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The article establishes so far neglected links between the German anti-English pamphlets during WWI, on the one hand, and right-wing antidemocratic theory after the war, on the other, by engaging with their central argumentative forms. Particularly the metaphors of the English as “merchants” or “peddlers” as well as England as a mechanical civilization in contradistinction to German organic culture facilitated the transfer of arguments between the discourses on war and democracy, respectively. The metaphors were old, but they were intensified by the concrete enmity – and further intensified the domestic constitutional arguments by underscoring the fundamental unsuitability of democracy for Germany.

This article explores the entangled histories of dengue and yellow fever. It traces how historical conflations of these diseases deepened at the start of the twentieth century in the context of rising fears that yellow fever might spread to Asia. Advances in biomedicine, I suggest, reinforced notions of their kinship and generated competing theories that dengue either foreshadowed yellow fever in Asia or inoculated the region against it. This history in which the language and science of dengue and yellow fever shadowed one another offers a nonlinear narrative of scientific progress. Furthermore, as the so-called neglected tropical diseases resurge in the present, it elucidates how disease threats are read against one another. Thus, the article offers a historical context to ongoing discussions on disease emergence and pandemic preparedness.

Like a number of contemporary progressive thinkers, William Clarke (1852-1901) was a socialist with liberal leanings. Believing in the benefits of collective ownership and democratic reform, he joined the Fabian Society in 1886 before resigning from it in 1897. This article seeks to account for Clarke's intellectual development from socialism to liberalism by focusing on the implications of his political writings. It argues that this estrangement partly resulted from the incompatibility between the principle of historic necessity underlying his critique of private ownership and his ongoing commitment to democracy and pragmatic reform.

Especially in the second part of The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, Hans Blumenberg considered philosophical modernity through a reflection on theodicy. Theodicy even appeared here as constitutive for modernity, although this philosophical project of defending God against the existence of evil had been challenged several times in the past centuries. This role of theodicy in Legitimacy has been emphasized by Blumenberg's readers, particularly Odo Marquard. This article shows how debates on modernity and theodicy actually played a more central role in the early reception of Blumenberg's book than his debates with Karl Lowith or Carl Schmitt on secularization.

Jon Stewart has recently argued that Hegel's defense of Friedrich Creuzer's controversial Symbolik should give us pause to reconsider the widely held view of Hegel's philosophy as racist and Eurocentric. More attention needs to be paid, however, to the strategy that Hegel employs in this defense. This article argues for the influence of Aristotle's theory of epigenesis on Hegel's philosophy of nature as well as his understanding of the stages of world-historical development. This Aristotelian understanding privileges the masculine West in relation to the feminine East that provides the material but not the vital efficient cause that animates Greek culture.

Recently, there has been a prominent call in the history of medicine for greater engagement with disability perspectives. In this article, I suggest that critiques of the so-called medical model have been an important vehicle by which alternative narratives of disability entered the clinical arena. Historians of medicine have rarely engaged with the medical model beyond descriptive accounts of it. I argue that to more adequately address disability perspectives, historians of medicine must better historicize the medical model concept and critique, which has been drawn upon by physicians, activists, and others to advance particular perspectives on disability. My present contribution describes two distinct formulations of critique that originated in differing interest groups and characterized the medical model alternatively as insufficient and oppressive. I examine the World Health Organization's efforts to incorporate these distinctive medical model critiques during the development and revision of its International Classification of Impairments, Disabilities, and Handicaps.

For a project on the origins and migrations of the European nations, Leibniz wanted to see a comparative lexicon purporting to derive the Germanic languages from Asiatic sources. Friends in nearby Gotha were known to have the book; its author had corresponded with Leibniz a few years earlier. But actually getting the book was more difficult than one might expect. In addition to the actual logistics and manners of scholarly communication in the late seventeenth century, this essay shows what scholars were trying to accomplish by establishing the prehistoric origins of the modern nations.

