Mexican Women's Pelves and Obstetrical Procedures: Interventions with Forceps in Late 19th-Century Medicine

2005 ◽  
Vol 79 (1) ◽  
pp. 100-115 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Cházaro ◽  
Paul Kersey
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Mexican Women ◽  
Early 19Th Century ◽  
Safe Delivery ◽  
Medical Instruments ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
Living Nature ◽  
Definition Of

This essay is an inquiry into the socio-cultural history of the use of forceps in 19th-century Mexico. It argues that the knowledge and practices that the use of such instruments implied were related to complex and controversial issues of the time regarding gender, race and national identity. In my study of operations involving forceps, I found that the adoption of medical instruments depended not only upon their supposedly greater operative efficiency but also upon the political and medical meanings attributed to the pelves of Mexican women. Early 19th-century obstetrics conceived the womb as an example of ‘living nature’ whose qualities assured that births were ‘normally happy events’ making the use of forceps and other instruments unnecessary. However, by mid-century, in the aftermath of independence, Mexico was desperately attempting to forge its identity as a nation. Due to European theories of race, Mexican women came to be characterized as having pathologically deformed pelves that evidenced possible defects of racial formation. The analysis of operative practices involving forceps reveals just how strongly such medical instruments became charged with a complex political definition of the ‘mestizo race’, which was seen to hold political promise for the future. In this context, forceps ceased to symbolize the threat of death, with which they had been associated since colonial times, and became artefacts that helped to assure the safe delivery of newborn mestizos by overcoming the problems of Mexican women's pathological pelves; although by the same token, the status of women as biologically inferior beings in need of medical assistance was reconfirmed.

Libraries of Educations Institutions in Russia in the First Half of 19th Century

2010 ◽  
pp. 96-101
Author(s):  
Elena A. Kalinina
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
School Libraries ◽  
Educational Institutions ◽  
Russian History ◽  
Early 19Th Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Russian Empire ◽  
In The Beginning ◽  
The 19Th Century

Libraries are the integral part of cultural history of Russia. Widespread opening of school libraries in the Russian Empire began in the early 19th century. They began opening school libraries across Russia in the beginning of the 19th century. The paper aims to show the formation and development of libraries in educational institutions of Russia in the first half of the 19th century. The research is based on legislative documents regulating the functions of activity of school libraries and archival materials on the Russian history of the 19th century.

From Evolutive Paranoia, by August Wimmer (1902)

2018 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 478-495
Author(s):  
German E Berrios ◽  
Johan Schioldann ◽  
Johan Schioldann
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Delusional Disorder ◽  
Clinical Profile ◽  
World War ◽  
Early 19Th Century ◽  
Historical Changes ◽  
Clinical Evolution ◽  
History Of ◽  
Clinical Concept

Literature on the history of ‘paranoia’ (as a clinical concept) is large and confusing. This is partly explained by the fact that over the centuries the word ‘paranoia’ has been made to participate in several convergences (clinical constructs), and hence it has named different forms of behaviour and been linked to different explanatory concepts. The Classic Text that follows provides information on the internal clinical evolution of the last convergence in which ‘paranoia’ was made to participate. August Wimmer maps the historical changes of ‘ Verrücktheit’ as it happened within the main European psychiatric traditions since the early 19th century. After World War II, that clinical profile was to become reified and renamed as ‘delusional disorder’.

scholarly journals Romantyczne wędrówki Polaków po Szwajcarii Saskiej

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 149-175
Author(s):  
Ewa Grzęda
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Travel Literature ◽  
Early 19Th Century ◽  
Polish Literature ◽  
History Of ◽  
Polish Language ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Spatial Imagination ◽  
Aesthetic Sensibility ◽  
The 19Th Century

Romantic wanderings of Poles across Saxon SwitzerlandThe history of Polish tourism in the Elbe Sandstone Mountains as well as the literary and artistic reception of the landscape and culture of Saxon Switzerland have never been discussed in detail. The present article is a research reconnaissance. The beginnings and development of tourism in the region came in the late 18th and early 19th century. The 1800s were marked by the emergence of the first German-language descriptions of Saxon Switzerland, which served as guidebooks at the time. From the very beginning Poles, too, participated in the tourist movement in the area. The author of the article seeks to follow the increasing interest in Saxon Switzerland and the appearance of the first descriptions of the region in Polish literature and culture. She provides a detailed analysis of Polish-language accounts of micro-trips to the Elbe Sandstone Mountains by Andrzej Edward Koźmian, Stanisław Deszert, Antoni Edward Odyniec, Klementyna Hoffman née Tańska and a poem by Maciej Bogusz Stęczyński. As the analysis demonstrates, in the first half of the 19th century Poles liked to visit these relatively low mountains in Central Europe and tourism in the region is clearly part of the history of Polish mountain tourism. Thanks to unique aesthetic and natural values of the mountains, full of varied rocky formations, reception of their landscape had an impact of the development of the aesthetic sensibility of Polish Romantics. Direct contact with nature and the landscape of Saxon Switzerland also served an important role in the shaping of spatial imagination of Polish tourists, encouraging them to explore other mountains in Europe and the world, including the Alps. On the other hand thanks to the development of tourist infrastructure in Saxon Switzerland, facilitating trips in the region and making the most attractive spots available to inexperienced tourists, micro-trips to the Elbe Sandstone Mountains marked an important stage in the development of mountain tourism on a popular-recreational level. Polish-language accounts of trips to Saxon Switzerland from the first half of the 20th century are a noteworthy manifestation of the beginnings of Polish travel literature.

