History of Science, Technology, and Medicine

We are living in a stressful world. Approximately half of all British employees suffer from workplace stress and over 13 million working days are lost through stress each year, costing the economy over £4 billion per annum. Stress has had a similar impact throughout the modern world: in both developed and developing countries, stress is now the most commonly cited cause of sickness absence from work and stress-related conditions, such as depression, heart disease and cancer, constitute a substantial source of personal ill-health and economic burden. Focusing on the evolution of biological and psychological understandings of stress during the twentieth century, The Age of Stress explores the relationship between scientific formulations and personal experiences of stress, on the one hand, and socio-political and cultural contexts, on the other. The book argues that scientific theories of stress and disease were strongly influenced not only by laboratory studies of homeostasis, but also by wider social, cultural and intellectual currents: the impact of economic depression during the inter-war years; modernist commitments to social reform; concerns about the consequences of military conflict during and after the Second World War; fluctuating global anxieties about political instability and the threat of terrorism during the Cold War; scientific studies of cybernetics; socio-biological accounts of behaviour; and counter-cultural arguments urging consumers to resist the incipient pressures of modern capitalism. The science of stress that emerged in this climate of anxiety was driven and shaped by, and in turn served to structure and direct, the search for individual and collective happiness in a troubled world.

Concentrating on technology, economics, labor, and social history, this book documents the full life cycle of one of America's great mineral ranges from the 1840s to the 1960s. The book examines the workers' world underground, but is equally concerned with the mining communities on the surface. For the first fifty years of development, these mining communities remained remarkably harmonious, even while new, large companies obliterated traditional forms of organization and work within the industry. By 1890, however, the Lake Superior copper industry of upper Michigan started facing many challenges, including strong economic competition and a declining profit margin; growing worker dissatisfaction with both living and working conditions; and erosion of the companies' hegemony in a district they once controlled. The book traces technological changes within the mines and provides a thorough investigation of mine accidents and safety. It then focuses on social and labor history, dealing especially with the issue of how company paternalism exerted social control over the work force.

How did typhus come to be viewed as a ‘Jewish disease’ and what was the connection between the anti-typhus measures during the First World War and the Nazi gas chambers and other genocidal medical practices in the Second World War? This book provides valuable new insight into the history of German medicine in its reaction to the international fight against typhus and the perceived threat of epidemics from the East in the early part of the 20th century. It examines how German bacteriology became increasingly racialised, and how it sought to eradicate the disease by eradication of the perceived carriers. Delousing became a key feature of Nazi preventive medicine during the Holocaust, and gassing a favoured means of eradication of typhus.

This is a major new study of the formative period in the development of modern general practice in the UK. Drawing upon an impressive range of hitherto unused archival material, the book analyses the important changes and developments in primary health care in the century before the creation of the National Health Service in 1948.

Much recent work on the history of colonial medicine argues that medicine was the handmaiden of colonial power and of capitalism. Highlighting the tenuousness of colonial power, this book challenges this interpretation through careful investigation of the complicated relationship between medicine, politics, and capital in Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. It includes chapters on midwifery training and female circumcision, on health and racial ideology, and on the quest to find the yellow fever virus in East Africa.

The last three decades of the twentieth century witnessed a critical turn towards the theory of history and an examination of the representation and historiography of the Orient. This volume situates the historiography of science in India within a social theory of science. It deals with paradigm shift within science studies, the move away from a West-centric theory of science, and future trends and possibilities. The book takes up several strands from the corpus of writing over the past 150 years and places them within the context of their times. It analyses ideas about the interplay between centre and periphery, internal and external accounts of science, creative tension between scientism and romanticism, model of colonial science and its relationship with the emergence of national science, and the distortions of nationalist historiography. While the essays do not in any sense constitute a comprehensive study in the historiography of sciences of India, they address certain relevant issues related to science and modernity in India. This book also explores the work of chemist-historians Prafulla Chandra Ray and Marcelin Berthelot.

How did people view mental health problems in the 18th century, and what do the attitudes of ordinary people towards those afflicted tell us about the values of society at that time? This book draws upon a wide range of contemporary sources, notably asylum documents, and civil and criminal court records, to present unique insights into the issues around madness, including the written and spoken words of sufferers themselves, and the vocabulary associated with insanity. The links between madness and a range of other issues are explored including madness, gender, social status, religion, and witchcraft, in addition to the attributed causes of derangement such as heredity and alcohol abuse. This is a detailed yet profoundly humane and compassionate study of the everyday experiences of those suffering mental impairments ranging from idiocy to lunacy, and an exploration into their meaning for society in the eighteenth century.