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. To curtail food trafficking, for instance, nuns and hospital wardens were often free to check the content of the tables whenever they pleased and to punish patients found at fault. 1 This invasion was all the more brutal because often the items stored in their bedside tables were all that patients had, the only material extension of themselves authorised in the spacious wards. Patients had no
‘Civilised’, for Dolto here, was a dirty word. Societal and technological change had reduced children’s opportunities for social interactions beyond the nuclear family; the twentieth-century child ‘has a larger material space, but a smaller one in terms of emotional relations’. 38 None of these views is especially surprising in the light of Dolto’s experiences and orientation in the 1930s and 1940s, but her status as a senior cultural presence imbued them with authority in the 1970s. By that time, she was a clinician with
prescriptive or between the normative and the heteronormative. 44 Robcis’s thesis is perceptive and often persuasive, bringing to bear a wealth of material on the history of French family policy and on the deployment of structuralist language by politicians and judges to support heteronormative conclusions. Her analytic framework has some limitations, however, where the ‘bridge figures’ are concerned. Robcis supposes a unidirectional line of influence – running from the intellectual elite, represented by Lacan and Lévi-Strauss, to
psychological development model built around ‘the study of normality’ rather than its opposite, while the left-wing French psychologist Henri Wallon argued that the causes of children’s mental ‘turbulence’ lay in the material, family and social environment rather than the ‘constitutional’ factors Heuyer emphasised. 24 Nonetheless, Heuyer, especially after his 1925 appointment at the Salpêtrière, exerted significant influence over the field. 25 Early psychoanalysts were able to use Heuyer’s patronage to gain
Holistic thinkers were often also Catholics. Holism resonated with, and existed in the context of, moves to bring Catholicism into greater dialogue with the human sciences. Coutrot, for example, read and corresponded with Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, an unorthodox Jesuit priest, philosopher and palaeontologist. A Catholic version of holistic humanism ( humanisme intégral ) was influentially articulated by the philosopher Jacques Maritain, who stressed the importance of recognising the material and spiritual dimensions of the
background in provoking psychoses, in a formulation which became somewhat famous: ‘ It takes three generations for a psychosis to appear : two generations of neurotic parents and grandparents in the subject’s genetic make-up [are required] for the subject to be psychotic.’ 75 Dolto wanted to know about any historic traumatic events experienced by close relatives, believing that their impacts could be unconsciously transmitted to the family’s children. By probing family histories in this way, Dolto elicited a wealth of material
Princesses de science (1907) which showed intellectual women (‘ cervelines ’) ending up dried and withered, incapable of love. 37 But unlike the Beauvoirs, who carefully scrutinised and censored their daughters’ reading material, Dolto’s parents ‘never limited my reading’, and her father ‘allowed me to read everything in his library’. 38 There was one notable exception – ‘“Zola is absolute piddle”’ ( du pot de chambre ) – but otherwise, ‘I could read anything my father bought.’ 39 She even read his copy of Victor
This book explores whether early modern people cared about their health, and what did it mean to lead a healthy life in Italy and England. According to the Galenic-Hippocratic tradition, 'preservative' medicine was one of the three central pillars of the physician's art. Through a range of textual evidence, images and material artefacts, the book documents the profound impact which ideas about healthy living had on daily practices as well as on intellectual life and the material world in Italy and England. Staying healthy and health conservation was understood as depending on the careful management of the six 'Non-Naturals': the air one breathed, food and drink, excretions, sleep, exercise and repose, and the 'passions of the soul'. The book provides fresh evidence about the centrality of the Non-Naturals in relation to groups whose health has not yet been investigated in works about prevention: babies, women and convalescents. Pregnancy constituted a frequent physical state for many women of the early modern European aristocracy. The emphasis on motion and rest, cleansing the body, and improving the mental and spiritual states made a difference for the aristocratic woman's success in the trade of frequent pregnancy and childbirth. Preventive advice was not undifferentiated, nor simply articulated by individual complexion. Examining the roles of the Non-Naturals, the book provides a more holistic view of convalescent care. It also deals with the paradoxical nature of perceptions about the Neapolitan environment and the way in which its airs were seen to affect human bodies and health.
diaries, of both medical service personnel and their patients, freely available online. The centenary of the First World War, meanwhile, has been used by organisations ranging from community research projects to the Red Cross and the BBC both to make records more accessible via online platforms and to solicit material for such projects in the name of memory, commemoration and education. While the increased accessibility of this range of records is of huge benefit to historians not only of the war but related historical fields, it also raises
vagaries of public works budgets. By the mid-nineteenth century, when the Enniscorthy Asylum was constructed, the architecture of the ideal public lunatic asylum had been a source of much debate for over half a century. Therefore, in order to trace the widely-held public opinion of asylums as austere, institutional, and utilitarian, it is necessary to go back to the early part of the nineteenth century, when a standard for large, public lunatic asylums at provincial level was still just a talking point in parliamentary committees. This book will explore the material