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Anorexia nervosa appeared as a newly named disorder in the 1870s in Britain, leading historians and other scholars to pinpoint this as the origin point of a medicalised understanding of female food refusal. An abiding interest in locating the historical roots of this contemporary disorder has led scholars to emphasise the ways in which anorexia nervosa is therefore an historical and not merely a 'modern' disorder. It has also resulted in a body of scholarship that emphasises continuity over discontinuity in anorexia nervosa's medicalised history. This has meant that scholars have neglected to ask why after its introduction into the medical lexicon, anorexia nervosa failed to become established as a credible, universally recognised and endorsed, and utile diagnostic category. This thesis is therefore concerned with two intertwined curiosities about anorexia nervosa's appearance in this period. It on the one hand explores the conditions within the medical profession that facilitated anorexia nervosa's identification and influenced the form in which it was articulated. It then pivots away from its emergence to show that this new disorder failed to make inroads into either the medical community or into late Victorian society and culture more broadly. The thesis argues that following its identification, anorexia nervosa failed to achieve supremacy within the medical profession and further failed to either reflect or influence women's social reality or align neatly with the anxieties encoded within cultural discourses about young women's health. As a result, and complicating the notion of a binary between continuity or discontinuity, it concludes that although the creation of anorexia nervosa as a new and distinct clinical syndrome in the late nineteenth century does indeed represent the origin point of a medicalised understanding of female food refusal, anorexia nervosa's early history can be most aptly characterised as a 'false start' for what would become, much later, an enduring, troubling and highly visible psychiatric disorder.

This thesis examines the lives of Senior Chief Koinange wa Mbiyu and his eldest son, Peter Mbiyu Koinange. It joins with the growing rise of biographical work within African Studies. It challenges the historical understanding of late colonial rule in Kenya and the role of official myth in pre- and post-independence historical narratives. Koinange wa Mbiyu was the patriarch of one of the most respected, wealthy, and politically influential Kikuyu families of Kenya's colonial and post-colonial period. His eldest son, Peter Mbiyu, received a prestigious education abroad and returned to Kenya where he became a prominent leader for African independent education African political action. Koinange and Peter bear frequent mention in academic discussions of collaboration, discontent, nationalism, and militancy in Kenya's colonial era. This thesis challenges the widely held narrative that Koinange and Peter embraced militant politics opposing colonial rule during the 1940s. While fitting larger understandings of decolonisation, it is not an honest depiction of the Koinange's political actions. As a result, this thesis is intentionally a work of revisionist history that looks to the profound changes in the culture and nature of colinal rule during the 1940s, rather than a political shift in the Koinanges. In addition to challenging the prevalent understanding of Koinange and Peter's political action, this thesis raises a number of areas - gender, wealth, elite and family dynamics, to name a few - where the Koinange family history would further illuminate the historical understanding of the colonial era. This thesis is a dual biography, crafted as a work of narrative history. It challenges a breadth of current scholarship, utilizing the largest collection of pre-Mau Mau archival records to date. This thesis engages with a number of historiographical challenges related to biography, the individual, the family, and the challenges of oral history shaped in the crucible of cultural crisis.

In the 19th century, debates over heredity were fuelled by anecdotal evidence and special, unusual cases. Farmers, animal and plant breeders, medical writers and natural historians all took part in wider efforts to compile and arrange this production of evidence in order to tell different stories about nature, and the laws of inheritance. While many historians have claimed that 'the inheritance of acquired characteristics', an important theory about the laws of inheritance, was a widespread belief during this period, the means by which this idea became widespread have been overlooked by other historians. Recently, Bernard Lightman and Sally Shuttleworth have both argued that early-19th century efforts to create community-led scientific periodicals and publications were more constitutive of scientific practice than earlier historians have considered, while Pietro Corsi has argued that the industry of 'contributors' to periodicals, encyclopaedias and dictionaries during this period provides a means by which we can better understand readership and reception of popular scientific ideas. In this thesis, I argue that the evidence produced by practitioners and amateurs in support of the inheritance of acquired characteristics is an important means by which we can come to understand how the idea became a widespread belief, and an important part of how many people understood the workings and laws of nature. This thesis draws on a range of practical agriculture and gardening magazines, popular encyclopaedias, as well as from phrenological journals and temperance writings, many of which have not previously been included in the history of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. One important aspect of this increasing popularity came via the fact that many of the proponents of the inheritance of acquired characteristics found the idea provided a means by which familiar, religious understandings of the family, sin, and reproduction, were preserved. In an era of scientific activity that Adrian Desmond has depicted as materialist and radical, the 1820s and 1830s saw medical and scientific writers from different religious backgrounds, discovering immediate and significant biblical value in the idea that sinful habits and virtues acquired in life are transmitted to offspring.

