When Sir Humphrey Appleby warned his Prime Minister against making “courageous policy”, he could have been talking about venereal diseases. Many have considered misogyny, class conflict and racial paranoia as the drivers of venereal diseases control policy in the early twentieth century. In reality, such policy was inclined towards disease control in the most practical way, with the resources to hand, and in line with realistic outcomes. This book re-examines historical sources to reveal the unacknowledged complexity of determining public policy for the control of venereal diseases in two case studies, Edinburgh in Scotland and Adelaide in South Australia.

In this critically acclaimed biography, now fully updated, Royle revises Kitchener’s latter-day image as a stern taskmaster, the ultimate war lord, to reveal a caring man capable of displaying great loyalty and love to those close to him.New light is thrown on his Irish childhood, his years in the Middle East as a biblical archaeologist, his attachment to the Arab cause and on the infamous struggle with Lord Curzon over control of the army in India.In particular, Royle reassesses Kitchener’s role in the Great War, presenting his phenomenally successful recruitment campaign – ‘Your Country Needs You’ – as a major contribution to the Allied victory and rehabilitating him as a brilliant strategist who understood the importance of fighting the war on multiple fronts.

A review of the original edition of The Burdens of Disease that appeared in ISIS stated, "Hays has written a remarkable book. He too has a message: That epidemics are primarily dependent on poverty and that the West has consistently refused to accept this." This revised edition confirms the book's timely value and provides a sweeping approach to the history of disease. In this updated volume, with revisions and additions to the original content, including the evolution of drug-resistant diseases and expanded coverage of HIV/AIDS, along with recent data on mortality figures and other relevant statistics, J. N. Hays chronicles perceptions and responses to plague and pestilence over two thousand years of western history. Disease is framed as a multidimensional construct, situated at the intersection of history, politics, culture, and medicine, and rooted in mentalities and social relations as much as in biological conditions of pathology. This revised edition of The Burdens of Disease also studies the victims of epidemics, paying close attention to the relationships among poverty, power, and disease.

Multidisciplinary collection of essays on the relationship of infertility and the "historic" STIs--gonorrhea, chlamydia, and syphilis--producing surprising new insights in studies from across the globe and spanning millennia.

From almost the time when man first discovered the pleasures of sin, he has also experienced the torments of the Pox. Drawing on references from art and literature, stories of famous sufferers and medical documents, this book presents the history of syphilis and gonorrhoea, and their treatment, from the Renaissance to the antibiotic age.

Reforming the World offers a sophisticated account of how and why, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American missionaries and moral reformers undertook work abroad at an unprecedented rate and scale. Looking at various organizations such as the Young Men's Christian Association and the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions, Ian Tyrrell describes the influence that the export of American values had back home, and explores the methods and networks used by reformers to fashion a global and nonterritorial empire. He follows the transnational American response to internal pressures, the European colonies, and dynamic changes in global society. Examining the cultural context of American expansionism from the 1870s to the 1920s, Tyrrell provides a new interpretation of Christian and evangelical missionary work, and he addresses America's use of "soft power." He describes evangelical reform's influence on American colonial and diplomatic policy, emphasizes the limits of that impact, and documents the often idiosyncratic personal histories, aspirations, and cultural heritage of moral reformers such as Margaret and Mary Leitch, Louis Klopsch, Clara Barton, and Ida Wells. The book illustrates that moral reform influenced the United States as much as it did the colonial and quasi-colonial peoples Americans came in contact with, and shaped the architecture of American dealings with the larger world of empires through to the era of Woodrow Wilson. Investigating the wide-reaching and diverse influence of evangelical reform movements, Reforming the World establishes how transnational organizing played a vital role in America's political and economic expansion.

Here David Oshinsky tells the gripping story of the polio terror and of the intense effort to find a cure, from the March of Dimes to the discovery of the Salk and Sabin vaccines--and beyond. Drawing on newly available papers of Jonas Salk, Albert Sabin and other key players, Oshinsky paints a suspenseful portrait of the race for the cure, weaving a dramatic tale centered on the furious rivalry between Salk and Sabin. He also tells the story of Isabel Morgan, perhaps the most talented of all polio researchers, who might have beaten Salk to the prize if she had not retired to raise a family. Oshinsky offers an insightful look at the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, which was founded in the 1930s by FDR and Basil O'Connor, it revolutionized fundraising and the perception of disease in America. Oshinsky also shows how the polio experience revolutionized the way in which the government licensed and tested new drugs before allowing them on the market, and the way in which the legal system dealt with manufacturers' liability for unsafe products. Finally, and perhaps most tellingly, Oshinsky reveals that polio was never the raging epidemic portrayed by the media, but in truth a relatively uncommon disease. But in baby-booming America--increasingly suburban, family-oriented, and hygiene-obsessed--the specter of polio, like the specter of the atomic bomb, soon became a cloud of terror over daily life. Both a gripping scientific suspense story and a provocative social and cultural history, Polio opens a fresh window onto postwar America.

Since the 2008 world food crisis a surge of land grabbing swept Africa, Asia and Latin America and even some regions of Europe and North America. Investors have uprooted rural communities for massive agricultural, biofuels, mining, industrial and urbanisation projects. ‘Water grabbing’ and ‘green grabbing’ have further exacerbated social tensions. Early analyses of land grabbing focused on foreign actors, the biofuels boom and Africa, and pointed to catastrophic consequences for the rural poor. Subsequently scholars carried out local case studies in diverse world regions. The contributors to this volume advance the discussion to a new stage, critically scrutinizing alarmist claims of the first wave of research, probing the historical antecedents of today’s land grabbing, examining large-scale land acquisitions in light of international human rights and investment law, and considering anew longstanding questions in agrarian political economy about forms of dispossession and accumulation and grassroots resistance. Readers of this collection will learn about the impacts of land and water grabbing; the relevance of key theorists, including Marx, Polanyi and Harvey; the realities of China’s involvement in Africa; how contemporary land grabbing differs from earlier plantation agriculture; and how social movements—and rural people in general—are responding to this new threat. This book was published as a special issue of Third World Quarterly.

“A fascinating and wide-ranging history of health, hygiene, and the sea. This is a great narrative of an important but often hidden aspect of seafaring.” —Ausmarine When European sailors began to explore the rest of the world, the problem of keeping healthy on such long voyages became acute. Malnourishment and crowded conditions bred disease, but they also carried epidemics that decimated the indigenous populations they encountered and brought back new diseases like syphilis. As navies developed, the well-being of crews became a dominant factor in the success of naval operations, so it is no surprise that the Royal Navy led the way in shipboard medical provision, and sponsored many of the advances in diet and hygiene which by the Napoleonic Wars gave its fleets a significant advantage over all its enemies. These improvements trickled down to the merchant service, but the book also looks at two particularly harsh maritime environments, the slave trade and emigrant ships, both of which required special medical arrangements. Eventually, the struggle to improve the fitness of seamen became a national concern, manifest in a series of far-reaching and sometimes bizarre public health measures, generally directed against the effects of drunkenness and the pox. In this way, as in many others, an attempt to address the specific needs of the seafarer developed wider implications for society as a whole. It also produced scientific breakthroughs that were a universal benefit, so far from being a narrow study of medicine at sea, this book provides a fascinating picture of social improvement. “The topics are intriguing, the research is thorough, and the book is a captivating read.” —Nautical Research Journal