Research leading to this article was funded by a European Research Council Starting Grant (under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme/ERC grant agreement no. 336564) for the project Visual Representations of the Third Plague Pandemic (University of St Andrews and University of Cambridge). Pestis minor is a pathological category that at the height of the third plague pandemic (1894–1959) fueled extensive debate and research among medical scientists. Referring to an attenuated or benign form of plague, evidence of pestis minor or pestis ambulans was produced in medical reports across the world so as to raise the question of whether the disease could survive measures against it by means of temporary transformation. Afflicting its victims only by the slightest lymphatic swellings, this theory went, the disease could thus lurk in the human body until conditions allowed it to break out again in its true, malignant form. This article draws for the first time a history of this contested pathology, the diagnostic and epidemiological questions raised by it, and the way in which it came to play a significant role in debates about the nature of plague at the turn of the nineteenth century. Publisher PDF

Völkisch research was a phenomenon in the social sciences and humanities that aimed to describe and cultivate the Volk, conceived broadly as a group united by some pre-existing or transcendental bond. Studies of this research complex have thus far been dominated by questions related to its close affiliation with the Nazi regime, but much remains unknown about how its longer-term development related to the transformation of science or to conceptual changes in the notion of Volk. This article addresses these questions by tracing the ways in which the idea of Volk transformed through accommodation with shifting scientific norms.

A contribution to the yet unwritten histories of Philippine Studies (PS), the Institute of Philippine Culture (IPC), and the Ateneo de Manila University (ADMU) Press, this article examines the rise of Filipino postcolonial institutions of knowledge production in the shadow of the Cold War. It argues that PS, IPC, and ADMU Press constituted a coherent and coordinated network that sought to establish a postcolonial culture of knowledge production after 1946. Moreover, their development signaled the rise of decolonizing thought that coincided with the emergence of Cold War area studies. KEYWORDS: POSTCOLONIAL KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION • INTELLECTUAL HISTORY • COLD WAR • DECOLONIZATION • JESUITS

International audience; Under the French ancien régime, Latin reading was commonly taught in parochial or charitable schools, the so-called petites écoles. The goal was to enable pupils to pronounce prayers and psalms in accordance with the learned ecclesiastical culture. The instruction and modeling provided by schoolmasters were essential in children's training, but so too were the books they used. Books of hours, ABCs, and psalters integrated particular typographical layouts, punctuation, and other symbols to help pupils read aloud. A similar system of visual cues was established in plainchant books in the course of the seventeenth century. This essay explores for the first time the graphic convergence between school books (reading primers) and plainchant books. It examines how they helped to develop the Latin literacy of often semiliterate people through oral performance of both reading and singing.

This article examines Bodin's distinction between sovereignty and government ("la police") in the Six Livres de la République (1576) in the intellectual context of the Wars of Religion, and argues that the terminology of "la police" requires investigation in order to clarify its meaning. It demonstrates how Bodin distinguished his understanding of political science from his contemporaries in explaining the relationship between administrative and sovereign power in such a way as to reinforce his concept of sovereignty.

An influential policy network emerged from two overlapping developments of the 1970s and 1980s: new research programs focusing on tropical diseases and debates about how to implement the concept of primary health care at the World Health Organization. Participating actors came together in an informal network that, by the late 1980s, expanded advocacy to include the promotion and reorganization of all forms of research that might improve health in the Global South. This goal became associated with a search for new research methods for determining priorities, a quest that reached a peak in the early 1990s when the World Bank entered the picture. The bank brought money, economic analyses, and neoliberal ideology to the research advocacy movement and helped stimulate an upsurge of cost-effective forms of economic thinking in global health (GH) circles. This expanded research network provided some of the conceptual foundations and leadership for several of the most emblematic institutions of the new GH. These included new organizations to bring together and coordinate public and private actors in pursuit of common aims and new forms of economic rationality. The network's advocacy work contributed as well to a massive expansion of GH research at the turn of the century.

