Imperialism, Race, and Therapeutics: The Legacy of Medicalizing the “Colonial Body”

2008 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 506-516 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia Barton
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
Mortality Rates ◽  
Colonial Medicine ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Racial Identities ◽  
Indian Medical ◽  
Gynecology And Obstetrics ◽  
History Of ◽  
Colonial Body ◽  
The 19Th Century

The BiDil controversy in America coincides with a renewed interest in the linkages between race and therapeutics, whether in the medical history of the United States itself, or in the colonial world. During the colonial era in South Asia, many anthropological and medical researchers conducted research which compared the European and “colonial” body, contrasting everything from blood composition to brain weight between the races of the Indian Empire. This, as Mark Harrison has shown, was fundamentally a phenomenon of the 19th century, arguing that “[i]t was only after 1800 that racial identities came to be fixed and that India was viewed with terror, as a reservoir of filth and disease.” Racist attitudes in British Indian colonial medicine are not hard to discover. They underpinned, for instance, campaigns to improve the appallingly high maternal and infant mortality rates in which the blame was placed squarely upon the women and the indigenous midwives who delivered them rather than the poverty in which they lived. As such, Peers Dimmock, a professor of gynecology and obstetrics at the Calcutta Medical School, opened his address to the First Indian Medical Congress in 1894 with a diatribe against “the unclean and repulsive traditionary [sic] methods of the native midwives.”

scholarly journals Debunking Millar v. Taylor: The History of the Prohibition of Legislative History

2018 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-58
Author(s):  
John J Magyar
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
Federal Courts ◽  
State Courts ◽  
Careful Examination ◽  
House Of Commons ◽  
Legislative History ◽  
Secondary Literature ◽  
The Us ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 19Th Century

Abstract The generally accepted belief about the rule prohibiting recourse to legislative history as an aid to statutory interpretation is that it began in the case of Millar v.Taylor in 1769, and it was followed thereafter in England and throughout the United States through to the 20th century. However, all four judges on the panel in Millar v.Taylor considered evidence from the Journal of the House of Commons and changes made to the relevant bill in their opinions. Meanwhile, the case was widely cited for several substantive and procedural matters throughout the 19th century, but it was not cited by a judge as a precedent for the rule against legislative history until 1887. A careful examination of the relevant cases and secondary literature from the 18th and 19th centuries reveals a much more nuanced and complex history to the rule. Its emergence becomes less clear because it is shrouded in judicial silence. Its beginnings must be inferred from a general and often unarticulated principle that lawyers felt free to disregard. Furthermore, the development, refinement, and decline of the rule followed a different timeline in England, the US federal courts and the state courts.

scholarly journals Mapping a Nation: Daniel Carter Beard’s Time as a Surveyor for the Sanborn Map Company

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 1-1
Author(s):  
John J. Swab
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Urban America ◽  
Fire Insurance ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
The City ◽  
Eastern Half

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> Fire insurance maps produced by the American firm the Sanborn Map Company have long served as cartographic guides to understanding the history of urban America. Primarily used by cultural and historical geographers, historians, historic preservationists, and environmental consultants; historians of cartography have little explored the history of this company. While this scholarship has addressed various facets of Sanborn’s history (Ristow, 1968), no scholarly piece has explored the lived experience of being a Sanborn surveyor. This lack of scholarship comes not from any significant oversight but rather from the fact that the contributions of most Sanborn surveyors were anonymous and little recorded on the maps themselves. Moreover, the company itself has done little to save its own history, thus little is known of their individual stories and experiences. The exception to this is perhaps the most famous Sanborn surveyor of all: Daniel Carter Beard.</p><p>Over the course of his nine-decade life, Daniel Carter Beard held several prominent positions including the co-founder of the Boy Scouts of America and the lead illustrator for many of Mark Twain’s novels. However, he got his start as a surveyor for the Sanborn Map Company in the 1870s, just a few years after its founding. His papers, housed at the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, includes a variety of ephemera from his time with the Sanborn Map Company.</p><p>Trained in civil engineering, Beard got his start as a surveyor for the Cincinnati (Ohio) Office of Platting Commission, creating the first official plat map for the city. He was hired by Sanborn in 1874 and served as a surveyor until 1878, traveling extensively over the eastern half of the United States, parlaying his skills into creating fire insurance maps for Sanborn. Thus, this paper speaks to two main themes. The first theme traces the route of Beard during his early years with the company across the eastern half of the United States, documenting both the places he visited and the challenges he faced as a Sanborn surveyor. The second theme, interwoven through the paper, is an analysis of the innerworkings of Sanborn’s administrative structure and its relationship with the larger fire insurance market during the 1870s. Altogether, these documents present unique insight into the organization of the Sanborn Map Company and how it produced its maps during the second-half of the 19th century.</p>

