End of the 19th century France is characterized by a wave of hygiene campaigns corresponding to a dominant depopulation phenomenon. It is in this context that a law is introduced in 1880 which stipulates that gymnastics should be taught in all boy's schools: the "loi George", whose provisions are soon extended to girls. Female physical and sports practice is thus structured politically and scientifically as a project of quantitative and qualitative regeneration of "race", based on the Lamarckian idea according to which health and physical improvement of the individual is transmitted to their descendants. This paper describes the socio-historical conditions of the construction of medical discourses about female physical and sports practice as well as their plurality and foundation, from 1880 to 1920, when the First Medical Congress on child and female Physical Education took place. Ambiguities, tensions, and contradictions of the politics of health and regeneration of the female body through physical and sports practice are analyzed.
This article contributes to the history of obstetrics as it was performed in the context of general practice during the 19th century. It focuses on the Swiss physician Cäsar Adolf Bloesch (1804-1863) from the town of Biel, Canton Bern. Drawing upon Bloesch's extensive practice records, it raises the question whether this physician participated in the local market for obstetrical activities. Furthermore, the paper tries to make an estimate about the importance this field of action took for Bloesch's practice. To achieve this, results of a smaller study about obstetrical cases within the practice records during the years 1832 to 1850 are being presented.I will argue that physicians like Bloesch were aware of the problems obstetrics brought with it, and as a consequence, he tried to limit it in favor of his general practice.
In the 1910s, in the wake of the glorious decade of syphilography (1900-1910), the early health education films lay the groundwork for a pragmatic approach to the containment of venereal diseases combining (early) diagnosis, treatment and prophylaxis. Realizing that WWI was turning into a durable military conflict, the French Army created a Cinematographic Section (SCA) in 1915 for the purposes of war propaganda and documentation. In 1916, secretary of war Justin Godard declared syphilis a "national public danger" and initiated information campaigns in military and civilian spheres. Conferences accompanied with film screenings were organized for all new military recruits, resulting in the production of a series sex hygiene films for military audiences characterized by a short, evocative and precise documentary style, contrasting with the romantic sex hygiene films aimed at the general public. This contribution examines the cinematographic origins of the instructional films for the military, as well as their evolution up to WWII and their influence on public sex hygiene films for civilians in the interwar period in France.
Many Italian physicians embraced Protestant ideas during the sixteenth Century: this suggests a connection between medical science and religious nonconformity. But why were physicians so exposed to the influence of Protestantism? Can we suppose that their heretical views affected the way in which they conceived medicine? And can we posit a particular link between certain kinds of medical thinking and specific religious doctrines? In order to analyse this relationship, I will focus on a specific character: Girolamo Donzellini. As a physician of great renown, put on trial five times by the Venetian Inquisition and eventually sentenced to death, Donzellini is a good case study. Moreover, his exposure to the works of Paracelsus allows one to put forward some considerations on Italian Paracelsianism, showing that medical attitudes often described as incompatible by historians could actually coexist in the same person, as a result of the complexity of the cultural and religious context.
The paper focuses on the structure of the obstetric market in a rural region of alpine South Tyrol (today: Italy) throughout the 1860s. Besides midwives and parturient women, also male obstetricians are traceable in the actual research area of the Tauferer Ahrntal. Among them was the general practitioner Dr. Franz von Ottenthal, whose medical records (Historiae Morborum, 1847-1899) are used to reconstruct the participation of physicians in the obstetric market. Special emphasis lies on the evaluation of the predominant hierarchies (midwives/surgeons/physicians) and the position of Franz von Ottenthal in this specialized medical sub-segment. Therefore, the quantitative extent of obstetric intervention as well as the qualitative dimension of treatments (medication, surgeries) is investigated. So far, the relevance of Ottenthals obstetric practice as to the gender ratio has been measured as rather high, considering that he generally treated more female than male patients. An attempt will be made to estimate the significance of the obstetric segment within his practice in order to find an explanatory approach for the higher female medical demand.
