Medico-Psychological Association of Great Britain and Ireland. Presidential Address, Delivered July 25th, 1907

1907 ◽  
Vol 53 (224) ◽  
pp. 677-704
Author(s):  
P. W. MacDonald

The honourable position, which, through your kindness, I am privileged to occupy to-day, associates the occupant of this chair with a long roll of distinguished predecessors, and unites him as it were to a confraternity of honour which oversteps time and unites generations. But whether the initial duty of having to deliver an inaugural address is a wise one, I will not venture to say; yet I do know that the consciousness of this time-honoured custom neither tends to produce peaceful repose, nor happy thoughts during the year of probation. My immediate predecessor, Dr. Robert Jones, having so diligently covered the field of evolution, from the time of King Saul to the latest conceptions of the London County Council, I have experienced no little difficulty in finding a resting-place in any of the ordinary fields of inquiry. Assuming that the members of this Association would not expect anything new in what I might say, I have speculated whether, perhaps in directions which are not new, I might say anything which would suggest useful thought to those interested in the aims and work of our Association. On the very threshold of my task I was, as if by chance, suddenly pulled up, and found written across my path these words: “I look into my glass.” Such is the title of the short address with which I purpose troubling you this afternoon. Would that this glass were the simple artificial mirror from off the reverse side of which you and I could re move the silver coating and look into the fathomless abyss beyond; but no, the glass is the human mental mirror of which all are possessed, some more, others less. If I propose to you to look with me into this glass at the question of the social aspect of insanity in a purely rural district, “far from the madding crowd,” and which has remained untouched from the influence of large communities, it is not as a mere theoretical exercise in race evolution, but because it contains within, a further inquiry, which even in this the early part of the twentieth century may be turned to profitable account in an Association like this.

Author(s):  
Ruth W. Grant

This chapter presents a historical account of the use of the term “incentives” and of the introduction of incentives in scientific management and behavioral psychology. “Incentives” came into the language in the early part of the twentieth century in America. During this period, the language of social control and of social engineering was quite prevalent, and incentives were understood to be one tool in the social engineers' toolbox—an instrument of power. Not coincidentally, incentives were also extremely controversial at this time and were criticized from several quarters as dehumanizing, manipulative, heartless, and exploitative. When incentives are viewed as instruments of power, the controversial ethical aspects of their use come readily to the fore.


The chapters in this book give an account of how the agenda for theology and religious studies was set and reset throughout the twentieth century – by rapid and at times cataclysmic changes (wars, followed by social and academic upheavals in the 1960s), by new movements of thought, by a bounty of archaeological discoveries, and by unprecedented archival research. Further new trends of study and fresh approaches (existentialist, Marxian, postmodern) have in more recent years generated new quests and horizons for reflection and research. Theological enquiry in Great Britain was transformed in the late nineteenth century through the gradual acceptance of the methods and results of historical criticism. New agendas emerged in the various sub-disciplines of theology and religious studies. Some of the issues raised by biblical criticism, for example Christology and the ‘quest of the historical Jesus’, were to remain topics of controversy throughout the twentieth century. In other important and far-reaching ways, however, the agendas that seemed clear in the early part of the century were abandoned, or transformed and replaced, not only as a result of new discoveries and movements of thought, but also by the unfolding events of a century that brought the appalling carnage and horror of two world wars. Their aftermath brought a shattering of inherited world views, including religious world views, and disillusion with the optimistic trust in inevitable progress that had seemed assured in many quarters and found expression in widely influential ‘liberal’ theological thought of the time. The centenary of the British Academy in 2002 has provided a most welcome opportunity for reconsidering the contribution of British scholarship to theological and religious studies in the last hundred years.


Author(s):  
Alexander Guterman

This chapter details how the congregation of the Great Synagogue in Warsaw reflected the social dynamics that had transformed the face of Warsaw Jewry. They included an increasingly large proportion of Jews whose way of life distanced them from the devoutly Orthodox masses. Many showed clear signs of acculturation, Polonization, and an ongoing process of assimilation, although such behaviour may not have been motivated by any clear ideology of integration into the Polish nation. While many of the Great Synagogue's leaders tried to influence the views of the congregation, it was the members themselves who shaped the image of the synagogue. Their loyalties represented the spectrum of allegiances in the Jewish population of Warsaw at the time, and as Jews from the countryside joined their brethren in the capital, the Great Synagogue came to reflect the social and ideological transformations taking place among Polish Jewry in the early part of the twentieth century, especially between the two world wars.


