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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.

Commencing in the 1820’s, American scholars took learning in Germany. There they confronted forms of geography in the universities, and learned of the normal school tradition. Upon their return to North America the normal school was introduced and with it came an early and simplistic variety of geography. Gradually courses geographic in nature began to emerge from the geology offering. Binomial departments, geology-geography, began to emerge. Early content of the geographic offering included delimitation of both the physiographic province and the geographic region. Then came study of economic geography, and development of environmentalism. The 14-18 war involved geography and geographers both on the battlefield and in negotiations with other delegations for the terms of peace. Then the AGS completed a map of Hispanic America (1—1 million) prior to 1945. The Society also made an extended study of the pioneer fringe and pioneer belts in the context of establishing a science of settlement, all of which had relevance for the redistribution of displaced persons resultant to World War II. It was in the 1920’s that both ecologic and political factors began earnestly to create individual genres of the geographic, all of which encouraged Bowman, and more especially R. Hartshorne to write books concerning the nature of geography. Substantial numbers of geographers were employed in World War II, largely in OSS. While in Washington DC, many active geographers who were not AAG members felt disenfranchised. Rigorous competitive activity on their part led to amalgamation of two organizations, the Association of American Geographers and the American Society for Professional Geographers. Then came a renewed quest for definition of the field. “Envoi” concludes the work with guidance to a multiplicity of archival holdings, their lodgment, extent and significance.

Building the Population Bomb examines how human population came to be understood as a problem in the twentieth century, how it became an object of intervention for governments, scientists, and nongovernmental organizations, and how some forms of intervention got coded as legitimate while others were recognized as coercive. It traces the emergence and growth of two scientific perspectives on population from the 1920s to the present. The first, rooted in the natural sciences, considered the world’s population as a whole in relation to natural resources. The second, rooted in the social sciences, considered national population growth rates in relation to economic growth. These two perspectives converged briefly after World War II, convincing world leaders that population growth posed a barrier to economic development and a threat to worldwide peace and environmental integrity. The book documents how this overpopulation consensus attracted vast sums of money to demography and population control, and teases out the differences between population control, birth control, and family planning. It concludes with the fracturing of this consensus at the end of the 1960s, constituting the factions that structure today’s debates over whether the world’s population is growing too quickly or not quickly enough, and over what should be done about it. The book documents how population growth came to take the blame for the world’s most complex and pressing problems, and how efforts to solve “the population problem” have diverted attention and resources from the pursuit of economic, environmental, and reproductive justice.

This book examines the way in which Robert Boyle seeks to accommodate his complex chemical philosophy within the framework of a mechanistic theory of matter. More specifically, the book proposes that Boyle regards chemical qualities as properties that emerge from the mechanistic structure of chymical atoms. Within Boyle’s chemical ontology, chymical atoms are structured concretions of particles that Boyle regards as chemically elementary entities, that is, as chemical wholes that resist experimental analysis. Although this interpretation of Boyle’s chemical philosophy has already been suggested by other Boyle scholars, the present book provides a sustained philosophical argument to demonstrate that, for Boyle, chemical properties are dispositional, relational, emergent, and supervenient properties. This argument is strengthened by a detailed mereological analysis of Boylean chymical atoms that establishes the kind of theory of wholes and parts that is most consistent with his emergentist conception of chemical properties. The emergentist position that is being attributed to Boyle supports his view that chemical reactions resist direct explanation in terms of the mechanistic properties of fundamental particles, as well as his position regarding the scientific autonomy of chemistry from mechanics and physics.

