being constituted in relation to each other, and to their social contexts, and offers new ways of contextualising the problems of modernity facing us in the twenty-first century.
This article will describe the contemporary scientific techniques used to excavate and identify the dead bodies of disappeared detainees from the Uruguayan dictatorship. It will highlight the developments that have led to increased success by forensic anthropologists and archaeologists in uncovering human remains, as well as their effects, both social and political, on promoting the right to the truth and mechanisms of transitional justice.
The construction of an underground car park beneath the main square of Turin, Italy in 2004 led to the unearthing of the skeletonised remains of twenty-two individuals attributable to the early eighteenth century. At this time the city was besieged during the War of the Spanish Succession in a hard-fought battle that resulted in unexpected triumph for the Piedmontese, a victory that marked a fundamental turning point in Italian history. The current study assesses the strength of evidence linking the excavated individuals to the siege and assesses their possible role in the battle through consideration of their biological profiles, patterns of pathology and the presence of traumatic injuries. This article presents the first analysis of evidence for the siege of Turin from an anthropological point of view, providing new and unbiased information from the most direct source of evidence available: the remains of those who actually took part.
This article provides an introduction to this special section of James Baldwin Review 7 devoted to Baldwin and film. Jackson considers Baldwin’s distinct approach to film criticism by pairing him with James Agee, another writer who wrote fiction as well as nonfiction in several genres, and who produced a large body of film criticism, especially during the 1940s. While Agee, a white southerner born almost a generation before Baldwin, might seem an unlikely figure to place alongside Baldwin, the two shared a great deal in terms of temperament and vision, and their film writings reveal a great deal of consensus in their diagnoses of American pathologies. Another important context for Baldwin’s complex relationship to film is television, which became a dominant media form during the 1950s and exerted a great influence upon both the mainstream reception of the civil rights movement and Baldwin’s reception as a public intellectual from the early 1960s to the end of his life. Finally, the introduction briefly discusses the articles that constitute this special section.
Recent killings of unarmed black citizens are a fresh reminder of the troubled state of racial integration in the United States. At the same time, the unfolding Black Lives Matter protest movements and the responses by federal agencies each testify to a not insignificant capacity for addressing social pathologies surrounding the color line. In order to respond to this ambivalent situation, this article suggests a pairing between the work of James Baldwin and that of the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein. I will argue that we cannot fully appreciate the depths of what Baldwin called the “savage paradox” of race without the insights provided by Klein and object relations psychoanalysis. Conversely, Baldwin helps us to sound out the political significance of object relations approaches, including the work of Klein and those influenced by her such as Hanna Segal and Wilfred Bion. In conversation with the work of Baldwin, object relations theory can help to identify particular social settings and institutions that might allow concrete efforts toward racial justice to take root.
humanitarians as engaged in an enterprise of governance as opposed to an action of solidarity, involved in cataloguing pathologies of ‘humanitarian bodies’ to fill the data vacuum in fragile settings. These criticisms notwithstanding, data remains essential in revealing patterns in play in our everyday world. It provides a snapshot of the present, and combined with analysis produces vital knowledge about how various categories of people experience crises
. Humanitarian innovation is politically safe, logoed, glitzy and smart. Besides establishment acceptance, humanitarian innovation draws positivity from its disavowal of past failures and commitment to a future of ‘failing-forward in a spirit of honesty’ ( HPG, 2018 : 132). Transparency regarding current systemic ‘pathologies’ like institutionalising self-interest or neglecting the agency of the disaster-affected ( ibid .: 22–3) is part of the self-cleansing necessary to birth a humanitarianism 2.0. This paper, however, questions whether humanitarian
plans for projects in Unity state rested on the assumption of a stable environment in the years to come. In Bentiu, the capital of Unity state, MSF-H had ceased its nutritional activities in 2012–13 and invested instead in the treatment of tuberculosis and HIV patients in Bentiu State Hospital, both pathologies requiring long-term and sustained care. In Leer, where it had been independently running the town’s hospital since 2005, the organisation was planning a phased withdrawal
intravenous fluids for the disease. Intentions to develop new Ebola care protocols in Kivu were impeded by the wide range of pathologies and severity of illness of the patients, although from September all patients who did test positive for Ebola were offered an intravenous experimental curative treatment that the Congolese authorities had agreed could be administered in designated treatment centres via a ‘compassionate use’ protocol. Although not noted in