Cancer under the Microscope

2021 ◽  
pp. 164-189
Author(s):  
Agnes Arnold-Forster

This chapter reveals how mapping was only one of the tools deployed to decode the ‘cancer problem’ in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Running parallel to the activities of Haviland, Moore, and Green, biologists, pathologists, and histologists took up the microscope with gusto and spawned a vibrant debate among cell theorists, bacteriologists, and parasitologists. This chapter thus traces the introduction of the microscope into the landscape of cancer theory and practice, explores the development of cell theories of malignancy, and interrogates the many and various ‘germ theories’ of the disease. It argues that despite their close relationship with the microscope and its scientific and progressive associations, all three theories appealed in part because they recapitulated and reframed very old ideas about cancer’s causes and characteristics.

Transfers ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 87-103 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catharine Coleborne

This article examines the interpretive framework of “mobility” and how it might usefully be extended to the study of the Australasian colonial world of the nineteenth century, suggesting that social institutions reveal glimpses of (im)mobility. As the colonies became destinations for the many thousands of immigrants on the move, different forms of mobility were desired, including migration itself, or loathed, such as the itinerant lifestyles of vagrants. Specifically, the article examines mobility through brief accounts of the curtailed lives of the poor white immigrants of the period. The meanings of mobility were produced by immigrants' insanity, vagrancy, wandering, and their casual movement between, and reliance on, welfare and medical institutions. The regulation of these forms of mobility tells us more about the contemporary paradox of the co-constitution of mobility and stasis, as well as providing a more fluid understanding of mobility as a set of transfers between places and people.


This book addresses the sounds of the Crimean War, along with the many ways nineteenth-century wartime is aurally constructed. It examines wide-ranging experiences of listeners in Britain, France, Turkey, Russia, Italy, Poland, Latvia, Daghestan, Chechnya, and Crimea, illustrating the close interplay between nineteenth-century geographies of empire and the modes by which wartime sound was archived and heard. This book covers topics including music in and around war zones, the mediation of wartime sound, the relationship between sound and violence, and the historiography of listening. Individual chapters concern sound in Leo Tolstoy’s wartime writings, and his place within cosmopolitan sensibilities; the role of the telegraph in constructing sonic imaginations in London and the Black Sea region; the absence of archives for the sounds of particular ethnic groups, and how songs preserve memories for both Crimean Tatars and Polish nationalists; the ways in which perceptions of voice rearranged the mental geographies of Baltic Russia, and undermined aspirations to national unity in Italy; Italian opera as a means of conditioning elite perceptions of Crimean battlefields; and historical frames through which to understand the diffusion of violent sounds amid everyday life. The volume engages the academic fields of musicology, ethnomusicology, history, literary studies, sound studies, and the history of the senses.


Experiment ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 131-144
Author(s):  
Wendy Salmond

Abstract This essay examines Russian artist Viktor Vasnetsov’s search for a new kind of prayer icon in the closing decades of the nineteenth century: a hybrid of icon and painting that would reconcile Russia’s historic contradictions and launch a renaissance of national culture and faith. Beginning with his icons for the Spas nerukotvornyi [Savior Not Made by Human Hands] Church at Abramtsevo in 1880-81, for two decades Vasnetsov was hailed as an innovator, the four icons he sent to the Paris “Exposition Universelle” of 1900 marking the culmination of his vision. After 1900, his religious painting polarized elite Russian society and was bitterly attacked in advanced art circles. Yet Vasnetsov’s new icons were increasingly linked with popular culture and the many copies made of them in the late Imperial period suggest that his hybrid image spoke to a generation seeking a resolution to the dilemma of how modern Orthodox worshippers should pray.


PEDIATRICS ◽  
1957 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 456-461
Author(s):  
Ernest Caulfield

IN VIEW of the tremendous advance in pediatrics during the past half century, one might think that a full century ago no one could have known very much about the care of children. To read the newspapers of that day, one might also conclude that it was an age primarily of quacks and patent medicines—of worm cures, hive syrups and of little liver pills. But to appreciate the true status of American pediatrics in 1855 one must judge it not only by the standards of our time but also by the standards of a century earlier, and when that is done it will be seen that American pediatrics in the mid-Nineteenth Century had also made considerable progress. In 1755 the care of the sick was generally in the hands of well-meaning yet untrained practical nurses whereas in 1855 people were turning to physicians who were usually medical school graduates, well acquainted with a vast number of new and important publications. More and more pediatric articles were appearing in the many American journals; and in the review of a new book, one writer mentioned "the numerous publications on the management of infants and children with which the press has been loaded." Indeed, the press was loaded, for the Philadelphia physician had at his command no less than 8 fairsized textbooks in English devoted exclusively to the care of children. The second quarter of the Nineteenth Century saw a definite trend toward pediatrics as a specialty. There is no need to discuss here the numerous elementary guides which were intended primarily for mothers and which were precursors of the textbooks, or the many systems of general medicine with their chapters on pediatric subjects, especially since this trend may be well illustrated by mentioning only the impressive list of textbooks published in Philadelphia.