This article deals with medical certificates issued by the physician Cäsar Adolf Bloesch (1804-1863) from Biel/Bienne. It aims at examining this service as a part of the medical market in the early nineteenth century. Firstly, it focuses on four administrative procedures which show how the standardized medical certificate was established at the time. Secondly, it examines how expert testimony in general and medical testimony in particular depended on public and private demand. Finally, this study argues that by attesting health or illness, physicians could gain their patients' confidence and increase their own social capital. For patients a medical certificate could imply release from moral judgement.
The socialist politician Marcel Sembat’s unpublished manuscripts reveal the unexpected figure of a diarist with a passion for his own intimate, bodily, sexual and affective economy, and of an autodidact and sometimes polemical reader of psychology (for instance Pierre Janet’s). Sembat was recognized nonetheless as a potentially publishable author by Georges Dumas, the editor of the Journal de psychologie normale et pathologique, who asked him to contribute an article – which was never published – on dreaming. Sembat was also particularly receptive to Freud’s early conceptions of sexuality. Was Marcel Sembat an amateur, like the painter Ingres playing the violin? Could he be characterized as a “psychologist from below”? As a dilettante? Or simply as a cultivated man according to the meaning this period ascribed to the term?
At the turn of the twentieth century, French entomology seemed divided between a multitude of fans and few official scholars. On the one hand, the network of the French Entomological Society, and on the other, a chair at the Muséum national d’histoire naturelle. To illustrate this duality between academic entomology and a more domestic entomology, we present a study based on two men: Charles Janet, a little-known province engineer who could be seen as a mere amateur among the professionals, Eugène-Louis Bouvier who was a scholar at the Muséum national d’histoire naturelle and the Academy of Sciences. The biographical approach developed here will allow us to meet close associates of these two men. Considering their own perceptions we will see how these actors situated themselves within their discipline. This approach will allow us to give a broader picture of French entomologists around 1900: their number, their institutions, their relationships and their means of communication. This text shows that the amateur/professional dichotomy is an unsuitable tool to describe entomology at that time.
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This article is focused on the figure of personal secretary in the history of science with the example of Anne Berman (1889–1979) who was, between 1933 and 1962, the secretary for the psychoanalyst Marie Bonaparte (1882–1962). Berman was not a psychoanalyst and psychoanalytic historiography considers her as a minor figure. However, her career as a personal secretary and her role in the French psychoanalytic movement should be considered in conjunction with her involvement with the feminist movement. This pharmacist by training has indeed played a prominent role within the Soroptimist, which was a movement that championed the professional interest of women and prides female excellence. In the case of Berman, the status of personal secretary did not enable her to gain lasting recognition by psychoanalysts, but only a weak and fragile legitimacy.
This article traces the unusual astronomical career of Jean Chacornac (1823–1873) during the French Second Empire. This clerk in a bazaar in Marseille became in just a few years astronomer at the Paris imperial observatory, and was then brutally expelled from this prestigious institution. The «Chacornac affair», largely forgotten, was an asymmetric struggle between a self-taught astronomer and the most famous professional French astronomer of the time, Urbain Le Verrier. Through the study of this case, we want to shed a light on people and practices kept on the margins of science by the process of professionalization of astronomy. Although he was excluded from the institution, Chacornac tried to continue to be an astronomer, independently, «from below». But the construction of a new social identity for State astronomy, in particular by Le Verrier, was inseparable from the attribution of indelible social stigma, which made Chacornac an «obligatory amateur».
Distancing himself from both Aristotelian and Epicurean models of natural change, and resisting delusions of anthropocentric grandeur, Cardano advanced a theory of teleology centred on the notion of non-human selfhood. In keeping with Plato, he argued that nature was ruled by the mind, meaning by "mind" a universal paragon of intelligibility instantiated through patterns of purposive action ("noetic" teleology). This allowed Cardano to defend a theory of natural finalism in which life was regarded as a primordial attribute of being, already in evidence in the most elementary forms of nature, whose main categories were ability to feign, self-interest, self-preservation and indefinite persistence.
