antibacterial properties, Pulvertaft was against patenting and happy to instruct anyone who asked him how to make it. 5 Major Pulvertaft’s experiments with home-made penicillin, used directly on live patients, sounds both illegal and unethical by today’s standards. But this was 1942, it was in the middle of a world war, and my grandfather knew that he had both science and a large colonial power (the British Empire) on his side. In those days, treatments for diseases and infections were part of immensely strong discursive, medical and legal structures; the knowledge (science
1 Disease and Welsh society ‘The gentry in general are pretty hearty in the Countrey [sic]. It’s the common sort that drop off ’.1 So wrote the Anglesey curate Owen Davies in March 1729 as an epidemic fever swept through his area. In many respects, however, his wry comment does represent something of the true situation in early modern Wales, since social status could have a strong influence on both susceptibility to disease and the chances of survival. By the early eighteenth century, the population of Wales is estimated to have been around 400,000 following a
7 Health and disease Traditionally viewed as a developmental or a humanitarian challenge, addressing Africa’s pressing public health problems has increasingly come to be seen as a critical human security challenge for the twenty-first century. While many have criticized the securitization of health issues, the cross-cutting linkages to other political, social, and economic issues are real, and so too are the implications for security. For ultimately, if enhancing the safety and well-being of individuals and communities lies at the heart of the human security
continues. This chapter intervenes in the debate by focusing on literary engagements with the topic and thereby challenges the narrative of a straightforward move from dirt to cleanliness by demonstrating a much more complex relationship between filth, hygiene, and modern selfhood. Strachan's hygiene hypothesis seemed to undermine, indeed reverse, accepted wisdom regarding dirt and its nefarious qualities, which had been the broad consensus since germ theory was widely accepted. A connection between disease and filth, especially human waste, had, of
10 ‘Man against disease’: the medical Left and the lessons of science, 1918–48 John Stewart This chapter examines the ideas and aspirations of left-wing doctors and medical scientists from the end of the First World War to the inauguration of the National Health Service (NHS) in 1948. There were four underlying premises to these medical politicians’ social and political analyses. First, scientific and medical practice provided a model for social organisation. Doctors and medical scientists, it was argued, worked collaboratively and irrespective of national
Introduction The next two chapters explore the consequences of the Conservative Party’s growing interest in the legal reform of trade unions and industrial relations as a response to what was commonly referred to as ‘the British disease’ (Taylor 1999 , 151–186). This period embraces the Wilson Governments (1964–70), the Heath Government (1970
hegemonic. Moreover, doctors were not always blind to the limits of their understanding of indigenous societies. As colonial states matured, and medical officers’ attention moved beyond the needs of European officials and the local servants, soldiers and police who sustained them, so their lack of knowledge of the underlying causes of disease among the wider indigenous population provoked increasing concern
from everywhere, they flow together to form their own people ( demos ). 18 Segregated from the rest of the population and gathered together on account of their disease, these people made up a separate entity. Around 470, the poet Sidonius Apollinaris coined the phrase ‘colleprosus’ to refer to those companions in misfortune. 19 Their association led to mutual help in their quest for food. However, lepers tended to be regarded as a burden on the population during lean times and were likely to be blamed for food shortages. 20 To lose or keep face? Miracles
The following considers Richard Marsh’s 1897 gothic novel The Beetle in relation to fin-de-siècle anxieties, specifically sexual deviancy, empire, and venereal disease. While the domestic Contagious Diseases Acts had been revealed in the 1880s, continued high rates of VD amongst British soldiers in particular continued the debate as to who was responsible for spreading diseases such as syphilis both at home and abroad. At a time of ‘colonial syphiliphobia’, to extend Showalter’s term, The Beetle suggests the necessity of regulating venereal disease in the Empire to protect Britain’s ‘racial superiority’ and conservatively warns against the potential consequences of dabbling with the sexually ‘deviant’ and dangerous Orient.
early 2000s newer and faster-sequencing ‘high throughput’ techniques and technologies have informed and propelled novel arenas of genetic and epigenetic research in relation to a dynamic field of enquiry that is focused on a diverse range of disease conditions, directly tying genomics to large-scale global epidemiological studies. This approach is increasingly seen as central to addressing infectious disease and the growing economic and social burden of common chronic diseases such as cancer, diabetes and cardiovascular disease in developed and emerging economies