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4 Middle-class medicine It is well known that Englishmen are in the main opposed to any and every new system with which they are not familiar. Probably to this influence is due the fact, that, with a few exceptions, pay wards are as unknown in this country as the pay hospitals themselves. 1 Sir Henry Burdett
This article examines James Baldwin’s late text The Evidence of Things Not Seen (1985) as one of his substantial attempts at “forging a new language,” which he tentatively mentions in his late essays and interviews. As an unpopular and difficult text in Baldwin’s oeuvre, Evidence carries the imprint of a new economy of time, casting the past into the present, and a new economy of space, navigating across other geographies in appraising the serial killings of children in one of Atlanta’s poorest Black neighborhoods. This article suggests that a new economy of time emerges earlier in No Name in the Street (1972), as a result of Baldwin’s self-imposed exile in Europe. The article then analyzes his spatiotemporal logic in the specifics of Evidence with reference to a Black middle class, urbanization, the ghetto, gentrification, and other colonized spaces.
The appearance of corpses in rubbish tips is not a recent phenomenon. In Argentina, tips have served not only as sites for the disposal of bodies but also as murder scenes. Many of these other bodies found in such places belong to individuals who have suffered violent deaths, which go on to become public issues, or else are ‘politicised deaths’. Focusing on two cases that have received differing degrees of social, political and media attention – Diego Duarte, a 15-year-old boy from a poor background who went waste-picking on an open dump and never came back, and Ángeles Rawson, a girl of 16 murdered in the middle-class neighbourhood of Colegiales, whose body was found in the same tip – this article deals with the social meanings of bodies that appear in landfills. In each case, there followed a series of events that placed a certain construction on the death – and, more importantly, the life – of the victim. Corpses, once recognised, become people, and through this process they are given new life. It is my contention that bodies in rubbish tips express – and configure – not only the limits of the social but also, in some cases, the limits of the human itself.
programme to shift its attention to those few opportunities that the local market could provide. However, under the impact of the recent economic and financial crisis, these opportunities have increasingly faded too. In a span of less than three years, Lebanon went from a country known for its growing middle class to one with an inflation rate of over 240 per cent 8 and a dramatic unemployment rate 50.1 per cent in 2022 (16.2 per cent in 2018–19). 9 As part of ‘Future of Food
’ ( Guardian , 2018 ). It is not that everyone within NGOs refuses to accept that this problem exists or its potential severity, but Goldring’s comments demonstrate a tendency among white, male, middle-class figures who are senior in these organisations – who are unlikely themselves to be the target of sexual harassment, abuse or intimidation – to downplay the risk of this occurring and to respond to accusations slowly and reluctantly. British
ended with local charities and national committees (e.g. the International Socialist Congress, the miners, the International Suffrage Alliance, the International Women’s Committee) contacting film departments of aid agencies to offer theatrical and non-theatrical venues, including meeting halls, clubs, schools, or churches. Moviegoers ranged from working- to middle-class, with a prevalence of female adults. Cinema also became a mobile technology after World War I, traveling from city centers to remote and rural locations. Mixing different filmic genres such as ‘social
: Zed Books ), pp. 1 – 17 . Droeber , J. ( 2005 ), Dreaming of Change: Young Middle-Class Women and Social Transformation in Jordan ( Leiden : Koninklijke Brill NV ). Fluri , J. ( 2012 ), ‘ Capitalizing on Bare Life: Sovereignty, Exception
their sons’ wages. While power inequalities between Syrian women are not new, they have been exacerbated by the loss of resources in displacement. Our findings come from research with a small, and highly specific, sample: Syrian women from rural and working-class backgrounds, and with low levels of formal education. It remains to be seen whether middle-class, and more highly educated, Syrian women, may have experienced similar shifts in their families and work in exile. Our
This book examines the payment systems operating in British hospitals before the National Health Service (NHS). An overview of the British situation is given, locating the hospitals within both the domestic social and political context, before taking a wider international view. The book sets up the city of Bristol as a case study to explore the operation and meaning of hospital payments on the ground. The foundation of Bristol's historic wealth, and consequent philanthropic dynamism, was trade. The historic prominence of philanthropic associations in Bristol was acknowledged in a Ministry of Health report on the city in the 1930s. The distinctions in payment served to reinforce the differential class relations at the core of philanthropy. The act of payment heightens and diminishes the significance of 1948 as a watershed in the history of British healthcare. The book places the hospitals firmly within the local networks of care, charity and public services, shaped by the economics and politics of a wealthy southern city. It reflects the distinction drawn between and separation of working-class and middle-class patients as a defining characteristic of the system that emerged over the early twentieth century. The rhetorical and political strategies adopted by advocates of private provision were based on the premise that middle-class patients needed to be brought in to a revised notion of the sick poor. The book examines why the voluntary sector and wider mixed economies of healthcare, welfare and public services should be so well developed in Bristol.
charity, even as these underwent significant changes over the early twentieth century. The previous two chapters examined the arrival in the hospital of patient payments and the almoner, contributory schemes and the middle-class patient, and how they became commonplace in the interwar years. It is typically assumed that these changes undermined or even ended philanthropy as the organising principle of the voluntary hospitals. 1 Yet, as we have already seen