Throughout this period Messianic Jews have mostly been perceived across the Jewish community as posing a significant threat to Jewish welfare. Underpinning Jewish concerns has been the idea that Messianic Judaism was merely a ruse to lure Jews to Christianity, offering an untenable identity; that a person could both be a Jew and accept Christ as Messiah. Jewish fears were significantly fuelled by the widespread belief that Messianic Jewish communities were deploying manipulative methods to achieve conversions, targeting vulnerable Jewish people. In post-war Britain, these concerns grew after a Jewish student took his own life after having become involved with Messianic Christians at university in 1979, and when Jews for Jesus formally launched in Britain in 1991 following its founding in the United States. In response to fears about Messianic Judaism a concerted Jewish campaign was launched to counter missionary activities, focused on protecting Jewish students. Operation Judaism was the brainchild of a Lubavitch rabbi from Birmingham, Shmuel Arkush, and grew into a nationwide campaign backed by the Chief Rabbi and the Board of Deputies. This chapter focuses on Messianic Judaism, and Jewish responses to it, as a window into evolving Jewish/Christian relations in post-war Britain. It explores the borders between the two faiths, as well as changing Christian attitudes towards the conversion of Jewish people after the Holocaust.
Being gay and Jewish in post-war Britain, Rabbi Lionel Blue once observed, could feel like a ‘double crucifixion’, as gay Jewish people had to manage both the homophobia and antisemitism of British society, and hostility towards homosexuality within the Jewish community. Slowly and inconsistently, however, attitudes towards gay people have evolved in Jewish Britain, change which has both reflected and shaped broader social attitudes towards homosexuality. This chapter explores the growth of Jewish gay activism, set in the context of international struggles for gay rights. It charts the birth of the Jewish Gay and Lesbian Group, highlighting some of the many challenges posed by coming out as a Jewish gay person in a community which continued to struggle with homophobia. The chapter analyses different responses to gay Jewish people and organisations across Jewish denominations, from Orthodox communities which struggled to accept gay living at any level to Progressive Judaism which, despite considerable challenges, eventually accepted the training and practice of openly gay rabbis. The chapter strives to explain the differing approaches of Orthodox and Progressive Judaism across this period and highlights the impact of Jewish gay activism both on attitudes towards homosexuality within and beyond the community, and on Jewish/non-Jewish relations in Britain more broadly.
This chapter discusses the surgical establishment’s claim that the rapid adoption of minimally invasive gallbladder surgery, or laparoscopic cholecystectomy, was a “patient-driven revolution” in general surgery. It shows that the motivations for developing a less invasive surgical procedure for gallstone treatment did not first originate from patients, but that demand was only generated after surgeons began publicizing its availability. Tang argues that the common and non-fatal nature of gallstones gave patients the consumer sovereignty and power to significantly influence surgical practice. In fact, the popularity for the new procedure among patients, once they knew about it, pressured some surgeons to offer it, sometimes even without adequate training. Examining patients who were seeking treatments they learned about outside of the doctor’s office, such as laparoscopic cholecystectomy, helps to better understand the circumstances in which consumer sovereignty can exist in medical care and how it can affect medical practice. Still, Tang suggests that the emphasis on patient demand to explain the procedure’s rapid adoption obscures the efforts made by some surgeons and hospitals to incite competition for gallbladder patients, and the lack of professional oversight in surgical innovation.
This book re-examines slave trading in the early Middle Ages from a comparative perspective, situating it at the core of economic and political development in northern and eastern Europe. In focusing on the ‘slaving zones’ centred on the British Isles and the Czech lands, it traces the forced migration of enslaved people from the point of capture to their destinations across Europe, the North Atlantic, north Africa, and western Asia. At the crux of the book is the shift of the ninth and tenth centuries prompted by increased demand, principally in the Islamic world. The desire to source more and more slaves led to changes in the practice of warfare to maximise captive taking, the logistics of slave trading, and rulers’ legal and economic relationships with slavery. By spanning the seventh through the eleventh centuries, this study traces the growth, climax, and decline of slave trading in the early Middle Ages and establishes its role as a driver of connectivity.
This chapter examines the demand for slaves and unfree labour in the British Isles and the Czech lands, serving as an introduction to slavery in these areas by outlining the types of labour performed by slaves, and their presence in agricultural or domestic, rural or urban contexts. This chapter also highlights the types of source material in which slaves, especially foreign slaves, appear, as well as the strengths and weaknesses of the source material for each region, which either enhance or skew our perceptions of slavery and its distribution. Source limitations ultimately mean that an assessment of changing demand for these regions is necessarily speculative, but the overall picture in both the British Isles and the Czech lands is one without any drastic shifts in the demand for slave labour between the seventh and eleventh centuries, though it is significant to note that slavery was present and accepted throughout this period.
