Papers by Jonathan Reinarz
Medicine and the Workhouse: The Old Poor Law
Medicine and the Workhouse: List of Contributors
Food and History, 2016
While contemporary grumblings about hospital food have become the quintessential hospital complai... more While contemporary grumblings about hospital food have become the quintessential hospital complaint, 1 it is undeniable that a clean, warm bed, rest and the provision of food and drink, rather than medicines and therapies, have over the course of history greatly increased hospital patients' chances of recovery. From the time of Galen, diet has been a central part of institutional medical therapy. However, even if central to the day-today routine of Roman hospitals, Victorian workhouses and colonial asylums, food and drink continue to be overlooked in historical accounts of hospitalization. More than likely, food and drink are so central to daily life that they easily become part of those "(initially) invisible structures" of the everyday and are, therefore, frequently overlooked by contemporary observers and historians. 2 If we are to write the history of medicine from below, however, as evidenced by important work undertaken since the 1980s, 3 historians must make greater efforts to address those subjects which were ubiquitous in the hospital experience and central to institutional care in the past. Food history, as the readers of this journal already know, is a thriving field of study, with annual conferences, workshops, networks and a substantial and expanding literature. The conference at which the six articles comprising this dossier were first presented was the first of its kind in the English language and aimed to foreground the role of food and drink in health care institutions over two millennia. Held in Brussels in April 2013, the event, sponsored by the Wellcome Trust and the Society for the Social History of Medicine, was a collaboration between the International Network for the History of Hospitals and the research group Social and Cultural Food Studies ("FOST")
European Journal for the History of Medicine and Health
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC BY 4.0 license.
Historic and Theatrical Smellscapes
Designing with Smell, 2017
Medicine and the Workhouse: Contents
Andrew Bamji, Faces from the Front: Harold Gillies, The Queen’s Hospital, Sidcup and the Origins of Modern Plastic Surgery
Social History of Medicine, 2018
Canadian Bulletin of Medical History, 2017
The Strait Gate: Thresholds and Power in Western History. By Daniel Jütte. Yale University Press.... more The Strait Gate: Thresholds and Power in Western History. By Daniel Jütte. Yale University Press. 2015. 376pp. £30.00. In Daniel Jütte's compact but thorough examination of the power of doors and thresholds in western history, there are many insights that lead us beyond his topic and spur thinking about the human experience. Near the beginning, for instance, we learn about a threshold that has had meaning on many levels for five centuries. After conquering part of the Americas, the Spanish kings changed the motto on their coat of arms from non plus ultra, 'nothing further beyond', a reference to the fabled Pillars of Hercules off the Spanish coast beyond which humans could not go, to plus ultra to commemorate that Spain had 'crossed a threshold that no other nation had yet crossed'. An historian of early modern and modern Europe, Jütte is principally interested in primal anxieties associated with these human sites of passage. His epigraph sets the tone. It is 'The door speaks', from an essay by Georg Simmel in which the sociologist maintains that historians of society must not limit themselves to the natural scientific viewpoint and highlights the larger meaning implicit in any door: 'It is absolutely essential for humanity that it set itself a boundary.' What we have done with these boundaries is what Jütte sets out to find. There is no more basic social boundary than the home, which, like any nest or den, has an entry into protection and a way out to the world. We build up our homes to build ourselves up. Then around ourselves we add more doors, walls, gates and portals and so create a life-grid with meaning: life becomes a journey with entrances and exits. In the literal and figurative power of the doors of the Christian Church, security, stability and hope entwine. This is clear in the photo of the inviting nested doorways of Chartres. A church entrance, its narthex (a 'transitory zone for those even slightly outside the church body like those awaiting baptism') and its nave have meaning connected to the power of Christ to let people in or keep them out of the body of believers. In pre-modern Europe, marriages could end at these doors, two separate ones being used as each party of a divorce left the building. Jütte reminds us that since church doors are now mostly an aesthetic experience, it is hard to fathom how for ages they were symbols of those metadoors invisible to the living which one would sooner or later have to pass through to gain admission to Heaven or Hell. Through Jütte's weaving of theology, art and architecture, we feel the reality of these gripping shared meanings and the social control they provided.
Dennis R. Mills,Effluence and Influence: Public Health, Sewers and Politics in Lincoln, 1848–50
Social History of Medicine, 2016
Drink in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: The Spirit of Medicine: The Use of Alcohol in Nineteenth-Century Medical Practice
Medicine and the Workhouse: Frontmatter
Corpus Curricula: Medical Education and the Voluntary Hospital Movement
Brain, Mind and Medicine: Essays in Eighteenth-Century Neuroscience, 2007
The centrality of hospitals to medical education is a relatively recent phenomenon in the history... more The centrality of hospitals to medical education is a relatively recent phenomenon in the history of medicine. Like many subjects in the history of medicine, connections can be traced to the eighteenth century, if not earlier. In order to understand significant changes in medical education, and especially in the field of anatomical instruction, one must look back even further, at
The History of Clinical Communication Teaching
Brown/Clinical Communication in Medicine, 2015
This thesis is concerned with brewery workers in England between 1870 and 1914. It deals with mos... more This thesis is concerned with brewery workers in England between 1870 and 1914. It deals with most aspects of labour management and workers' experiences, including their recruitment, training, promotion, working conditions, benefits and retirement. Besides being written in a way which mirrors most labourers' working lives, this study is concerned with these institutions during a dynamic period in a particular industry at a specific midland firm. Primarily, it examines working conditions and business practices at Flower & Sons Brewery in Stratford-upon-Avon and the way in which these evolved in relation to certain scientific and technological developments specific to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although considering economic and political conditions in their national scope, this study also emphasises the local context of employment and business during this period. Most recent histories of the English brewing industry have examined the state of the trade ...
Sensing the South – <I>How Race is Made: Slavery, Segregation and the Senses</I>, by Mark M. Smith
The Senses and Society, 2010
The Age of Museum Medicine: The Rise and Fall of the Medical Museum at Birmingham's School of Medicine
Social History of Medicine, 2005
Social History of Medicine, 2006
Medical History, 2005
may be some of her best discussion of this topic comes towards the end of the period covered, in ... more may be some of her best discussion of this topic comes towards the end of the period covered, in chapter 13. No book is likely to escape the publishing house error free; this one has its own crop-flaws in orthography, grammar, and diction (e.g., on pp. 62, 299, 301, 329, 429, 439). The most glaring mistake is in Roger Bannister's otherwise fine Foreword, when he refers to ''America's great medical school, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology'' (p. xi); MIT has never had a medical school. The author's style is marred by occasional overwriting: ''[T]his chapter bears the unhappy burden of conveying narrative inadequacy: individual disciplines become alien and incomprehensible to the general reader, and the 'big picture' becomes one of intellectual incoherence'' (p. 299). The author exhibits a distracting fondness for abstract nouns (''representativity'', p. xxi; ''nursification'', p. 111; ''contestation'', p. 209) and sometimes awkward diction; surely there are smoother ways to express what was an important shift in focus at St Mary's than 'The school scientized' (title of chapter 11). On the whole, however, the book not only is easy to read but does what the author aimed to do, namely make a contribution to existing historiography ''by insisting that no history of a medical institution can be complete that does not explore both the science and the politics of medicine'' (p. xx).
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Papers by Jonathan Reinarz