Groove Theory

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tony Bolden
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Performance Studies ◽  
Black Musicians ◽  
Cultural Artifact ◽  
Social Perspectives ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Intellectual History

Tony Bolden presents an innovative history of funk music focused on the performers, regarding them as intellectuals who fashioned a new aesthetic. Utilizing musicology, literary studies, performance studies, and African American intellectual history, Bolden explores what it means for music, or any cultural artifact, to be funky. Multitudes of African American musicians and dancers created aesthetic frameworks with artistic principles and cultural politics that proved transformative. Bolden approaches the study of funk and black musicians by examining aesthetics, poetics, cultural history, and intellectual history. The study traces the concept of funk from early blues culture to a metamorphosis into a full-fledged artistic framework and a named musical genre in the 1970s, and thereby Bolden presents an alternative reading of the blues tradition. Funk artists, like their blues relatives, tended to contest and contextualize racialized notions of blackness, sexualized notions of gender, and bourgeois notions of artistic value. Funk artists displayed contempt for the status quo and conveyed alternative stylistic concepts and social perspectives through multimedia expression. Bolden argues that on this road to cultural recognition, funk accentuated many of the qualities of black expression that had been stigmatized throughout much of American history.

Historicism

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mari Hvattum
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Cultural Development ◽  
Early 19Th Century ◽  
Cultural Conditions ◽  
Related Idea ◽  
History Of ◽  
Cultural Historian ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Art And Architecture

In its most general sense, historicism refers to a new historical consciousness emerging in late-18th- and early-19th-century Europe. This novel “historical-mindedness,” as the cultural historian Stephen Bann has called it, sprung from a recognition that human knowledge and human making are historically conditioned and must be understood within particular historical contexts. Historicism inspired new interest in the origin and development of cultural phenomena, not least art and architecture. When used in relation to architecture, historicism usually refers to the 19th-century notion that architecture is a historically dynamic and relative phenomenon, changing with time and circumstance. This in contrast to 18th-century classicism which tended to uphold the classical tradition as a universal ideal and a timeless standard. Historicism in architecture often entails Revivals of various kinds, i.e., the reference to or use of historical styles and motifs. The term is related to concepts such as eclecticism, revivalism, and relativism. In architectural history, an early anticipation of a historicist way of thinking is Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s History of the Art of Antiquity (1764). While still idealizing Greek art, Winckelmann also analyzed Egyptian, Etruscan, Phoenician, and Persian art and architecture, paying close attention to the historical conditions in which each of these cultures emerged. This new attentiveness to the relationship between cultural conditions and artistic expression lies at the heart of historicism, as does the related idea that architecture has the capacity to represent an epoch or a nation, forming a veritable index of cultural development. There is a strong organicist aspect to historicism, i.e., a tendency to think about cultural phenomena as organic wholes that evolve according to laws.

Discourses about language and literacy education in Portugal: past and present

2019 ◽  
Vol 2019 (259) ◽  
pp. 15-38
Author(s):  
Clara Keating
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Labour Force ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Literacy Education ◽  
Historical Period ◽  
Language And Literacy ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Democratic State ◽  
History Of ◽  
Definition Of

Abstract This article presents a historical analysis of discourses about language and literacy that have emerged during different periods in the political and cultural history of Portugal. It covers six periods, from the colonial era to the present, and it considers different geopolitical spaces, including the Portuguese mainland, the Atlantic archipelagos, former Portuguese colonies and diasporic spaces created as a result of emigration from Portugal. The article traces three kinds of discursive shift: (1) shifts in discourses in Portuguese society regarding the goals of language and literacy education, along with associated discourses about appropriate language and literacy pedagogies; (2) shifts in discourses about the specific nature and significance of literacy in Portuguese; and (3) shifts in discourses about the value and symbolic power of standardized forms of spoken and written Portuguese. It shows how each historical period has been characterized by distinctive political and ideological currents which have, in turn, shaped and re-shaped ways of thinking about the role of language and literacy education in the definition of citizenship and national identity, in the construction of heritage, in the creation of a “modern” democratic state and, more recently, in the retooling of human resources to create a flexible labour force.

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