Trials of the self

This book recreates the world of peasants who streamed into late-medieval and early modern northern Italy to carry containers of wine, brenta. It focuses on Saint Alberto, who was a wine porter in the city of Cremona, which imported workers in the thirteenth century - Fernand Braudel called them 'indispensable immigrants'. Alberto's legend is a mix of significant and recurring forms of behaviour - after finishing his daily work as a field hand, kneeling before a cross to say his prayers. It is from the annals of Reggio Emilia, Piacenza, Parma, and Cremona that one can glean information about Alberto. Alberto's transformation from historical non-person to celebrity began within a few days of his burial. Claims of his frequent praying in Saint-Mattia derived from the news of his healing miracles, and the book presents factual accounts of his posthumous reputation. The ecclesiastical authorities of Cremona consigned the chapel of Saint-Alberto to the wine porters of their city. The book deals at length with brentatore, the Italian wine porter, and brenta. It is from the scatological imagination of Teofilo Folengo and other works of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that one gets a glimpse of how wine porters were perceived by others. The book looks at who orchestrated Alberto's cult as campaigning for one's own sainthood is really rather unseemly.

In this book scholars from across the globe investigate changes in ‘society’ and ‘nation’ over time through the lens of immunisation. Such an analysis unmasks the idea of vaccination as a simple health technology and makes visible the social and political complexities in which vaccination programmes are embedded. The collection of essays gives a comparative overview of immunisation at different times in widely different parts of the world and under different types of political regime. Core themes in the chapters include immunisation as an element of state formation; citizens’ articulation of seeing (or not seeing) their needs incorporated into public health practice; allegations that development aid is inappropriately steering third-world health policies; and an ideological shift that treats vaccines as marketable and profitable commodities rather than as essential tools of public health. Throughout, the authors explore relationships among vaccination, vaccine-making, and the discourses and debates on citizenship and nationhood that have accompanied mass vaccination campaigns. The thoughtful investigations of vaccination in relation to state power, concepts of national identify (and sense of solidarity) and individual citizens’ sense of obligation to self and others are completed by an afterword by eminent historian of vaccination William Muraskin. Reflecting on the well-funded global initiatives which do not correspond to the needs of poor countries, Muraskin asserts that an elite fraternity of self-selected global health leaders has undermined the United Nations system of collective health policy determination by launching global disease eradication and immunisation programmes over the last twenty years.

This book explains the current fascination with autism by linking it to a longer history of childhood development. Drawing from a staggering array of primary sources, it traces autism back to its origins in the early twentieth century and explains why the idea of autism has always been controversial and why it experienced a 'metamorphosis' in the 1960s and 1970s. The book locates changes in psychological theory in Britain in relation to larger shifts in the political and social organisation of schools, hospitals, families and childcare. It explores how government entities have dealt with the psychological category of autism. The book looks in detail at a unique children's 'psychotic clinic' set up in London at the Maudsley Hospital in the 1950s. It investigates the crisis of government that developed regarding the number of 'psychotic' children who were entering the public domain when large long-stay institutions closed. The book focuses on how changes in the organisation of education and social services for all children in 1970 gave further support to the concept of autism that was being developed in London's Social Psychiatry Research Unit. It also explores how new techniques were developed to measure 'social impairment' in children in light of the Seebohm reforms of 1968 and other legal changes of the early 1970s. Finally, the book argues that epidemiological research on autism in the 1960s and 1970s pioneered at London's Institute of Psychiatry has come to define global attempts to analyse and understand what, exactly, autism is.