Author(s):  
Dawn Belkin Martinez

For many people, Angela Davis is, first and foremost, an icon of the 1960s, a near-mythic figure of that turbulent era and the many radical social causes we now associate with those years. She has spent five decades writing about racial capitalism, the political economy, woman and the prison–industrial complex. However, behind the icon and the image is a longer and more complicated story, one that today has important lessons for social workers and other activists alike. This article will trace her personal history, examine her political trajectory, provide an overview of a few of her principal writings and briefly discuss her connection with the theory and practice of social work.


2021 ◽  
pp. 389-405
Author(s):  
Lars Magnusson

In recent years there has been a renewed interest in Cameralism, both as a discourse and as an administrative political economy, in both theory and practice. Attention has been drawn to how Cameralism—defined as thought and practice—should be understood. The aim of this article is to take a step back and focus on the historiography of Cameralism from the nineteenth century onwards. Even though many in recent times have challenged old and seemingly dated conceptualizations and interpretations, they are still very much alive. Most profoundly this has implied that Cameralism most often in the past has been acknowledged as an expression of—German. as it were—exceptionalism to the general history of economic doctrine and thinking.


MRS Bulletin ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 23 (9) ◽  
pp. 28-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
A.M. Stoneham ◽  
I.J. Ford ◽  
P.R. Chalker

The diamond films of the early 1980s presented two quite different challenges. First how could this new form of diamond be exploited technically? Second, how could this clearly nonequilibrium generation of diamond be understood and the understanding be used to maximum effect? We shall be discussing the ideas of theory and modeling, and we will show how they have contributed to the interplay of science and technology.The science of diamond films is the art of beating nature in the use of carbon. Theory gives the understanding to improve this art. One way in which we improve on nature is in new geometries: controlled growth over selected surfaces o surface regions. The coverage, defect density, microstructure, and rate of growth are key issues. Another way to beat nature is controlled doping. Could wmake n-type semiconductors or lasers using diamond films? A third direction might be routes to control interfaces. Grai boundaries and the regions between small, misaligned crystals affect thermal properties and electron emission. Difficulties with electrical contacts may limit the use of diamond films as semiconductors or insulators. Substrate-film adhesion can determine tribological performance.If theory is to play a role in controlling film deposition, we need to understand the role of theory itself. Theory can add value at several distinct levels. At the highest level, modeling has the potential to provide a substitute for experiment, especially when information is needed about behavior at extreme conditions. When the phenomena are very fast or very complex, theory can be used to interpret limited experiments. At a more modest level, even simple quantitative models can illustrate the many processes occurring during film growth. Atomistic theories of this type can identify the rate-determining steps and point to ways of influencing them. Mesoscopic theories, especially combined with macroscopic approaches like elasticity theory, can identify routes to improved performance.


2000 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 325-337 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jay Spaulding

Modern nationalisms first arose during the later eighteenth century around the wide periphery of the ancient heartland of western culture and gnawed their way inward during the course of the nineteenth century to the core, culminating in World War I, Each new nationalism generated an original “imagined community” of human beings, part of whose ideological cohesion derived from a sense of shared historical experience. Since the actual historical record would not necessarily satisfy this hunger, it was often found expedient to amend the past through acts of imagination aptly termed the “invention of tradition.”One of the many new “imagined communities” of the long nineteenth century took shape in the northern Nile-valley Sudan between the final disintegration of the old kingdom of Sinnar (irredeemable after the death of the strongman Muhammad Abu Likaylik in 1775) and the publication of Harold MacMichael's A History of the Arabs in the Sudan in 1922. The new national community born of the collapse of Sinnar, strongly committed to Arabic speech and Islamic faith, was tested by fire through foreign conquest and revolution, by profound socio-economic transformation, and by the challenges attendant on participation in an extended sub-imperialism that earned it hegemony—first cultural, and ultimately political—over all the diverse peoples of the modern Sudan.One important response of the nascent community to the trials of this difficult age was the invention of a new national historical tradition, according to which its members were descended via comparatively recent immigrants to the Sudan from eminent Arabs of Islamic antiquity.


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