scholarly journals Medizin, Recht und das Wissen vom «zivilisierten» Krieg im langen 19. Jahrhundert

Gesnerus ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 72 (2) ◽  
pp. 215-230
Author(s):  
Svenja Goltermann

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.

Author(s):  
Anthony Carty

The view that no form of international law existed in seventeenth-century France, and that this time was a part of ‘prehistory’, and thus irrelevant for international legal thought today is challenged. In addition, the traditional claim of Richelieu to be an admirer of Machiavelli and his Ragion di Stato doctrine to the detriment of the aim of concluding treaties and keeping them (as sacred), is refuted by careful historical research. In Richelieu’s thinking, there is a role for law to play but it is law as justice, law in the classical natural law tradition. Those who rule are subject to the rule of law as justice, the rule of God, or the rule of reason. In Richelieu’s world, kings and ministers are rational instruments of the practical implementation of God’s will on earth.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-45
Author(s):  
Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi ◽  
Constantine Petridis

Abstract Mapping Senufo: Art, Evidence, and the Production of Knowledge – an in-progress, collaborative, born-digital publication – will offer a model for joining theories about the construction of identities and the politics of knowledge production with research and publication practice. In this article, we examine how computational methods have led us to reframe research questions, reevaluate sources, and reimagine the form of a digital monograph. We also demonstrate how our use of digital technologies, attention to iteration, and collaborative mode of working have generated fresh insights into a corpus of arts identified as Senufo, the nature of evidence for art-historical research, and digital publication. We posit that the form of a digital publication itself can bring processes of knowledge construction to the fore and unsettle expectations of a tidy, authoritative narrative.


The history of infanticide and abortion in Latin America has garnered increasing attention in the past two decades. Particularities of topic and temporal focus characterize this work and shape this bibliography’s geographic organization. Mexico possesses the most developed scholarship in both the colonial and modern periods. There, tracing of the persistence of pre-Conquest Indigenous medical knowledge and the endurance of paraprofessional obstetrical practitioners through the colonial era and into the 19th century features prominently and echoes some of the scholarship examining European midwives’ administration of plant-based abortifacients in the medieval and Early Modern eras. This topic plays a role, but a much less prominent one in scholarship on Colombia, Peru, and Brazil. Scholars of Brazil, the Caribbean, and circum-Caribbean have focused in particular on the issue of enslaved mothers’ commission of infanticide and abortion on their own children in the 18th and 19th centuries, a particularly fraught issue in the context of the abolition of the slave trade. A central assumption in much scholarship on the 19th-century professionalization (and masculinization) of obstetrical medicine is that the marginalization of midwives entailed a reduction in women’s access to abortion, although this position has been challenged in some recent scholarship on 19th-century Mexico in particular. The examination of the ways that the new republics perceived the crimes of infanticide and abortion in their legal codes, judicial processes, and in community attitudes is a central focus of 19th- and 20th-century scholarship. Scholars have remarked upon the considerable uniformity across all regions of a paucity of denunciations or convictions in the first half of the 19th century and the rise of criminal trials for both crimes in its last three decades. This change coincided (although no one has argued been provoked by) many countries’ issuance of national penal codes in the 1870s and 1880s. This intensification of persecution also coincided with the Catholic church’s articulation of an explicit condemnation of abortion (Pius IX’s 1869 bull Apostolicae Sedis), although demonstrating the concrete implications of this decree to the Latin American setting remains a task yet to be undertaken. Historians of both abortion and infanticide have also concentrated on defendant motives and defenses in criminal investigations. While some highlight defendants’ economic desperation, most scholars argue that the public defense of female sexual honor was a crucial motivator, which courts understood as a legitimate concern in 19th- and even mid-20th-century trials. Scholarship on 20th-century infanticide and abortion history continues to concentrate on fluctuations in attitudes toward honor, gender, and the family as influences on criminal codes and especially judicial sentencing for both acts, and toward the late 20th century on feminist efforts to decriminalize abortion that have met with varied success across countries.


2021 ◽  
pp. 187936652110663
Author(s):  
Dmitry Mikhailov ◽  
Nikolay Ternov

The article provides a comparative characteristic of the nationally motivated ethnocultural concepts of the 19th century, based on the interpretation of Siberian peoples` history. Finnish nationalism was looking for the ancestral home of the Finns in Altai and tried to connect them with the Turkic-Mongol states of antiquity and the Middle Ages. Under the influence of the cultural and historical theories of regional experts, the Siberian national discourse itself began to form, which was especially clearly manifested in the example of the genesis of Altai nationalism. Russian great-power nationalism sought to make Slavic history more ancient and connected it with the prestigious Scythian culture. If we rely on the well-known periodization of the development of the national movement of M. Khrokh, then in the theory of the Finns` Altai origin, we can distinguish features characteristic of phase “B,” when the cultural capital of nationalism gradually turns into political. In turn, the historical research of the regional specialists illustrates the earliest stage in the emergence of the national movement, the period of nationalism not only without a nation but also without national intellectuals. The oblasts are forming the very national environment, which does not yet have the means for its own expression, but it obviously contains separatist potential. At the same time, both the Finnish and Siberian patriots, with their scientific research, solved the same ideological task—to include the objects of their research in the world cultural and historical context, to achieve recognition of their right to a place among European nations. However, Florinsky’s theory, performing the function of the official propaganda, is an example of the manifestation of state unifying nationalism, with imperial connotations characteristics of Russia.


