What does the Charité’s cabbage garden have to do with medical knowledge and economy? And how are accounting, economy, and health interconnected beyond current discussions about economisation? Bringing together health, medicine, and accounting, the chapter on hospital economies investigates the Charité hospital’s various economies between 1780s and 1910: its Ökonomie of functional entities, like the kitchen, laundry, brewery; the bodily economy of its sick inmates; and the hospital’s administrative economy that, after 1900, professionalised as ‘hospital economics’. Hüntelmann argues that all of these economies were linked together and that health and accounting have long been deeply entangled with one another. The chapter demonstrates this by focusing on inmates’ food and diet: in the hospital’s Ökonomie, the production and supply of food was registered and balanced against consumption; daily consumption rates and diets were calculated for each person, monetised, and used to derive daily cost-rates and patient fees; annually budgeted and retrospectively balanced. Surveying more than a century, we find that calculative practices and accounting at the Charité hospital were remarkably stable. But there are also major changes over time as the collection of data became more formalised – as the entire process of organising food production, calculating diets, and accounting for food-stocks became more standardised, not least because it involved more people gathering and transforming the necessary dates – and professionalised as ‘hospital economics’. And as the 1780s hospital Ökonomie diminished over time, from the early decades of the twentieth century it mainly existed on paper, interlinked by and represented in the hospital’s accounts.

Inter-regional relations between the European Union and Latin America and the Caribbean (EU–LAC) have not only been identified within the diplomatic and intergovernmental spheres. In fact a prominent inter-parliamentary dialogue between these regions has been promoted since the 1970s, years before the first EU–LAC executive summits. The fact that due to colonialism the continents have historically shared the same language, political traditions and culture facilitated the political approximation of both sides, including at the inter-parliamentary level. Alongside this common political and cultural background, in 2006 the Euro–Latin American Parliamentary Assembly (Eurolat) was formalised as the parliamentary dimension of EU–LAC bi-regional Strategic Association (1999). Considering the relations among parliamentarians from the two sides of the Atlantic, this chapter aims to shed some light on the past and current developments of EU-–LAC inter-parliamentary relations, something still neglected by the academic literature on EU–LAC inter-regionalism. By unveiling recent debates and topics of the Eurolat agenda since its establishment in 2006, this chapter intends to highlight how EU–LAC relations at the parliamentary level have evolved over the past decades. Important emphasis is given not just to the development of the institutional settings of this relationship but also to the political or ideological aspects of it, which explain how parliamentarians and political parties of the two regions have dialogued and clashed over key political, economic and social issues over the past years.

J. Andrew Mendelsohn’s chapter focuses on economic, governmental, and medical policies in early modern mining societies in Saxony. Starting with the example of a penny box of German miners’ societies and the in and out of clinking pennies, the weekly payments of miners to the societies’ penny box, and the money’s use for injured or harmed miners suffering from miners diseases, J. Andrew Mendelsohn combines economic history (miners’ societies and sick funds as the earliest form of social insurance) and medical history (expertise on miners’ diseases as the earliest form of occupational health). Accounting, Mendelsohn argues, constituted each in relation to the other.Mines and mining towns were both an important economic sector and a kind of experimental field for medical observation and knowledge production, amid the background of attempts to govern the laboring body of miners. This was because mining investors, with their public responsibility in miners, had a vested interest in miners living longer and healthier (and thus more productive) lives. In this sense Mendelsohn argues that all-pervasive values and practices of welfare, effective work, and good governance – in both a moral and technical sense – entailed accounting for anything significant happening to the bodies of miners. For this reason, the practice of the official mining physician involved substantial administrative organisation, managerial and medical oversight, and various forms of recordkeeping, especially simple forms of accounting, all within a framework of accountability that was both political and economic.

Accounting shapes the epistemic possibilities of medical knowledge – and shows how practices seemingly ancillary to bioscience can alter both organisational and human bodies, as well as the available ways for living in each. From the 1950s through 1990s, members of Anabaptist churches, who joined ‘voluntary service’ programmes, were able to ‘volunteer’ as Normal Control human subjects at the US National Institutes of Health. Each group had a ‘unit leader,’ who worked informally as the churches’ local account. As documented in traditional archives and in a publicly available ‘vernacular archive’, Anabaptists were both accounting and being accounted for. First, Mennonites appeared literally in the legers of NIH. They were essential research materials whose time the government purchased for a given price. Accounting practices helped NIH and the Anabaptist churches temporarily to align their missions, which had the structural effect of allowing a moral market in healthy civilian bodies to emerge. Second, Anabaptists were enrolled at NIH in experiments, including studies of metabolism, for which bodies were seen as in vivo accounts through which scientists could record input and output. As a mode of attention in metabolic medicine, accounting clarifies when and how categories such as age, gender, and race, were made real and they reinforced shared social biases. Third, Anabaptists were doing the physical labour of bookkeeping at NIH. Their labour of accounting, and the practices of peer surveillance and discipline it required, enforced the embodied discipline that clinical researchers capitalised upon without needing to assert directly.