This meticulously researched book traces the introduction of colonial medical care, and its rapid expansion between 1840 and 1920. By funding medical care, the colonial state forged a new relationship between health and governance that raised many questions. How was medical care to be funded? Was the state responsible for providing medical care? What role were the voluntary and private sectors to play? The colonial state sought to transplant British forms of medical philanthropy to India. Participation in voluntarism and a public associational culture associated with medical philanthropy were meant to improve Indian society. Over the twentieth century, as the British state moved towards acknowledging the importance of medical care in India, the colonial state used decentralization to limit medical expenditure. Government and municipal expenditure on public medical infrastructure led to increasing acceptance of Western medicine by Indian patients and popularity of surgical specializations, but neglected rural patients. This book—a first of its kind—examines how gender and ethnicity shaped colonial hospitals in north India. The characterization of Indian society as irrational and bound to custom shaped the construction of both male and female patients. The failure of the Dufferin Fund to raise sufficient funds for a Women’s Medical Service exposed the limitations of the government’s reliance on the voluntary sector for medical provision. Reform of army hospitals was also stalled by prioritizing economy over efficiency. The underfunding of colonial medical care left a legacy of poor medical provision, regional disparities, and over-reliance on the private and voluntary sectors.

It was only a coincidence that the NHS and the Empire Windrush (carrying 492 migrants from Britain’s West Indian colonies) arrived together. As the ship’s passengers disembarked in June 1948, frantic preparations were already underway for the July ‘Appointed Day’ when the nation’s new National Health Service would first open its doors. Yet the relationship between immigration and the NHS rapidly attained—and has enduringly retained—notable political and cultural significance. Both the Appointed Day and the post-war arrival of colonial and Commonwealth immigrants heralded transformative change. Together, they reshaped daily life in Britain and notions of ‘Britishness’ alike. The reciprocal impacts of post-war immigration and medicine in post-war Britain, however, have yet to be explored. This book casts new light on a period only now attracting significant historical interest. It draws attention to the importance—but also the limitations—of medical knowledge, approaches and professionals in mediating post-war British responses to race, ethnicity, and the emergence of new and distinctive ethnic communities. By presenting a wealth of newly available or previously ignored archival evidence, it interrogates and re-balances the political history of Britain’s response to New Commonwealth immigration. The book uses a set of linked case-studies to map the persistence of ‘race’ in British culture and medicine alike; the limits of belonging in a multi-ethnic welfare state; and the emergence of new and resolutely ‘unimagined’ communities of patients, researchers, clinicians, policy-makers and citizens within the medical state and its global contact zones.

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.

John Roebling was one of the nineteenth century’s most brilliant engineers, ingenious inventors, successful manufacturers, and fascinating personalities. Raised in a German backwater amid the war-torn chaos of the Napoleonic Wars, he immigrated to the United States in 1831, where he became wealthy and acclaimed, eventually receiving a carte-blanche contract to build one of the nineteenth century’s most stupendous and daring works of engineering: a gigantic suspension bridge to span the East River between New York and Brooklyn. In between, he thought, wrote, and worked tirelessly. He dug canals and surveyed railroads; he planned communities and founded new industries. Horace Greeley called him “a model immigrant”; generations later, F. Scott Fitzgerald worked on a script for the movie version of his life. Like his finest creations, Roebling was held together by a delicate balance of countervailing forces. On the surface, his life was exemplary and his accomplishments legion. As an immigrant and employer, he was respected throughout the world. As an engineer, his works profoundly altered the physical landscape of America. He was a voracious reader, a fervent abolitionist, and an engaged social commentator. His understanding of the natural world, however, bordered on the occult, and his opinions about medicine are best described as medieval. For a man of science and great self-certainty, he was also remarkably quick to seize on a whole host of fads and foolish trends. Yet Roebling spun these strands together. Throughout his life, he believed in the moral application of science and technology, that bridges—along with other great works of connection, the Atlantic cable, the Transcontinental Railroad—could help bring people together, erase divisions, and heal wounds. Like Walt Whitman, Roebling was deeply committed to the creation of a more perfect union, forged from the raw materials of the continent. John Roebling was a complex, deeply divided, yet undoubtedly influential figure, and his biography illuminates not only his works but also the world of nineteenth-century America. Roebling’s engineering feats are well known, but the man himself is not; for alongside the drama of large-scale construction lies an equally rich drama of intellectual and social development and crisis, one that mirrored and reflected the great forces, trials, and failures of the American nineteenth century.

