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Colonial Caring covers over a century of colonial nursing by nurses from a wide range of countries including: Denmark, Britain, USA, Holland and Italy; with the colonised countries including South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Ethiopia, Nigeria, India, Indonesia (Dutch East Indies) and the Danish West Indies. It presents unique perspectives from which to interrogate colonialism and post-colonialism including aspects of race, cultural difference and implications of warfare and politics upon nursing. Viewing nursing’s development under colonial and post-colonial rule reveals different faces of a profession that superficially may appear to be consistent and coherent, yet in reality is constantly reinventing itself. Considering such areas as transnational relationships, class, gender, race and politics, this book aims to present current work in progress within the field, to better understand the complex entanglements in nursing’s development as it was imagined and practised in local imperial, colonial and post-colonial contexts. Taking a chronologically-based structure, early chapters examine nursing in situations of conflict in the post-Crimean period from the Indian Rebellion to the Anglo-Boer War. Recruitment, professionalisation of nursing and of military nursing in particular, are therefore considered before moving deeper into the twentieth century reflecting upon later periods of colonialism in which religion and humanitarianism become more central. Drawing from a wide range of sources from official documents to diaries, memoirs and oral sources, and using a variety of methodologies including qualitative and quantitative approaches, the book represents ground-breaking work.

Challenging the assumption that the stigma attached to mental illness stems from public ignorance and irresponsible media coverage, this book examines mental healthcare workers’ efforts to educate the public in Britain between 1870 and 1970. It covers a period which saw the polarisation of madness and sanity give way to a belief that mental health and illness formed a continuum, and in which segregative care within the asylum began to be displaced by the policy of community care. The book argues that the representations of mental illness conveyed by psychiatrists, nurses and social workers were by-products of professional aspirations, economic motivations and perceptions of the public, sensitive to shifting social and political currents. Sharing the stigma of their patients, many healthcare workers sought to enhance the prestige of psychiatry by emphasising its ability to cure acute and minor mental disorder. However, this strategy exacerbated the stigma attached to severe and enduring mental health problems. Indeed, healthcare workers occasionally fuelled the stereotype of the violent, chronically-ill male patient in an attempt to protect their own interests. Drawing on service users’ observations, the book contends that current campaigns, which conflate diverse experiences under the label mental illness, risk trivialising the difficulties facing people who live with severe and enduring mental disturbance, and fail to address the political, economic and social factors which fuel discrimination.

The English Systemis a history of port health and immigration at a critical moment of transformation at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. It challenges generally held assumptions that quarantine policies delineated intransigent national borders, and argues instead that the British geo-body was defined as a more fluid construction. A combination of port sanitation and sanitary surveillance, known to contemporaries as the ‘English System,’ was gradually introduced as an alternative to obstructive quarantines at a time of growing international commerce. Yet at the same time escalating anti-alien anxieties sought to restrict the movement of migrants and transmigrants who arrived from the Continent in increasing numbers. With the abolition of quarantine in 1896 the importance of disease categories based on place, which had formed its foundation and which had been adapted for the new ‘English system,’ lessened. However, these categories had not collapsed but were merely transferred. This book examines this crucial transition showing how the classification of ‘foreign’ and ‘domestic’ disease was translated, after the abolition of quarantine and during the period of mass migration, to ‘foreign’ and ‘domestic’ bodies – or the immigrant and the native population.

Many people are shocked upon discovering that tens of thousands of innocent persons in the United States were involuntarily sterilized, forced into institutions, and otherwise maltreated within the course of the eugenic movement (1900-30). Such social control efforts are easier to understand when we consider the variety of dehumanizing and fear-inducing rhetoric propagandists invoke to frame their potential victims. This book details the major rhetorical themes employed within the context of eugenic propaganda, drawing largely on original sources of the period. Early in the twentieth century the term “moron” was developed to describe the primary targets of eugenic control. This book demonstrates how the image of moronity in the United States was shaped by eugenicists. This book will be of interest not only to disability and eugenic scholars and historians, but to anyone who wants to explore the means by which pejorative metaphors are utilized to support social control efforts against vulnerable community groups.

Healing with water provides a medical and social history of English spas and hydropathic centres from 1840 to 1960. It argues that demand for treatment rather than leisure drove the development of a number of inland resorts which became renowned for expertise and facilities for hydropathy and spa treatment. Water was used in varied therapeutic approaches by both orthodox and unorthodox practitioners. It explores ideas about water’s healing potential, the importance placed on a healthy regimen and how treatment became associated with new institutions and a specialist workforce. Water cures attracted sustained support from patients suffering from a variety of complaints, some of which were associated by contemporaries with the effects of industrialisation and modernisation. The importance of broader public and private cultures of health is considered, in particular how health and social reform movements influenced the views of patients and practitioners. The relationship between the medical application of water and its use for leisure and hygienic purposes is also investigated. The study brings new perspectives to the historiography of resort development, which has focused on the seaside and leisure, exploring how health and healing influenced society and economy in specialist watering places. These aspects were actively marketed to the public. A range of medical and non-medical actors were influential in shaping facilities and environment at resorts, including local authorities, charities and private businesses. The study assesses why the NHS funded spa treatment in 1948 but support was later withdrawn, comparing this with trends in France and Germany. (247)