1983 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 337-351
Author(s):  
Hafez Farmayan

In 1898, with Great Britain and Russia vying for political and economic dominance of Iran, Grand Vizier Mīrzā Alī Khān Amīn ud-Dawlah set in motion a cycle of events that, during the early part of the twentieth century, led to the downfall of the Qājārs, a dynasty he had spent his entire professional career serving. What initiated this cycle was the negotiation for a loan from Great Britain, sought partially for governmental expenses but mostly to finance a trip by the Shah to Europe. To obtain this loan, Amīn ud-Dawlah mortgaged the revenues of Iran's two most important customs houses in the south (Bushehr and Kermanshah), and also allowed those two departments to come under the control and administration of the British-owned Imperial Bank of Persia. In return for these astonishing concessions, the Bank advanced £50,000 to Grand Vizier Amin ud-Dawlah for emergency expenditures. The remainder, a mere £200,000, was to be paid upon completion of negotiations with the British Government. British bankers and diplomats in Tehran, aware of the sensitivity of the Grand Vizier's extraordinary decision, urged London to complete the negotiations as soon as possible. In the view of British representatives in Tehran this was imperative if temporary control of the customs houses was to become “a permanent institution.” However, negotiations dragged on long enough to give Russia and the Grand Vizier's rivals a chance to successfully frustrate the negotiations. Failure to obtain this British loan forced Grand Vizier Amīn ud-Dawlah to resign.


Author(s):  
Cybelle Fox

This chapter describes in detail the three worlds, focusing on the factors—labor, race, and politics—that will best explain the differential incorporation of blacks, Mexicans, and European immigrants into the American welfare state and the scope, form, and function of relief provision across regions. On the eve of the Great Depression, the vast majority of European immigrants lived in the Northeast and Midwest, Mexicans lived overwhelmingly in the Southwest, while most blacks still lived in the South. So different were their experiences with the racial, political, and labor market systems in these regions that these groups could be said to be living in separate worlds. Each of them suffered from significant discrimination at the hands of native-born whites in the early part of the twentieth century. European immigrants were largely included in the social welfare system, blacks were largely excluded, while Mexicans were often expelled from the nation simply for requesting assistance.


1992 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 1-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
F.M.L. Thompson

An ultra-slow motion serial whose episodes appear at intervals of twelve months needs a recapitulation of the story so far, however excellent the retentive capacity of scholars in comparison with soap opera audiences. The characters in question are the landowners, great and not so great, and the landed families who were already wellestablished on their estates and in their country houses in late Victorian Britain: and also the newcomers who have continued, throughout the twentieth century, to purchase landed estates and country houses. The main plot concerns the structure and distribution of landownership, and I have suggested that reports of the virtual disappearance of great estates in the last hundred years have been greatly exaggerated. There have been great changes, but while some individuals or entire families have fallen off the boat others have clambered aboard, so that in the 1990s perhaps one-third or more of the land of Britain is held in sizeable estates of 1,000 acres and upwards, compared with radier over one-half in the 1890s. The changing composition of the cast of landowners, and the wildly fluctuating fortunes of particular members of the cast, have fascinated many observers of the social and political scene, and these features provide the sub-plots. The undoubted decline of landed and aristocratic political and social predominance, leading to the virtual elimination of their influence on public life, and the equally undoubted decline, impoverishment, and extinction of some once great and famous landed families, have tended to become confused as cause and effect in some accounts.


2013 ◽  
Vol 17 (59) ◽  
pp. 14-17
Author(s):  
Jean Everitt

One of the major changes to the social structure of Britain brought about by industrialization in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was the creation of the working class. Library provision for the new mass readership was not just through public libraries, but through a number of bodies committed to provide an educational service to the working classes. My research is essentially an examination of one of the institutions committed to provide such a service by the working man for the working man in the second half of the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth century.


2019 ◽  
Vol 101 (4) ◽  
pp. 357-395 ◽  
Author(s):  
Saty Satya-Murti ◽  
Jennifer Gutierrez

The Los Angeles Plaza Community Center (PCC), an early twentieth-century Los Angeles community center and clinic, published El Mexicano, a quarterly newsletter, from 1913 to 1925. The newsletter’s reports reveal how the PCC combined walk-in medical visits with broader efforts to address the overall wellness of its attendees. Available records, some with occasional clinical details, reveal the general spectrum of illnesses treated over a twelve-year span. Placed in today’s context, the medical care given at this center was simple and minimal. The social support it provided, however, was multifaceted. The center’s caring extended beyond providing medical attention to helping with education, nutrition, employment, transportation, and moral support. Thus, the social determinants of health (SDH), a prominent concern of present-day public health, was a concept already realized and practiced by these early twentieth-century Los Angeles Plaza community leaders. Such practices, although not yet nominally identified as SDH, had their beginnings in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century social activism movement aiming to mitigate the social ills and inequities of emerging industrial nations. The PCC was one of the pioneers in this effort. Its concerns and successes in this area were sophisticated enough to be comparable to our current intentions and aspirations.


2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-177
Author(s):  
Egdūnas Račius

Muslim presence in Lithuania, though already addressed from many angles, has not hitherto been approached from either the perspective of the social contract theories or of the compliance with Muslim jurisprudence. The author argues that through choice of non-Muslim Grand Duchy of Lithuania as their adopted Motherland, Muslim Tatars effectively entered into a unique (yet, from the point of Hanafi fiqh, arguably Islamically valid) social contract with the non-Muslim state and society. The article follows the development of this social contract since its inception in the fourteenth century all the way into the nation-state of Lithuania that emerged in the beginning of the twentieth century and continues until the present. The epitome of the social contract under investigation is the official granting in 1995 to Muslim Tatars of a status of one of the nine traditional faiths in Lithuania with all the ensuing political, legal and social consequences for both the Muslim minority and the state.


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