This book challenges a dominant hypothesis in the study of epidemics. From an interdisciplinary array of scholars, a consensus has emerged: invariably, epidemics in past times provoked class hatred, blame of the ‘other’, or victimization of the diseases’ victims. It is also claimed that when diseases were mysterious, without cures or preventive measures, they more readily provoked ‘sinister connotations’. The evidence for these assumptions, however, comes from a handful of examples—the Black Death, the Great Pox at the end of the sixteenth century, cholera riots of the 1830s, and AIDS, centred almost exclusively on the US experience. By investigating thousands of descriptions of epidemics, reaching back before the fifth-century BCE Plague of Athens to the eruption of Ebola in 2014, this study traces epidemics’ socio-psychological consequences across time and discovers a radically different picture. First, scholars, especially post-AIDS, have missed a fundamental aspect of the history of epidemics: their remarkable power to unify societies across class, race, ethnicity, and religion, spurring self-sacrifice and compassion. Second, hatred and violence cannot be relegated to a time when diseases were mysterious, before the ‘laboratory revolution’ of the late nineteenth century: in fact, modernity was the great incubator of a disease–hate nexus. Third, even with diseases that have tended to provoke hatred, such as smallpox, poliomyelitis, plague, and cholera, blaming ‘the other’ or victimizing disease bearers has been rare. Instead, the history of epidemics and their socio-psychological consequences has been richer and more varied than scholars and public intellectuals have heretofore allowed.

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.

This book examines the environmental history of the Antarctic Peninsula region from the early twentieth century to the present. As the most politically contested part of the Antarctic continent, the Antarctic Peninsula region is a good location for considering the intersection of diplomatic history and environmental history. In making imperial claims to the “Falkland Islands Dependencies,” British officials argued that the production of useful scientific knowledge about the Antarctic environment helped to justify British ownership. In contrast, Argentines and Chileans made the case that the Antarctica Peninsula belonged to them as a result of geographical proximity, geological continuity, and a general sense of connection. Despite being caught up in the broader struggles between imperialism and nationalism of the mid-twentieth century, the Antarctic Peninsula region was never decolonized. Instead, under the terms of the 1959 Antarctic Treaty, existing sovereignty claims and reservations of rights were “frozen” for the duration of the treaty, and the whole Antarctic continent came to be governed by a treaty system that drew much of its authority from the production of useful scientific knowledge. In making an argument for imperial continuity in the history of the Antarctic Peninsula region, an environmental history approach offers a new perspective on the history of Antarctica that suggests that the environment, science, and politics continue to be closely entwined. This in turn has important implications for thinking about connections between diplomatic history and environmental history in different parts of the world and in addressing pressing global challenges such as climate change.

This book provides a global compendium on the history of paleopathology, an interdisciplinary scientific discipline that focuses on the study of ancient disease. Offering perspectives from regions that have traditionally had long histories of paleopathology, such as the United States and parts of Europe, this volume also presents important work by an international roster of scholars who are writing their own regional and cultural histories in the field. The book identifies major thinkers and figures who have contributed to paleopathology, as well as significant organizations and courses that have sponsored scientific research and communication, most notably the Paleopathology Association. The volume concludes with an eye towards the future of the discipline, discussing methods and research at the leading edge of paleopathology, particularly those that employ the analysis of ancient DNA and isotopes.

Dorothy Wrinch, a complicated and ultimately tragic figure, is remembered today for her much publicized feud with Linus Pauling over the shape of proteins, known as “the cyclol controversy.” Pauling emerged victorious and is now seen as one of the twentieth century's greatest scientists. History has proven less kind to Wrinch. Although some of Wrinch's theories did not pass the test of time, her contributions to the fields of Darwinism, probability and statistics, quantum mechanics, x-ray diffraction, and computer science were anything but inconsequential. Wrinch's story is also the story of the science of crystals and the ever-changing notion of symmetry fundamental to that science. Drawing on a personal relationship with Wrinch as well as the papers archived at Smith College and elsewhere, this book explores the life of this brilliant and controversial figure. This biography provides a biographical narration, a detailed account of the cyclol controversy, and a personal memoir of the author's relationship with Wrinch. The book presents a sympathetic portrait of the life and science of a luminous but tragically flawed character.

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.