2021 ◽  
pp. 155-179
Author(s):  
Andrea Bianchi

How knowledge of international law is produced, by what forces and processes it is shaped, how one can determine what issues are deemed relevant to the field, what questions can be competently raised by the members of the profession and the discipline, and who has the authority to provide them with an answer, are all issues that lie at the heart of this chapter. Particular attention will be paid to the concepts of both epistemic communities and discursive policies. In light of the interaction of the different forces and actors at play in the production of knowledge, an attempt will be made to sketch out the main trends of the contemporary episteme of international law. The final part of the chapter tackles the issue of how to bring to light and make visible the invisible frames of knowledge production in international law, by using critical theory and the power of legal imagination.


2021 ◽  
pp. 256-275
Author(s):  
Eyal Benvenisti ◽  
Doreen Lustig

During the course of the second half of the 19th century, the rules regulating the conduct of armies during hostilities were internationally codified for the first time. The conventional narrative attributes the codification of the laws of war to the campaign of civil society, especially that of the founders of the Red Cross—Henry Dunant and Gustav Moynier. In what follows, we problematize this narrative and trace the construction of this knowledge. We explore how the leading figures of the Red Cross, who were aware of the shortcomings of their project, were nonetheless invested in narrating its history as a history of success. Their struggle to control the narrative would eventually confer the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) with considerable interpretive and agenda-setting authority in the realm of the laws of war. We dwell on the meaning of this conscious exercise in knowledge production and its normative ramifications.


Author(s):  
Lucy J. Havard

Early modern manuscript recipe books have become increasingly popular sources for historical research over recent years. Extensive compilations of food recipes, medicinal remedies and household tips, these manuscripts provide rich, multi-faceted opportunities for historical study and discussion. This paper utilizes recipe books as a means to examine contemporary food preservation practices. Through detailed textual analysis of these manuscripts, and the reconstruction of early modern preserving recipes, I explore the explicit and tacit ‘domestic knowledge’ required for food preservation. I argue that, rather than being a straightforward activity, this was a complex process requiring significant judgement, intuition and experience on the part of the housewife. Preservation was an experimental practice that might be considered under the umbrella of early modern natural philosophy, and the housewife was a legitimate actor in the associated knowledge production.


2019 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 237-249
Author(s):  
Francisco J. Conejo ◽  
Ben Wooliscroft

This study explores indigence as a potential by-product of newly-formed markets, and inquires into the factors from which this indigence might develop. Both are addressed via historical research, in the context of 19th-century Denver, Colorado, U.S., using beggars as a proxy for the indigent. Data from period newspapers indicates that begging emerged concurrently with Denver’s 1858 foundation. By 1880 it reached significant proportions. Consistent with the literature, Denver begging derived from interrelated micro, meso, and macro factors: Immigration, venture failure, vice, economic reactivation, proletarianization, lack of social support, government policy, environmental degradation, racial discrimination, and personal choice. These ten factors mirror some of the issues still confronting Denver and other cities/countries today. We conclude that indigence does not necessarily result from personal flaws, nor is it an anomaly of otherwise well-operating markets. It can be a byproduct of larger, more complex market systems, exacerbated by the canons of laissez-faire economics. Historical marketing research enhances how current market issues are understood.


2019 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 741-757
Author(s):  
Elisabeth Schweiger

AbstractOver the last decade, the concept targeted killing has received much attention in debates on the customary interpretation of the right to self-defence, particularly in the context of practices such as US armed drone attacks. In these debates, government silence has often been invoked as acquiescence to the jus ad bellum aspects of targeted killing. Focusing on the question of state silence on targeted killing practices by the Israeli and US governments in recent years, this article investigates over 900 UN Security Council and Human Rights Council debates and argues that there has been no tacit consent to targeted killing. The analysis firstly shows that the majority of states have condemned Israeli targeted killing practices and have raised concerns about armed drone attacks, while falling short of directly protesting against US practices. The article, secondly, applies the customary international law requirements for acquiescence and challenges the idea that silence on US armed drone attacks can be understood as a legal stance towards targeted killing. The article, finally, investigates the political context and engages with alternative interpretations of silence. Contextualizing acts of protest and lack of protest within an asymmetrical political context, the article posits that the invocation of silence as acquiescence in the case of targeted killing is problematic and risks complicity of legal knowledge production with the violence of hegemonic actors.


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