scholarly journals Book Review: Religion and Politics in America: An Encyclopedia of Church and State in American Life

2017 ◽  
Vol 56 (3) ◽  
pp. 219
Author(s):  
Amanda Sprochi
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Religion And Politics ◽  
The United States ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
American Life ◽  
Politics And Religion ◽  
University History ◽  
History Of

Religion and Politics in America: An Encyclopedia of Church and State in American Life provides an overview of the relationship between politics and religion in the United States. Smith, president of Tyndale International University, history instructor at Georgia Gwinnett College, and Presbyterian minister, with his collaborators, has created a resource that spans the history of the United States from the colonial era to the present day. The 360 entries in the encyclopedia are arranged alphabetically by topic and are signed by the contributor, and each article includes references for further reading. Cross-references, a chronological time line, and a comprehensive index help to identify particular topics and to facilitate further reading.

The Feminization of Etiquette Literature: Foucault, Mechanisms of Social Change, and the Paradoxes of Empowerment

1996 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 417-434 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jorge Arditi
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Change ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Other ◽  
Women’S Empowerment ◽  
Discursive Space ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Space ◽  
The 19Th Century

This paper explores the opening of a discursive space within the etiquette literature in the United States during the 19th century and how women used this space as a vehicle of empowerment. It identifies two major strategies of empowerment. First, the use or appropriation of existing discourses that can help redefine the “other” within an hegemonic space. Second, and more importantly, the transformation of that space in shifting the lines by which differentiation is produced to begin with. Admittedly, these strategies are neither unique nor the most important in the history of women's empowerment. But this paper argues that the new discourses formulated by women helped forge a new space within which women ceased being the “other,” and helped give body to a concept of womanhood as defined by a group of women, regardless of how idiosyncratic that group might have been.

Conception and Creation of the American Academy of Pediatrics

PEDIATRICS ◽  
1993 ◽  
Vol 92 (3) ◽  
pp. 469-470
Author(s):  
James G. Hughes
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Child Health ◽  
The United States ◽  
Mortality Rates ◽  
American Academy Of Pediatrics ◽  
Improve Child Health ◽  
Women And Children ◽  
National Programs ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Pregnant Mothers

In the latter years of the 19th century, and to an increasing degree in the first decades of the 20th, there arose in the United States and elsewhere a growing concern for the health and welfare of women and children, especially pregnant mothers and infants. Compared with current figures, maternal and infant mortality rates were extremely high, and there were virtually no widespread programs to avoid malnutrition and a host of preventable diseases and disabilities in childhood. Isolated instances of good maternal and infant programs existed, but it became obvious that our country needed national programs to improve child health and welfare.

The Regional Centrality of Vietnam’s Central Highlands

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oscar Salemink
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Local Population ◽  
Forest Products ◽  
The United States ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Strategic Value ◽  
East And Southeast Asia ◽  
History Of ◽  
Central Highlands ◽  
Local Leaders

