scholarly journals Talking therapy: The allopathic nihilation of homoeopathy through conceptual translation and a new medical language

2021 ◽  
pp. 095269512096787
Author(s):  
Lyn Brierley-Jones

The 19th century saw the development of an eclectic medical marketplace in both the United Kingdom and the United States, with mesmerists, herbalists and hydrotherapists amongst the plethora of medical ‘sectarians’ offering mainstream (or ‘allopathic’) medicine stiff competition. Foremost amongst these competitors were homoeopaths, a group of practitioners who followed Samuel Hahnemann (1982[1810]) in prescribing highly dilute doses of single-drug substances at infrequent intervals according to the ‘law of similars’ (like cures like). The theoretical sophistication of homoeopathy, compared to other medical sectarian systems, alongside its institutional growth after the mid-19th-century cholera epidemics, led to homoeopathy presenting a challenge to allopathy that the latter could not ignore. Whilst the subsequent decline of homoeopathy at the beginning of the 20th century was the result of multiple factors, including developments within medical education, the Progressive movement, and wider socio-economic changes, this article focuses on allopathy’s response to homoeopathy’s conceptual challenge. Using the theoretical framework of Berger and Luckmann (1991[1966]) and taking a Tory historiographical approach (Fuller, 2002) to recover more fully 19th-century homoeopathic knowledge, this article demonstrates how increasingly sophisticated ‘nihilative’ strategies were ultimately successful in neutralising homoeopathy and that homoeopaths were defeated by allopaths (rather than disproven) at the conceptual level. In this process, the therapeutic use of ‘nosodes’ (live disease products) and the language of bacteriology were pivotal. For their part, homoeopaths failed to mount a counter-attack against allopaths with an explanatory framework available to them.

Author(s):  
Lourdes Parra Lazcano

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.


Author(s):  
Shannon K. Withycombe

Throughout the 19th century, American women experienced vast changes regarding possibilities for childbirth and for enhancing or restricting fertility control. At the beginning of the century, issues involving reproduction were discussed primarily in domestic, private settings among women’s networks that included family members, neighbors, or midwives. In the face of massive social and economic changes due to industrialization, urbanization, and immigration, many working-class women became separated from these traditional networks and knowledge and found themselves reliant upon emerging medical systems for care and advice during pregnancy and childbirth. At the same time, upper-class women sought out men in the emerging profession of obstetrics to deliver their babies in hopes of beating the frightening odds against maternal and infant health and even survival. Nineteenth-century reproduction was altered drastically with the printing and commercial boom of the middle of the century. Families could now access contraception and abortion methods and information, which was available earlier in the century albeit in a more private and limited manner, through newspapers, popular books, stores, and from door-to-door salesmen. As fertility control entered these public spaces, many policy makers became concerned about the impacts of such practices on the character and future of the nation. By the 1880s, contraception and abortion came under legal restrictions, just as women and their partners gained access to safer and more effective products than ever before. When the 19th century closed, legislatures and the medical profession raised obstacles that hindered the ability of most women to limit the size of their families as the national fertility rate reached an all-time low. Clearly, American families eagerly seized opportunities to exercise control over their reproductive destinies and their lives.


2021 ◽  
pp. 095792652110131
Author(s):  
Michael Billig

This paper examines how the British government has used statistics about COVID-19 for political ends. A distinction is made between precise and round numbers. Historically, using round numbers to estimate the spread of disease gave way in the 19th century to the sort precise, but not necessarily accurate, statistics that are now being used to record COVID-19. However, round numbers have continued to exert rhetorical, ‘semi-magical’ power by simultaneously conveying both quantity and quality. This is demonstrated in examples from the British government’s claims about COVID-19. The paper illustrates how senior members of the UK government use ‘good’ round numbers to frame their COVID-19 goals and to announce apparent achievements. These round numbers can provide political incentives to manipulate the production of precise number; again examples from the UK government are given.


Author(s):  
Amin Tarzi

Since its inception as a separate political entity in 1747, Afghanistan has been embroiled in almost perpetual warfare, but it has never been ruled directly by the military. From initial expansionist military campaigns to involvement in defensive, civil, and internal consolidation campaigns, the Afghan military until the mid-19th century remained mainly a combination of tribal forces and smaller organized units. The central government, however, could only gain tenuous monopoly over the use of violence throughout the country by the end of the 19th century. The military as well as Afghan society remained largely illiterate and generally isolated from the prevailing global political and ideological trends until the middle of the 20th century. Politicization of Afghanistan’s military began in very small numbers after World War II with Soviet-inspired communism gaining the largest foothold. Officers associated with the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan were instrumental in two successful coup d’états in the country. In 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, ending the country’s sovereignty and ushering a period of conflict that continues to the second decade of the 21st century in varying degrees. In 2001, the United States led an international invasion of the country, catalyzing efforts at reorganization of the smaller professional Afghan national defense forces that have remained largely apolitical and also the country’s most effective and trusted governmental institution.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (21) ◽  
pp. 221-231
Author(s):  
Péter Bősze

