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Smith, whose theory of moral sentiments shows his interest in the workings of the body, agrees with Hume's physician in promoting the use of mineral waters when nothing else seems to work. Smith even adds that, should the waters of Buxton fail to work, ‘the journey to Buxton, however, may be of great service’, 4 suggesting that the whole process of taking the waters started with the departure from home on a therapeutic trip. That mineral waters were valid drugs is the starting point of this chapter
4 Crimes against the body: causing harm The proverbial Hippocratic injunction that medical practitioners must ‘do no harm’ makes accusations against doctors of crimes against the body particularly problematic. Violence should be completely antithetical to the medical identity, but violent behaviour is a common human reaction to multiple forms of motive or threat. It is also a prominent feature of ‘news’, however construed at whatever period. This chapter focuses on the occurrence and reporting of violent crime by medical men, specifically serious sexual assault
Poison, race and magic were materially and metaphorically linked in early modern English theatre. When Black bodies were racially simulated on stage, their characters were prevented from being accepted into what we might call ‘the white world order’ of their respective plays. That is, in cases of Black isolation – where Black characters were surrounded by an all
supervising, controlling, and disciplining individual bodies. 3 With regard to ‘child rescue’, the moniker given to evangelical attempts at ‘improving’ the lives of children living in poverty in the late nineteenth century, the scholarship is less complete, especially when it comes to the sick and disabled. 4 By considering the treatment and experience of the impaired/disabled child in a voluntary organisation, the Church of England-sponsored Waifs and Strays Society, this
2 The Welsh body and popular medical culture ‘Yn Mhob Clwyf mae Perygl’ In every disease lurks danger1 (Welsh Proverb) How did people in Wales conceptualise, reify or otherwise approach illness and their bodies? Indeed, for the early modern Welsh inhabitant, what was illness? In general terms, the early modern period is viewed as a period of transition. In England, a gradual move away from magical and superstitious medical forms has been noted, beginning in the seventeenth century, and accelerating through the secularising Georgian period. As people seemed to
, the relationship between those elements and the body's energy exchanges, and finally the effects of different states of nourishment, rest, exercise, age, health, and disease. 8 But because diabetes was intrinsically linked to the complexities of human metabolism, it seemed almost impossible to establish a therapeutic standard or reliable prognoses. Thus, Joslin stated that ‘there is no one symptom always present and indeed there are many diabetics who have
4 Fiona Dukelow 32 and 37 inches – the healthy body and the politics of waist circumference: a governmental analysis of the Stop the Spread campaign We believe, in any event, that the body obeys the exclusive laws of physiology; and that it escapes the influence of history, but this too is false. The body is molded by a great many distinct regimes; it is broken down by the rhythms of work, rest, and holidays; it is poisoned by food or values, through eating habits or moral laws; it constructs resistances. (Foucault, 1984 [1971]: 87) Introduction In a novel
Athletes start the century as normal, healthy citizens, and end up as potentially unhealthy physiological 'freaks', while the general public are increasingly urged to do more exercise and play more sports. This book offers a comprehensive study, and social history, of the development of sports medicine in Britain, as practiced by British doctors and on British athletes in national and international settings. It describes how and why, in Britain, medicine applied to sport became first an area of expertise known as sports medicine, and then a formal medical specialty: Sport and Exercise Medicine. In the late nineteenth century, vigorous exercise was an acceptable, probably necessary, part of the moderate healthy lifestyle for the normal, healthy man. Consequently sports medicine was part and parcel of normal medical treatment, distinguishable only through its location or through its patient history. There was no wide-spread de facto scepticism about the value of vigorous exercise among physicians and scientists. The normality of the young male athlete is reconsidered between 1928 and 1952. At the end of the period, the athlete becomes an abnormal or supernormal human being who demands specialist medical interventions. The formation and work of British Association of Sport and (Exercise) Medicine, the Institute of Sports Medicine, the Sports Council, and the British Olympic Association's Medical Committee is discussed. The book finally discusses fitness. Normal life, war, elite competition gives us an insight into how athletic bodies are conceptualised, and how sports medicine has formed and reformed over a century.
eighteenth-century imagination. First, the omnipresence of the medical context rendered bodies more accessible. The imagined nudity of women in the bath, for example, is a recurrent trope of spa poetry. Secondly, most visitors stayed for a few weeks only – at best for a whole season – and were not attached to the society of spa towns by long-lasting social bonds. Many novels played with this idea, and had some characters suddenly leave town, reinvent themselves or hide their identity. As a consequence, the imagination of spa culture tended to foster seduction, sexuality
(Duster, 2003 ). Early twentieth-century state-sponsored eugenic projects, based on assumptions of biological difference, attempted to manage futures by encouraging and/or preventing desirable and undesirable traits, and were notorious for their violent and blatant racism (Murphy, 2017 ). As the language of differential human evolution and racial biological inferiority became politically untenable, the focus shifted to more ‘unconventional eugenics’, where (racialised) bodies could be assigned differential worth based on their assumed economic potential. In the second