This article analyzes the gap between the defectological narrative of care and the reality of institutional life for children with learning disabilities in the Soviet Union of the 1930s. It shows that, under Stalin, the Soviet discipline of defectology entailed a promise of correction and social integration that aligned well with the official rhetoric of triumphant socialism and that incorporated new, specific ideological meanings into its long-standing narrative of care. I also show that the defectological narrative was rarely realized in practice due to not only scarce material resources but also a profound reversal of defectological and Marxist conceptions of labor. By analyzing the disconnect between rhetoric and reality in the treatment of "mentally retarded" children in prewar Stalinism, this article contributes to a deeper understanding of the Soviet system and ideology of care.

From 1928 to 1934, about half of the two dozen women who were surgically sterilized while under the care of American doctors working with the International Grenfell Association (IGA) in St. Anthony, Newfoundland, were sterilized because they were deemed to be mentally unfit or substandard. These sterilizations coincided with rising concern about feebleminded persons and eugenic and legislative solutions across the United States, the British Empire, and beyond, but Newfoundland did not develop a eugenic movement nor did it enact laws to sanction surgical sterilization. What happened in St. Anthony was a result of the otherwise beneficial “Americanization” of the IGA., Environ la moitié des deux douzaines de femmes qui subirent une stérilisation chirurgicale entre 1928 et 1934 alors qu’elles étaient soignées par des médecins américains qui travaillaient pour l’International Grenfell Association (IGA) à St. Anthony (Terre-Neuve) furent stérilisées parce qu’elles étaient considérées comme mentalement inaptes ou inférieures. Ces stérilisations coïncidaient avec la montée des préoccupations suscitées par les personnes d’esprit faible et des solutions eugéniques et législatives adoptées aux États-Unis, dans l’empire britannique et au-delà. Aucun mouvement eugénique ne vit cependant le jour à Terre-Neuve, qui n’adopta pas de lois pour approuver la stérilisation chirurgicale. Ce qui se produisit à St. Anthony était le résultat de l’américanisation de l’IGA, qui fut par ailleurs bénéfique.

Blumenberg's The Legitimacy of the Modern Age was published in the same year as Foucault's The Order of Things (1966). Both books attempt to grasp certain not altogether self-evident changes in the Western history of knowledge and attempt new methods of considering these discontinuities and the so-called "thresholds" between epochs. Beyond such general points of shared interest, one must ask if Blumenberg and Foucault share other intellectual features, for they both developed strong philosophical critiques of Husserlian and Heideggerian approaches to history, critiques that arose from their shared hostility to a kind of "historicism," alongside their refusal of any "substance."

For decades, physicians wrote much of the history of medicine, often "great man" histories that celebrated their colleagues' accomplishments as part of a celebratory historical narrative. Beginning in the 1970s, social historians challenged this type of scholarship, arguing that it was Whiggish, omitted the flaws of the medical profession, left patients out of the story, and ignored issues of gender, race, and class. This Garrison Lecture revisits this history through the prism of my recent book, The Good Doctor: A Father, a Son, and the Evolution of Medical Ethics, which is essentially a biography of my physician father, Phillip Lerner, and an autobiography. In the talk I ask whether there is true historical value to biography or whether it should serve only as an adjunct to "real" social history. I also historicize my own career, something I chose not to do in the book.

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link. An article on scientific and poetic experiments concerning air.

This article explores theories of mediation in examining sovereignty. An advantage of critical media studies is its capacity to consider macro and micro scales of meaning. The significance of radical transitions of scale to sovereign functions is clear at our digital moment. However, we find fascinating preliminary settings for mediated sovereignty during the mid-to-late seventeenth century, a period that saw radical remapping of sovereign powers. Revolutions in the forms of sovereignty are apparent in Thomas Hobbes's reading of the new Commonwealth through perceptual technologies and in the work of Margaret Cavendish, whose play with Robert Hooke's "design'd business" of magnified quantum worlds informed her hybrid fiction-philosophy.