Vietnam’s Central Highlands—or Tây Nguyên—area is usually described as remote, backward, and primitive, but this region has played a central role in the history of the surrounding states and the wider East and Southeast Asia region. Far from isolated, the Central Highlands engaged in trade in precious forest products with lowland states and beyond since at least the emergence of the Hinduized Cham states from the first centuries ce onward. Lowland and coastal states needed the support of local leaders and traders in order to boost their trade and tax revenues. In addition, as a buffer between various rivalrous polities now known as Vietnam, Champa, Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand, the area occupied a strategic position in the wider mainland Southeast Asia region. With the emergence of a unified, neo-Confucianist Vietnamese state the region lost its centrality until the late colonial era, when its strategic value turned it into a battleground among various Vietnamese parties, France, and the United States. It was here that the outcome of the Indochina wars was determined, but at a terrible price for the local population. After the adoption of economic reforms in reunified Vietnam the Central highlands regained its economic centrality, predicated on the global prominence of its valuable cash crops such as coffee, tea, rubber, pepper, and cashew. This coffee boom was based on the labor of lowlander in-migrants, who displaced and dispossessed the highlanders in the process, turning the national and international integration of the Central Highlands and its renewed centrality into a tragic experience for the Central Highlanders. By taking the centrality of the Central Highlands seriously, I arrive at an alternative historical periodization.

Foreign Travelers’ Accounts and Fanny Calderón de la Barca’s Life in Mexico

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lourdes Parra Lazcano
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
War Of Independence ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
Mexican Society ◽  
History Of ◽  
Arbitrary Section ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Calderón De La Barca

Foreign travelers arrived in large numbers in Mexico, especially after Mexican War of Independence, to see the country and access its commercial potential. Each of them talked about the Valley of Mexico, its richness and human diversity. The way these travelers wrote about their “gazes” over this valley—in particular Fanny Calderón de la Barca—is key to understanding the politics of their trips. After their initial viewing, foreign travelers described the Mexican social and political situation as ripe for exploitation and improvement. Despite the fact that these travel accounts consider only an arbitrary section of the Mexican reality, affected by the bias and life history of each writer, they offer valuable material in their portrayal of Mexican society at that time. Hernán Cortés and Alexander von Humboldt’s views of the Mexican Valley were highly influential for the subsequent foreign travelers who went to Mexico during the 19th century, mainly from the United Kingdom, central Europe, and the United States. The work of Fanny Calderón de la Barca, and her gaze as it falls upon the Valley of Mexico, reflect the politics of mid-19th-century Mexico.

Foreign Travelers in Mexico

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
James A. Garza
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Political Stability ◽  
Tourism Industry ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Foreign Travel ◽  
Travel Restrictions ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 19Th Century

The history of foreign travel to Mexico has been dependent on the country’s political, economic, and social conditions. Travel restrictions, banditry, the condition of transportation routes and ports, political stability, revolution, and the development of a tourist industry have all played a role in how travelers have written about Mexico. Despite periodic challenges, Mexico has proven to be an alluring destination for foreign travelers since the colonial era. Men and women have journeyed to Mexico for different reasons, some on official business and others for pleasure or to escape their lives back home, and in turn have produced numerous accounts that have served to attract more visitors and have functioned as a valuable source of information on the everyday life of Mexico’s peoples. Still others have traveled to Mexico for conquest, and while their motivations were violent, their journals have served as a guide for those interested in retracing the same routes. Travelers have depicted landscapes, communities, peoples, and practices; offered insight into important historic periods; and depicted Mexico as exotic, bountiful, primitive, or dangerous. This historical topic is divided into three distinct eras: the colonial period, the 19th century, and the 20th century. The Spanish Crown restricted foreign travel to Mexico during the colonial era (1521–1821), resulting in the relative scarcity of accounts from the period. Foreign travelers during this period were conquistadors, clerics, officials, or explorers, all with varying degrees of literacy. During the 19th century, foreign travelers came in three overlapping waves: the early republic era (1821–1840), when most were either investors or diplomats; the middle period (1830–1870), an era dominated by soldiers, travelers, and archeologists; and the Porfiriato (1876–1911), when investors and wealthy tourists flooded Mexico. The 1910 Mexican Revolution marks the beginning of Mexico’s 20th century and two distinct periods of foreign travel, both influenced by state power and violence. The revolutionary and state-building era (1910–1946) saw foreign travelers as primarily war journalists and writers exploring the effects of the revolution’s social and cultural measures. After World War II, foreign travelers encountered the tourism era (1946–1968), a period under the influence of a burgeoning state tourism industry. Despite this challenge, travelers, many of them writers, carved out their own niches.

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