This book explores the life of Henry Dresser (1838–1915), one of the most productive British ornithologists of the mid-late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; it is also an exploration of ornithology during a period when the subject changed dramatically. The book is based on previously unpublished letters, diaries and photographs to provide the first detailed biography of any of the independent industrialist–naturalists who dominated nineteenth century British ornithology. Dresser travelled widely in Europe, New Brunswick and to Texas during the American Civil War before settling down to work in London in the timber and iron trades. He built enormous collections of skins and eggs of birds, many of which came from famous travellers and collectors. These collections formed the basis of over 100 publications on birds including some of the finest and some of the last of the great bird books of the late nineteenth century, combining cutting-edge scientific information with masterpieces of bird illustration. Dresser played a leading role in scientific society and in the early bird conservation movement. His correspondence and diaries reveal the inner workings, motivations, personal relationships and rivalries that existed among the leading ornithologists. This book is aimed at anyone interested in birds, history and natural history, and as a textbook for courses relating to history, history of science and museum studies.

This collection expands the history of Chinese medicine by bridging the philosophical concerns of epistemology and the history and cultural politics of transregional medical formations. Topics range from the spread of gingko’s popularity from East Asia to the West to the appeal of acupuncture for complementing in-vitro fertilization regimens, from the modernization of Chinese anatomy and forensic science to the evolving perceptions of the clinical efficacy of Chinese medicine. The individual essays cohere around the powerful theoretical-methodological approach, “historical epistemology,” with which scholars in science studies have already challenged the seemingly constant and timeless status of such rudimentary but pivotal dimensions of scientific process as knowledge, reason, argument, objectivity, evidence, fact, and truth. Yet given that landmark studies in historical epistemology rarely navigate outside the intellectual landscape of Western science and medicine, this book broadens our understanding of its application and significance by drawing on and exploring the rich cultures of Chinese medicine. In studying the globalizing role of medical objects, the contested premise of medical authority and legitimacy, and the syncretic transformations of metaphysical and ontological knowledge, contributors illuminate how the breadth of the historical study of Chinese medicine and its practices of knowledge-making in the modern period must be at once philosophical and transnational in scope. This book will appeal to students and scholars working in science studies and medical humanities as well as readers who are interested in the broader problems of translation, material culture, and the global circulation of knowledge.

Leprosy and colonialism investigates the history of leprosy in the colony of Suriname in the Dutch Caribbean within the context of colonial power and racial conflict - from the plantation economy and the age of slavery to its legacy in the modern colonial state. The book traces the origins of the modern stigmatization and exclusion of people affected with leprosy to the political tensions and racial fears of colonial slave society, tensions exerting their influence up to the present day. Leprosy was framed in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Surinamese slave society as an economic and racial problem and a social and political threat to the functioning of the slave economy, a danger to European dominance. Sufferers were attributed with an inferior racial and/or social status and the solution was to segregate and isolate them, and leave them to their fate. After the abolition of slavery, interest in the problem of leprosy diminished for a time in Suriname; however, compulsory segregation received new impetus in the early 20^th century in the context of a modernizing colonial state. Modernization included ‘medicalized’ leprosy politics that made more humane treatment possible, but at the same time increased the detection and segregation of sufferers. This colonial management of leprosy was contested: by sufferers who evaded segregation, by Afro-Surinamese and other non-white population groups who kept to their own belief systems such as the importance of taboo violations, and by patients in the asylums who kept their own an agency.

This book examines the turbulent careers of medical practitioners who wanted to become full members of the profession but were held back from the fulfilment of their ambitions. They might have fallen bankrupt, or have been forced to take a post that did not live up to their expectations. Alternatively they might have been accused of neglecting or injuring patients. Another possibility was that they felt the pressures of professional practice so severely that they fell ill or committed suicide. This book tells the stories of the unfortunate, deceptive and desperate doctors who tried and failed to earn a living, or who overcame substantial setbacks to their careers. It moves beyond the well-known examples of medical heroes and villains to reveal startling, poignant and sometimes equivocal experiences that complicate our understanding of medical professionalisation. By the end of the nineteenth century, for example, the behaviour of professional doctors aspired to be entirely disinterested; yet the continued existence of a medical marketplace demanded attention to personal gain and fostered covert competition between practitioners. This is also the first book to consider the parameters of a specifically medical masculinity and pressure points for medical male identities. As such it will be essential reading for undergraduates working on the social history of medicine, and a research text for academic treatments of professionalisation in medicine.

This book seeks to integrate the history of mental health nursing with the wider history of institutional and community care for people experiencing mental illness and/or living with a learning disability. It develops new research questions by drawing together a concern with exploring the class, gender, skills and working conditions of practitioners with an assessment of the care regimes staff helped create and patients’ experiences of them. Contributors from a range of disciplines use a variety of source material to examine both continuity and change in the history of care over two centuries. The book benefits from a foreword by Mick Carpenter and will appeal to researchers and students interested in all aspects of the history of nursing and the history of care. The book is also designed to be accessible to practitioners and the general reader.