In the late 1940s, amid elevated concern about heart disease and new funding to fight it, multiple screening emerged alongside group psychotherapy for weight loss as two innovative responses of the American public health community. I describe the early trajectory and fate in the 1950s of both programs as shaped by the ongoing political controversy about national health insurance. Group weight loss became the main de facto American response to a perceived obesity-driven heart disease crisis. The episode casts light on the larger picture of how postwar American public health gravitated toward interventions centered on individual behavior and may offer lessons for obesity interventions today.

In the face of an obdurate disease, the Mission to Lepers made a virtue out of "saving" children from leprosy and from paganism by separating them from their parents so that they became a source of publicity, sponsorship, and fund-raising. This policy transformed a benevolent work of mercy into a professional one, for it soon became clear that children separated from their parents did not develop leprosy. Consequently, the asylum became a site where scientific conclusions were made about the transmission of the disease, and the authority of the mission was enhanced at international medical conferences. This nascent professionalism became sufficient for the Philippines to also be persuaded to remove children from their leprosy-infected parents. In turn, Culion-based research on the observations of children ensured the authority of the American and Philippine doctors in informing decisions made by the League of Nations and later the World Health Organization.

In the early 1900s, railroad companies throughout the Great Plains worked with agricultural extension personnel and land-grant colleges to design demonstration trains for rural communities. Historian David Vail examines how these “farming specials” connected field and extension science by designing mobile laboratories that traveled from town to town to promote the newest farming technologies as well as to assist landowners with threats to their fields. This article considers the intersections of science, technology, environment, and production farming to better understand how specialized agricultural science connected to experiential practices on the land.

This essay investigates cinema's engagement with the neo-Malthusian movement to control global overpopulation in the long 1960s. It examines the contested production and reception of Z.P.G.: Zero Population Growth (Michael Campus, 1972) and Soylent Green (Richard Fleischer, 1973) to shed new light on the nexus of science, activism and the media. It argues that the history of the movement, usually reconstructed as an elite scientific and political discourse, cannot be fully understood without also taking into account mass-market entertainment.

In book 8 of Paradise Lost, God ironically laments that he is “alone / From all Eternitie” (405–6), lacking an “equal” suitable for companionship. This article argues that God's provocative claim to loneliness registers a history of divine desocialization stretching from the depolytheization of the biblical and classical gods to Milton's own relentless reduction of Christianity to its monotheistic core. Milton could not have endorsed divine loneliness, but his poem thinks about it deeply nonetheless.

I argue that Ann Petry in her novel The Street (1946) portrays chronic illness, disfigurement, and disability as embodied effects of racism resulting from labor exploitation, crowded and unsafe housing conditions, and lack of access to nourishing food and respectful, thorough, and effective health care. Further, Petry conveys that Western medicine (as practiced in the United States) reproduces and maintains white supremacy through mechanisms including how treatment resources are allocated, how medical institutions collaborate with law enforcement officials and institutions, and how medical professionals and spaces authorize the objectification of Black bodies. Some of the conditions Petry portrays as disabling are not recognized by Western medicine or measured in health disparities research; other conditions, Petry shows, are misrecognized by those discourses. Thus, Petry's novel challenges the medical model of disability while also urging a more expansive understanding of what should be recognized as an embodied effect of racism.

This article details the variety of critical strategies in Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, finding strong connections with her writing as a reviewer for the Analytical Review, the literary review published by the reformer and Dissenter Joseph Johnson. In Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft employed textual analyses and an evolving set of theoretical positions that had been introduced in the course of her career at the Analytical Review. By elucidating the importance of the reviews and the specificity of Wollstonecraft's procedures, this article contributes to a growing consensus that Rights of Woman initiated feminist literary criticism.

Approximately thirty almost entirely overlooked books appeared in Europe between 1500 and 1700 that include the word anthropologia in their titles. At first glance, the content of these works bears no resemblance to anthropology as we think of it. They present a combination of medieval traditions, cutting-edge medical practices, and evolving natural philosophical and theological systems found in universities of all confessions across Europe. But these largely overlooked sources reveal that the disciplines we use to study ourselves may have developed from an intertwined natural philosophical and religious system. They suggest that anthropology's typical origin narrative should be reconsidered.