Research into public health policies and expert instruction has been oriented traditionally in the national context. There is a rich historiography that analyses the development of health policies and systems in various European and American countries during the first decades of the twentieth century. What is often ignored, however, is the study of the great many connections and circulations of knowledge, people, technologies, artefacts and practices during that period between countries. This book redresses that balance.
Research into public health policies and expert instruction has been oriented traditionally in the national context. There is a rich historiography that analyses the development of health policies and systems in various European and American countries during the first decades of the twentieth century. What is often ignored, however, is the study of the great many connections and circulations of knowledge, people, technologies, artefacts and practices during that period between countries. This book redresses that balance.
European public health was a playing field for deeply contradictory impulses throughout the twentieth century. In the 1920s, international agencies were established with great fanfare and postwar optimism to serve as the watchtower of health the world over. Within less than a decade, local-level institutions began to emerge as seats of innovation, initiative, and expertise. But there was continual counterpressure from nation-states that jealously guarded their policymaking prerogatives in the face of the push for cross-national standardization and the emergence of original initiatives from below. In contrast to histories of twentieth-century public health that focus exclusively on the local, national, or international levels, Shifting Boundaries explores the connections or "zones of contact" between the three levels. The interpretive essays, written by distinguished historians of public health and medicine, focus on four topics: the oscillation between governmental and nongovernmental agencies as sites of responsibility for addressing public health problems; the harmonization of nation-states' agendas with those of international agencies; the development by public health experts of knowledge that is both placeless and respectful of place; and the transportability of model solutions across borders. The volume breaks new ground in its treatment of public health as a political endeavor by highlighting strategies to prevent or alleviate disease as a matter not simply of medical techniques but political values and commitments. Contributors: Peter Baldwin, Iris Borowy, James A. Gillespie, Graham Mooney, Lion Murard, Dorothy Porter, Sabine Schleiermacher, Susan Gross Solomon, Paul Weindling, and Patrick Zylberman. Susan Gross Solomon is professor of political science at the University of Toronto. Lion Murard and Patrick Zylberman are both senior researchers at CERMES (Centre de Recherche Médecine, Sciences, Santé et Société), CNRS-EHESS-INSERM, Paris.
This book contains over forty authoritiative essays, focusing on the political economy of medicine and health, understandings of the body and transformations of some of the theatres of medicine.
This book is a groundbreaking study of the historical reasons for the divergence in public health policies adopted in Britain, France, Germany and Sweden, and the spectrum of responses to the threat of contagious diseases such as cholera, smallpox and syphilis. In particular the book examines the link between politics and prevention. Did the varying political regimes influence the styles of precaution adopted? Or was it, as Peter Baldwin argues, a matter of more basic differences between nations, above all their geographic placement in the epidemiological trajectory of contagion, that helped shape their responses and their basic assumptions about the respective claims of the sick and of society, and fundamental political decisions for and against different styles of statutory intervention? Thus the book seeks to use medical history to illuminate broader questions of the development of statutory intervention and the comparative and divergent evolution of the modern state in Europe.
The region between the Baltic and the Black Sea was marked by a set of crises and conflicts in the 1920s and 1930s, demonstrating the diplomatic, military, economic or cultural engagement of France, Germany, Russia, Britain, Italy and Japan in this highly volatile region, and critically damaging the fragile post-Versailles political arrangement. The editors, in naming this region as "Middle Europe" seek to revive the symbolic geography of the time and accentuate its position, situated between Big Powers and two World Wars. The ten case studies in this book combine traditional diplomatic history with a broader emphasis on the geopolitical aspects of Big-Power rivalry to understand the interwar period. The essays claim that the European Big Powers played a key role in regional affairs by keeping the local conflicts and national movements under control and by exploiting the region's natural resources and military dependencies, while at the same time strengthening their prestige through cultural penetration and the cultivation of client networks. The authors, however, want to avoid the simplistic view that the Big Powers fully dominated the lesser players on the European stage. The relationship was indeed hierarchical, but the essays also reveal how the "small states" manipulated Big-Power disagreements, highlighting the limits of the latters' leverage throughout the 1920s and the 1930s.
This comprehensive, up-to-date analysis of Japanese policy between the two world wars utilizes both English and Japanese sources to present Japan as an independent agent, not a state whose policy was determined by the actions of other countries. Beginning with Japan's disappointment with the Versailles Peace Treaty in 1919, Nish examines the roots of Japanese discontent and feelings that ambitions in China were being unreasonably restrained. He explains British and American policies in the region as reactive, but concludes that their responses helped to determine which factions would dominate Japan's political arena. This non-partisan account is even-handed in apportioning responsibility for the events leading to the Second World War. While some Japanese politicians in the 1920s tried to follow the international path, there were others who tended to side with the army in establishing Japan's position, first in Manchuria and later in North and Central China in the 1930s. Conscious of the nation's unpopularity in the western world, Japan allied itself with Germany and Italy in the Anti-Comintern Pact of 1936 and the Tripartite Alliance of 1940. To pursue its own national objectives, Japan joined her allies in making war on the United States and the colonial empires of Britain, France, and the Netherlands. Its forces succeeded in overrunning many colonial territories; and, with a view to easing the problems of occupying them, Japan liberalized its harsh military policies, granting independence to Burma and the Philippines and welcoming Asian leaders to Tokyo for the Greater East Asian Conference of November 1943.
In 1930s Bucharest, some of the country’s most brilliant young intellectuals converged to form the Criterion Association. Bound by friendship and the dream of a new, modern Romania, their members included historian Mircea Eliade, critic Petru Comarnescu, Jewish playwright Mihail Sebastian and a host of other philosophers and artists. Together, they built a vibrant cultural scene that flourished for a few short years, before fascism and scandal splintered their ranks. Cristina A. Bejan asks how the far-right Iron Guard came to eclipse the appeal of liberalism for so many of Romania’s intellectual elite, drawing on diaries, memoirs and other writings to examine the collision of culture and extremism in the interwar years. The first English-language study of Criterion and the most thorough to date in any language, this book grapples with the complexities of Romanian intellectual life in the moments before collapse.