This thesis examines late Ottoman discourses on the soul and emotions as reflected by a large corpus of psychological literature under the umbrella of ilm-i ahval-i ruh (the science of the states of the soul, psychology) in relation to the rise of the rhetoric concerning the 'new man' - an imaginary 'Ottoman individual' educated in 'new schools' to be in complete harmony with Ottoman modernization. It posits that the 'new man' was subjected to a process of design as a producing unit whether in possession of a soul or not, while the conceptual framework of the 'individual' was being formulated. The secondary literature on Ottoman modernization has illustrated intellectual efforts for designing the 'new man' in relation to the formation of national identity. In doing so it has focused on the process of indoctrination and the dissemination of normative accounts. Drawing on that literature, this thesis intends to complicate the picture and look beyond the normative accounts. By approaching the debate between materialism and spiritualism as a psychological argument and revolving the story around the metaphors of 'man as machine' and 'man as animal', it aims to display the influence of the scientific and technological changes that shaped the material as well as the intellectual culture these authors experienced. In an attempt to go beyond what lies beneath the national and religious underpinnings of the imagined 'new man', this thesis maintains a tight focus on the psychological writings of four intellectuals - all of whom gave serious thought to the debate about the soul: Abdullah Cevdet, Filibeli Ahmed Hilmi, Baha Tevfik, and Mustafa Şekip Tunç. By shifting the centre of focus of the rhetoric about the 'new man' from national or religious identity formation to the pressing concerns about economic and technological progress, it shows an Ottoman entanglement with science and technology and a deeper Ottoman inquiry into the conceptual framework of the individual. Accordingly it argues that the psychological literature on the soul and emotions bears testimony to the acute concern for how to integrate individuals into the frenzy of progressive discourses in the late Ottoman Empire. This concern constituted common ground among intellectuals from different backgrounds. Yet they held different understandings of the notion of progress and often gave different answers to deeper philosophical questions pertaining to the new man's soul, emotions, will, and relations with collective units. Such complexity demonstrates that multiple trajectories were possible before national identity formation took concrete forms in a much later context, and that transnational patterns of 'constructing the subjects' through psychological studies played an equally important role.

As the first analytic history of Ethiopian medicine, this thesis explores the interchange between the institutional development of a national medical network and the lived experiences of women as patients and practitioners of medicine from the years 1940-1975. Using birth and gender as mechanisms to explore the nation's public health history allows me to pursue alternative threads of enquiry: I ask questions not only about state activities and policy pursuits, but also about the relevance and acceptance of those actions in the lives of the citizenry. This thesis is also the first medical history of a non-colonial African country, opening up new questions about the role of non-Western actors in the expansion of Western medicine in the twentieth century. I explore the ways in which the exceptional history of Ethiopia can be couched in existing narratives of African modernity, medicine, and birth history. Issues of local agency and the creation of new social elites in the pursuit of modernity are all pertinent to the case of Ethiopia. Through both extensive archival research and oral interviews of nearly 200 participants in Haile Selassie's medical campaigns, I argue that the extent to which the imperial medical project in Ethiopia 'succeeded' was highly predicated on pre-existing conditions of gender, class, and geography.