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As a pioneer of a new field of research, history of the body, Georges Vigarello goes back over his career as a historian, not so much in search of a hypothetical or ultimate unity of the body, but beyond the original dipersion is rather aiming at relating the existence of coherences and unified logics passing through different fields: the body as an object of thought, of representations and practices. In such a perspective, the history of the body sheds light on a specific era, underlines its culture, while indicating its possible homogeneity.
This article establishes the biography of a little known physician of the 19th century., whose commitment with orthopaedics and formulation of medical gymnastics was important: the surgeon-orthopaedist Sauveur-Henri-Victor Bouvier. Several constitutive processes of the medical field of the 19th century are analysed: specialization (around orthopaedics), professionalization and development of various therapeutic and hygienic methods (among them medical gymnastics). Bouvier's biography is particularly instructive and sheds new light on these different processes, as well as on the institutionalization of orthopaedics from the 1820's up to the 1870's, at the intersection between medical and educative fields, between hospital, medical faculty and teaching of gymnastics.
This article takes as its starting point Frauennot-Frauenglück (Women's Misery--Women's Happiness), a film representative of health education films on sex hygiene in Weimar Germany. This paper opens by situating the film in the landscape of German health education films from World War I to the Weimar era. I document the evolution of interest in sexual health education films in the early decades of the twentieth century and show how their narratives changed as a result of the increasing popularity of feature films in the Weimar period. The article then focuses on the lectures which accompanied health education films. I argue that an analysis of these under-investigated lectures can raise new stimulating epistemological questions on the historical status of health education films, as these lectures changed the filmic dispositive. I show how this common practice served as a technique of rhetorical reworking in efforts to adjust or orient the visuality of what was shown to the public. Drawing on two very different lectures which accompanied Frauennot-Frauenglück, the article identifies two approaches to lecturing. While one consisted in enabling controversial films to be screened to the public, the other (socialist) approach transforms initial censorial intentions, allowing the speaker stress his personal or new positions.
The object of this article is to point out and to discuss the significant intersections and boundary blurring between psychiatry and tropical medicine while treating malaria in the German "colonial metropolis" Hamburg. The focus of this study is the Hamburg asylum at Friedrichsberg and the Institute for Maritime and Tropical Diseases (Hamburg Tropical Institute). Under analysis are two groups of patients as well as the means with which their doctors treated them: 1. patients who have been sent back from the German colonies in Africa after mental disorders had been diagnosed, and 2. patients suffering from general paralysis and treated in Friedrichsberg after 1919 using the then newly developed malaria fever therapy (according to Wagner-Jauregg). The implementation of this latter led to an intensification of the cooperation between psychiatry and tropical medicine in Hamburg which prior to this had been only very sporadic.
Arthur Israel was associated with August Bier's University Surgical Clinic in Berlin from 1910 to 1933, in the end as the head of the downgraded (outpatient) clinic. After he was forced out of his Berlin post, Israel was department head in the Israelitisches Krankenhaus Hamburg until he emigrated to the U.S. in 1940, settling in New York. In 1960, he returned to Germany. Based on papers from Israel's estate, the article describes his life stations and his struggle to cope with his time at the Berlin university clinic. The focus is on a meeting in Berlin in 1961. His departure from the usual practice of heaping praise on the clinic and its former head marks the beginning of a never-published critique of conditions in the clinic. The ambivalence reflected in his evaluation is in stark contrast to the traditional cultivation of "Bier's School".
The aim to 'civilize' warfare accompanied Medicine and International Law ever since the mid-19th century. However, the entanglement of Medicine and Law, crucial for such an endeavour, has not been taken into consideration so far; likewise, the huge importance of medical knowledge for the perception of wars and their ramifications did not garner much attention in historical research. Hence, by focusing on the 'long' 19th century, this paper shows, firstly, that the production of surgical knowledge during warfare aimed at measuring the effects of combat on human bodies in order to develop prognostic medical knowledge for future wars, as well as maintaining the combat strength of soldiers. Moreover, this knowledge production during warfare strived for the enhancement of medical competence in the diagnosis and treatment of wounds in general. Secondly, I show that this medical knowledge was not only relevant for warfare, but also crucial for the design of International Law: it served to nourish the debates among the so called 'civilized' nations about legitimate and illegitimate weaponry and warfare.