Money, Marriage, and Madness

Author(s):  
Kim E. Nielsen

Money, Marriage, and Madness is a story of the medical profession, a woman’s wealth and the gendered property laws in which she operated, marital violence, marriage and divorce, institutional incarceration, and an alleged bank robbery. Dr. Anna B. Miesse Ott lived in a legal context governing money, marriage, and madness that nearly all nineteenth-century women shared. She benefited from wealth, professional status as a physician, and whiteness, but they did not protect her from the vulnerabilities generated by sexism and ableism. After an 1856 marriage and divorce, Ott served for nearly twenty years as a physician in Madison, Wisconsin and garnered additional wealth. In 1873, her husband and local physicians testified to her insanity, as well as her legal incompetency, and Ott entered the gates of the Wisconsin State Hospital for the Insane where she remained until her 1893 death. Her decades of institutionalization reveal daily life in a late nineteenth-century asylum and the permeability of its walls. Tracing the stories told of her after her death enables analyses of the impact of the diagnosis of mania and institutionalization on our memory of her. In addition, this book explores historical methods, ethics, and dilemmas confronted when historical sources are limited and come not from the subject but from those with greater power.

Modern Italy ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Omar Mazzotti ◽  
Massimo Fornasari

This article examines the dissemination of agricultural education in primary schools in the Romagna, an important rural area in post-unification Italy. The topic is explored within a wider perspective, analysing the impact of institutional changes – at both the national and local levels – on the transmission of agricultural knowledge in primary education during the final quarter of the nineteenth century. Two particular elements of the process are examined: students, as the intended beneficiaries of the educational process; and teachers, who as well as having a key role in reducing the extent of illiteracy were sometimes also involved in disseminating agricultural knowledge. The transfer of that knowledge appears to have been a very challenging task, not least because of the scant interest that Italy's ruling class showed towards this issue. However, increasing importance seems to have been given to agricultural education in primary schools during the economic crisis of the 1880s, when the expansion of this provision was thought to be among the factors that might help to prepare the ground for the hoped-for ‘agricultural revolution’.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-41
Author(s):  
W. Walker Hanlon ◽  
Casper Worm Hansen ◽  
Jake Kantor

Using novel weekly mortality data for London spanning 1866-1965, we analyze the changing relationship between temperature and mortality as the city developed. Our main results show that warm weeks led to elevated mortality in the late nineteenth century, mainly due to infant deaths from digestive diseases. However, this pattern largely disappeared after WWI as infant digestive diseases became less prevalent. The resulting change in the temperature-mortality relationship meant that thousands of heat-related deaths—equal to 0.9-1.4 percent of all deaths— were averted. These findings show that improving the disease environment can dramatically alter the impact of high temperature on mortality.


2002 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claudia Agostoni

This article explores why alongside sanitary legislation and public health works, Mexican physicians of the late nineteenth century attempted to transform the habits, customs and day to day activities of the population. It stresses the importance that the teaching of the principles of private and public hygiene had for the future of the country, how this education was to be carried out, and why some members of the medical profession believed that the hygienic education of mothers/women was an unavoidable requirement for the progress of the nation. Este artíículo analiza por quéé durante las déécadas finales del siglo diecinueve, el gremio méédico mexicano consideraba que era absolutamente indispensable que los habitantes del paíís, y en particular las mujeres de la capital, contaran con una cultura de la higiene. No sóólo era fundamental sanear y ordenar a la ciudad de Mééxico mediante obras de infraestructura sanitaria, y emitir leyes que regularan la salubridad de la nacióón, sino que era igualmente importante, y quizáás máás urgente, que los habitantes transformaran sus háábitos y costumbres de acuerdo con lo establecido por la higiene púública y privada. Asimismo, el artíículo examina los méétodos mediante los cuales se procuróó crear una cultura de la higiene, y por quéé la madre de familia fue considerada como una aliada imprescindible para la empresa de los higienistas.


Author(s):  
Shaul Stampfer

This chapter investigates the phenomenon of remarriage in nineteenth-century eastern Europe, demonstrating its significance in Jewish marital behaviour. Patterns of remarriage deserve attention for a number of reasons: they influenced fertility levels, affected family structure, played a role in networking, and served as an indicator of the importance of marriage in a given society. Remarriage is highly revealing of group characteristics and behaviour, but remarriage in late nineteenth-century eastern Europe merits attention for an additional reason. Patterns of remarriage and their changes over time significantly diverged among various population groups. Eastern Europe is thus an excellent context for examining the impact of significant variables on remarriage by means of a comparative approach. The chapter then evaluates modes of remarriage among four major religious-national groups: Russian Orthodox, Catholics, Protestants, and Jews. It also considers important differences between Jews and Christians in specific patterns of remarriage.


2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 78-102
Author(s):  
MILES WILKINSON

Abstract:This essay examines the origins of physician-patient privilege in the United States. It concentrates an 1828 New York law that protected medical confidentiality in the courtroom—the first statutory guarantee of physician-patient privilege—as well as the rapid spread of privilege statutes throughout the nineteenth century. Using the published notes of the authors of New York’s influential statute alongside other primary sources, I argue that these early statutes are best explained as the result of nineteenth-century efforts to codify American law. The medical profession took little note of physician-patient privilege until much later, indicating that privilege emerged not as a protection of doctors’ professional status, nor as a means of protecting patients in the courtroom, but rather as an inadvertent offshoot of attempts to streamline and simply judicial proceedings. It is perhaps because of these unsystematic origins that physician-patient privilege still remains such an unevenly applied rule in American courtrooms.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 20190130 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura E. Ludtke

This article addresses the charge that the introduction of the electric light in the late nineteenth century increased disruptions to the human body's biological processes and interfered with the oscillating sleeping–waking cycle. By considering the nineteenth century research into the factors that motivate and disrupt sleep in concert with contemporary discussions of the physiology of street lighting, this article exposes how social and political forces shaped the impact of artificial light on sleep and, more perniciously, on bodily autonomy. As a close reading of artificial light in three influential dystopian novels building on these historical contexts demonstrates, dystopian fiction challenges the commonplace assumption that the advent of the electric light, or of widespread street lighting in public urban spaces, posed an immediate or inherent threat to sleep. Beginning with H. G. Wells's The Sleeper Awakes (1899), in which the eponymous sleeper emerges from a cataleptic trance into a future in which electric light and power are used to control the populace, representations of artificial light in early dystopian fiction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries depict a nightmare of total illumination in which the state exerted its control over the individual. In Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), constant artificial illumination plays a vital role in the chemical and behavioural conditioning undergone by individuals in a post-Fordian world. George Orwell intensifies this relationship between light and individual autonomy in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), where access to electric current (and thus light) is limited at certain times of the day, brownouts and electrical rationing occur intermittently, and total illumination is used to torture and reprogram individuals believed to have betrayed Big Brother.


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