This thesis investigates the emergence of an internationally renowned psychiatric community in Uganda. Starting at the beginning of colonial rule in 1894, it traces the changing nature of mental health care both within and beyond the state, examining the conditions that allowed psychiatry to develop as a significant intellectual tradition in the years following Independence in 1962. This ‘golden age’ of psychiatry saw Uganda establish itself as a leader of mental health care in Africa, an aspect of history that is all the more marked for its contrast with the almost complete collapse of mental health care after the expulsion of the Asian population by Idi Amin in 1972. Using a wide range of new source material, including interviews with psychiatrists, traditional healers, and community elders, this thesis pushes the history of psychiatry in Africa beyond the examination of government policy and colonial hegemony. It brings together the history of psychiatry with the histories of missionary medicine, medical education, and international health by asking what types of people, institutions, and organisations were involved in the provision of mental health care; how important the growth of Makerere Medical School was for intellectual and institutional psychiatry; and how ‘African’ mental health care had become by the end of the period. It presents a history of mental health care in a country that has tended to be overshadowed by Kenya in the historiography, yet whose engagement with medical missionaries and efforts to advance medical training meant that the trajectory of psychiatry came to be quite different. Focusing in particular on the significance of western-trained Ugandan medical practitioners for mental health care, the thesis not only analyses African psychiatrists as historical actors in their own right, but represents the first attempt to examine the development of psychiatric education in Africa.

This thesis examines the role of missionaries, the colonial government, and leprosy patients in the formation of leprosy settlements in Uganda, from the first inception of the settlements in 1927, until 1951 when the nature of leprosy control in Uganda changed, with the government appointment of a Protectorate leprologist and the creation of more treatment centres. It focuses on four leprosy settlements opened between 1930 and 1934 by the Anglican Church Missionary Society (CMS) and the British and Irish Catholic Franciscan Missionary Sisters for Africa (FMSA) and Mill Hill Mission (MHM). Firstly, this thesis explores the ways in which the differing goals, ideologies, and resources of the Protestant CMS and the Catholic FMSA and MHM shaped the formation of and social environment within leprosy settlements in a highly Christianised and denominationally divided Uganda. Secondly, it examines the relationship between the CMS and Franciscan leprosy missions and the government, exploring the cooperation and conflict that their spiritual and medical priorities had upon the social lives of patients within Uganda’s leprosy settlements. Thirdly, this thesis assesses the extent to which missionaries consciously endeavoured to engineer a social environment for leprosy patients within settlements that conformed to their ideal of Christianised, modern African communities, as well the roles that healthy and leprous Ugandans chose to play in response to these attempts at social engineering. Missionaries and Ugandan leprosy patients had different priorities, but far from being passive receptacles of the ‘civilising’ mission, most leprosy patients were active agents in pursuing their own medical, social, and economic priorities through life in the settlements.

This study considers the history of trauma, both as a psychiatric concept and as a diagnosis, and its social and cultural representation from a transnational perspective after WWII. The intellectual evolution of trauma was determined by various medical, social and cultural variables, institutions, and people who wielded influence in the postwar world order as well as diverse local contexts. This thesis focuses on the globalisation and localisation of such concept and diagnosis shaped by international and local mental health experts at the World Health Organization and the National Taiwan University Hospital. Through the efforts of these experts, trauma not only became one of the most globally diffused psychiatric diagnoses, but also a hyperbole appropriated by Taiwanese psychiatrists to account for extreme forms of social suffering. Studies have criticised the universality and the Anglo-American-centred approach to the history of traumatic psychiatry. Scholars have also begun to explore transnational histories of psychiatry by systematically comparing or tracing the diffusion routes of psychiatric topics. Their methods of enquiry and problems solved, however, differ. My research analyses a disparate collection of evidence at the level of international organisations and from local aspects, allowing not only a critical reconsideration of trauma in the trend of global medicine, but also its reception, contestation and appropriation in the non-Western contexts. Guided by the works of medical historians, literary critics and cultural anthropologists, this project combines archival research with oral history interviews to challenge the existing historical accounts of trauma, and provide evidence of the limited capacity of globalised psychiatric norms and their reception and appropriation beyond the imagination of world citizenship. It argues that such scientific artefacts were not only produced through mutual reference between Eastern and Western experiences, but also measures of instrumental rationality employed by postwar internationalists to engineer their modernity in the Global South.