Luxurious Citizens. The Politics of Consumption in Nineteenth-Century America

The meanings of blindness in nineteenth-century America.

GEORGE HENRY spent only one day at the Pennsylvania Institution for the Blind, but the experience made a profound impression on him. Midway through a colorful career as a canal builder and bell maker, Henry developed an inflammation of the eyes that gradually destroyed his vision. Desperate to find some new way to support his family, in the late 1830s he went to the school's workshop in Philade...

Medical America in the nineteenth century. Readings from the literature

American medicine was derivative in its origins. Beginning as an element of a culture brought from Europe by the first settlers, it was influenced by European sources and trends throughout much of its evolution. According to Dixon Ryan Fox, cultural transfers of this kind occur in four stages. First, a few educated in the mother country emigrate to the new settlement; then, the colonial youth a...

Local politics and public health in mid-nineteenth-century Plymouth.

INTRODUCTION IN the mid-nineteenth century, Plymouth ranked as one of Britain's most unhealthy towns.' Overcrowding was as bad as that encountered in all but the most pernicious blackspots of London, Liverpool, or Manchester.2 Between 1841 and 1850, the rate of mortality had averaged twenty-five per thousand, a figure as high as the worst of the nation's industrial cities3 (Table I). Rapid popu...

Constructions of Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century Spanish America

Pseudo-science and society in nineteenth-century America

Water, as portrayed in Goubert's study, strikes me as a quintessential Latourian non-human actor, which was "conquered" and transformed by architects, town planners, engineers, hygienists, physicians, and chemists, but which also made its own "conquest", dramatically changing the scientific and cultural landscape of nineteenthand twentieth-century France. Thus, Goubert argues that a cultural an...