Hungarian language medical journals were published only since the 19th century. The first one among them was the Medical Magazine founded and edited by Pál Bugát and Ferenc Schedel Toldy in 1831. Unfortunately, it ceased to exist after the freedom fight 1848-49. One decade after the bloody defeating of the freedom fight founded Lajos Markusovszky the Orvosi Hetilap 1857 that was issued without a break to our days. This is the world’s seventh oldest medical journal a proud part of the Hungarian Heritage as well. Specialists published first in the supplements of the journal and the Gyógyászat founded by Imre Poór separated first from the original paper. At the end of the century, there were published already specific journals of many specialities. These journals mirrored exactly the development of Hungarian medical language. The Orvosi Tár revealed obviously all difficulties of creating new medical terms. However, the Orvosi Hetilap used already exact Hungarian definitions. It is almost unbelievable how precisely the authors wrote their articles. Only since the second half of the 20th century were emerging terms of foreign origin, initially Greco-Latin and later on the rapidly spreading English.


Author(s):  
Camila Kuhn Vieira ◽  
Carine Nascimento da Silva ◽  
Ana Luisa Moser Keitel ◽  
Adriana da Silva Silveira ◽  
Solange Beatriz Billig Garces ◽  
...  

We are experiencing a period of accelerated socio-cultural, political and economic changes that are reflected in practically all social institutions, including the family. This is a secular social institution, which reflects the evolution of society. There is still resistance to “idealizing” the family as the “sphere of care and love”. However, it is known that the traditional family of the 19th century gave way to the nuclear family and that, at the same time, it gives way to families with different backgrounds. Also noteworthy are the transformations that occur in complex and liquid society, as highlighted by authors such as Morin and Bauman. In this sense, these transformations also occur in the social institutions that compose it, among them the family nuclei and other social spaces where different generations are inserted, especially with the increasing presence of elderly people. Therefore, with so many important social issues involved in these relationships (society-family-aging and intergenerationality), these reflections are considered to be extremely relevant.


1996 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 417-434 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jorge Arditi

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.


2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 195-217

Among the various human attitudes toward a pandemic, along with fear, despair and anger, there is also an urge to praise the catastrophe or imbue it with some sort of hope. In 2020 such hopes were voiced in the stream of all the other COVID-19 reactions and interpretations in the form of predictions of imminent social, political or economic changes that may or must be brought on by the pandemic, or as calls to “rise above” the common human sentiment and see the pandemic as some sort of cruel-but-necessary bitter pill to cure human depravity or social disorganization. Is it really possible for a plague of any kind to be considered a relief? Or perhaps a just punishment? In order to assess the validity of such interpretations, this paper considers the artistic reactions to the pandemics of the past, specifically the images of the plague from Alexander Pushkin’s play Feast During the Plague, Antonin Artaud’s essay “The Theatre and the Plague” and Albert Camus’s novel The Plague. These works in different ways explore an attitude in which a plague can be praised in some respect. The plague can be a means of self-overcoming and purification for both an individual and for society. At the same time, Pushkin and Camus, each in his own way and by different means, show the illusory nature of that attitude. A mass catastrophe can reveal the resources already present in humankind, but it does not help either the individual or the society to progress.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
María Castro Ruiz ◽  
Rodrigo Perez Fernandez

The history of the Galatea dates back to the 19th century when in 1896 she was launched and Christianised as Glenlee at Glasgow. She sailed as a merchant ship in the United Kingdom and Italy during the first period of her operational life, and was later adapted with mechanical propulsion. After several circumnavigations, in 1922 she was renamed Galatea to serve in the Spanish Navy, where she remained in service for 60 years. Since 1993 she has been resting in her hometown in Scotland as a museum ship. As a tribute to the extensive and remarkable history of this ship, and in order to recover and preserve the naval tradition in Spain, it has been proposed to design a ship with the same morphology as the Glenlee to stoke the spirit of the Galatea and inspire the construction of new sailing ships. She will be adapted as a military training ship of the Spanish Navy. Therefore, studies in stability, propulsion, general arrangement and structural calculations will be necessary to validate the transformation of the Glenlee into a new Galatea II complying with mandatory regulations and technological advances that will encourage its operation to the future naval officers of the Spanish Navy.


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