Lists and tables that were used in war offices, regiments, and field hospitals to account for soldiers and their physical state had the long-term epistemic effect of establishing the notion of the military population as a dynamic factor. The relationship between military medicine and the management of military manpower is manifest in the military papers of the Electorate of Hanover and the Kingdom of Prussia from the 1680s to the 1760s. During this period, close proximity of civil and military medicine reshaped notions of military manpower as one of the key assets of the early modern state. Individual soldiers and their bodies were transformed into populations that could be measured and managed on a large scale. Such developments fit with broader processes during the period, when population emerged both as a theoretical concept and a field of political intervention. This culminated in the mid-eighteenth century in new evidence-based and statistical approaches to policy and politics. Military health care and the management of manpower played a key role in this process. Eighteenth-century military populations were considered to be assets for waging war. Within the context of cameralism, their utility can be interpreted in terms of a military economy of the body.

The state-supported mental hospitals that sprung up in abundance in Europe and North America from about 1820 became founts of data and statistics. Doctors always insisted that the asylums were medical institutions, and on this basis, they distinguished administrative accounts, denominated in money, from medical tallies of patients. These institutions, however, were seriously expensive, and as they grew, ever more so. Medical administrators could never ignore the relationship of asylum costs to patient outcomes. A few doctors even presented numerical ratios of costs to cures as the ultimate justification for asylum care – though they often added that inadequate or delayed care was disadvantageous even from the standpoint of financial costs alone. Any such calculation depended data routines and conventions of calculations, none of them straightforward. The numbers, in fact, were not always passed by without criticism, especially since the dubious statistics of one institution tended, by comparison, to show others in an unfavourable light. Hence, although these accounts were often presented in reports as routine and unproblematic, and even on occasion as recipes for effortless administration, they were condemned at other moments as groundless or absurd. Such criticism did not owe to any knee-jerk rejection of numbers by doctors. The necessity of statistics in this and other fields of public health was widely acknowledged. The problem was that doctors as well as administrators were almost compelled to look to the accounts for something they could never provide, a numerical basis for fixing the benefits of treatment.

In the latter part of the nineteenth century, and especially in the first third of the twentieth century, the urban hospital saw its purpose move from the protection and care of patients to their diagnosis and cure. As a result of this process, the numbers and types of patients entering hospitals in England and France, and the funding structures supporting those admitted, underwent a substantial change. These changes were underpinned by new ways of accounting for treatment which saw starkly different approaches adopted by institutions in the two countries. Drawing on evidence from the hospital services of Leeds and Sheffield in England and Lille, Rouen and Le Havre in France, this chapter explores those differences. It utilises a range of sources, including hospital annual reports, financial returns, and internal enquiries, to examine the development of the daily rate – prix de journée – calculated for patient treatment by hospitals in France and the growth of block grants provided by working-class mutual societies in England. It shows that the daily rate, which initially emerged as a way to charge external organisations for using community funded hospitals, became a highly contested site in which accounting practices were deployed to police the boundaries of permissible costs. In contrast, the block grant was adopted, in part, to minimise accounting complexity and administrative costs, but more importantly to shore up the residual charitable elements of the ‘voluntary hospital’ system and impose strict financial discipline. Each of these approaches fed into postwar socialised hospital services, shaping accounting and financial practices for decades to come.

European relations with external countries have mainly focused on trade, aid and technical assistance, developing preferential relationships. The network of relationships between the EU and some non-member states defined as a “Pyramid of privilege” (Hill and Smith 2005). These kinds of European relationships extended towards some Latin American countries. Before the 1970s the European Union did not consider foreign policy to Latin America a fundamental issue.These dealings started as a consequence of European intervention in Central America in the 1980s. After this the EU inaugurated new institutionalised relationships with Latin America through sub-regional and regional groups. The Union decided to move its relations with Latin America towards some forms of “associated statuses”; thus, this occurred only with Chile and Mexico. Through this particular condition as a European partnership, each country participated actively in social and co-operation programmes (in horizontal programmes). These involvements increased close links between the EU and Latin America and strengthened European influences in developing domestic policies in Chile and Mexico. The chapter analyses the ties between the EU, Chile and Mexico, specifically how the EU has influenced domestic policies in higher education and science and technology areas, considering the nature of its relationships since 1997.