The final chapter examines the ways in which rulers responded to slaving, arguing that their attempts to control the terms by which individuals could be enslaved and sold appear to have always been reactionary. From the tenth century they indicate a mounting concern in the face of escalating slaving, and this is most evident in England, where law codes and penitentials survive from the entire early medieval period, though a similar, if slower-paced, concern is hinted at by law fragments in Bohemian texts. Where centralization programmes occurred later or were poorly documented, as in Ireland, Wales, and Scotland, these concerns were not codified. Although English and Bohemian rulers attempted to extend limited control over slaving in law, they were active beneficiaries of the trade through taxes and involvement in raiding.
Before the second half of the ninth century, in the British Isles and the tenth century in the Czech lands, slave trading primarily operated on a small scale and was primarily fuelled by opportunistic sales that were themselves motivated by individual circumstances or, to a lesser degree, commercial trading. Networks of liminal markets such as emporia and politically central high-status sites attracted slave sales through the concentration of merchants and buyers, and slaves could either remain locally with a buyer or be transported along long-distance trade routes. Case studies of England and Great Moravia illustrate the networks along which enslaved people were transported and the mechanisms by which slave trading operated.
By the early 1990s, a drastic increase in malignant melanoma rates—mainly in the UK, Europe, America, and Australia—sparked significant concern about skin cancer. In Britain, medical experts and the media attempted to curtail overall sunbed use but failed. Skincare providers and research institutions, on the other hand, realized that they could capitalize on people’s concerns by providing the most advanced “UV-free” tanning technologies. This chapter focuses on two of these technologies: dihydroxyacetone (DHA) fake tanning serums and the entirely novel invention of MelanoTan injections. An evaluation of media coverage and publications in medical journals demonstrates how such “UV-free” technologies were introduced as entirely “safe” alternatives to sunbeds and sunbathing. As Creed argues, however, both products counterintuitively promoted former risk-laden practices, and reinvigorated tanning culture overall. Tanning injections, moreover, introduced a new host of health risks for twenty-first century consumers. Such technologies therefore provide insight into the history of controversial health, beauty, and risk reduction technologies. They also demonstrate the extent to which commercial industries have simultaneously taken the lead in resolving and profiting from public health concerns since the second half of the twentieth century.
In 1980, the media alerted women to a new and frightening illness associated with menstrual periods and tampon use: toxic shock syndrome (TSS). Early symptoms deceptively resembled the flu, which quickly deteriorated into septic shock and death in otherwise healthy women. With tampons precipitating illness, the relationship was less about technology and the patient consumer, but rather the consumer who became a patient due to the use of a stigmatized and gendered technology. Subsequent epidemiological studies conducted by The Centers for Disease Control determined that all super-absorbent tampons carried risk for TSS. The Rely tampon, however, manufactured by Procter & Gamble (P&G) showed the highest rate of all. Drawing on new research, Vostral shows that while P&G publicly received accolades for voluntarily withdrawing its product and alerting women to the dangers of Rely, behind-the-scenes the company fought for access to their data. The chapter uses archival documents and oral histories to trace arguments amongst FDA, CDC, and corporate lawyers concerning the nature of the right to medical privacy, and how womens’ roles and needs were construed in lawsuits. Procter & Gamble proceeded to subpoena records, a strategy which the CDC contested with the lawsuit Farnsworth v. Procter & Gamble (1985). The ruling in favour of the CDC hinged upon the reasonable expectation for informants to retain anonymity, however it was derived from the premise of respectability and embarrassment, rather than the more meaningful right to medical privacy or equal protection for women.
Technology and consumerism are two characteristic phenomena in the history of medicine and healthcare, yet the connections between them are rarely explored by scholars. In this edited volume, the authors address this disconnect, noting the ways in which a variety of technologies have shaped patients’ roles as consumers since the early twentieth century. Chapters examine key issues, such as the changing nature of patient information and choice, patients’ assessment of risk and reward, and matters of patient role and of patient demand as they relate to new and changing technologies. They simultaneously investigate how differences in access to care and in outcomes across various patient groups have been influenced by the advent of new technologies and consumer-based approaches to health. The volume spans the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, spotlights an array of medical technologies and health products, and draws on examples from across the United States and the United Kingdom.