The Introduction provides an overview of the central questions raised in the book, the arguments presented, and the methodology employed. It frames key questions about the shifting meanings of childhood pain and its implications for the construction of adult worlds. Additionally, it highlights the interplay between the child as an object of clinical observation and as a symbolic figure within cultural and scientific narratives. Through this lens, it contributes to broader debates on the intersections of science, emotion, and society. The methodology used is one of interdisciplinary history, drawn largely from the history of medicine and cultural history, which assesses visual as well as written material.

Since 1971, international aid for agricultural research has been shaped by an unusual and ambitious partnership: an organization founded as an ad hoc consortium of national governments, foreign aid offices, philanthropies, United Nations agencies, and international financial institutions that is known today as CGIAR. At its founding, the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research was tasked with fostering scientific research that would help “developing nations … increase and improve the quality of their agricultural output.” Representative of an era of broad multilateral cooperation, and reliant on complex international funding networks, CGIAR assumed the profoundly localized mission of reshaping farmers and fields across diverse cultural, economic, and environmental contexts. The tensions arising as researchers and institutions navigated the demands and expectations of these distinct scales form the crux of CGIAR history. They have affected the changing disciplinary orientations of research centers, the ecologies prioritized in breeding, the expectations for intellectual property management, and even the words used to describe crops.

The introductory chapter provides an overview of the book’s focus as a whole and explores its relation to existing historiography, including its engagement with decolonial and postcolonial theory and scholarship in Indigenous Studies and Latin American Studies. In highlighting the book’s unique arguments, contributions, and perspectives, the Introduction explains the concept and double meaning of "troubling encounters" and provides the book’s thematic organization. Noting that some chapters adopt a local perspective, others a national one, and yet others draw attention to transnational and even global domains, the Introduction reflects upon the variety of scales for interpreting and troubling the history of encounters in the human sciences. For the authors, the legacies of those scales are read in the myriad interactions of expedition science, in the relationality implied in fieldwork or the logic of settler colonial custodial institutions, and finally in the resulting theories about human nature and behavior that circulated globally within scientific circles and beyond.

Over nearly three decades of British rule, mental illness sparked complex, consequential interactions in Palestine: between colonial state and society, Arabs and Jews, and Palestine and the wider region. The introduction outlines Mandatory Madness’s focus on the social and cultural history of colonial psychiatry in mandate Palestine, and argues for its significance across three distinct fields: as offering a novel account of the mandate period, which stresses entanglement rather than assuming division; as shifting the focus in histories of psychiatry away from institutions and experts and towards encounters; and as challenging methodological nationalism by revealing regional and global forms of interconnection. The introduction also reflects on the possibilities and perils of working with the archives of colonial psychiatry in mandate Palestine, and provides an overview of the political history of the period to orient readers across the rest of the book.

This chapter introduces the contents of this volume and provides a critical overview of medieval pharmacology with a focus on the Mediterranean from the ninth/tenth century to the fifteenth. It emphasises the importance of drawing evidence from various cultures (Byzantine, Islamicate, Jewish, Latin) and disciplines (history, art history, manuscript studies, and archaeology) in order to discuss topics of broader significance for the global Middle Ages, such as the transfer of medical and pharmacological knowledge. It also shows how our understanding of medieval pharmacology can be significantly expanded by the study of evidence from other areas, such as alchemy, cooking, diplomacy, magic, religion, and philosophy.

This chapter introduces the region, peoples, and historical changes underway in the mid-nineteenth century where the book begins. The lands lie along the Mackenzie and Yukon rivers and their tributaries, where waters flow north along the Mackenzie River into the Beaufort Sea and south-west down the Yukon River across into Alaska. These are the homelands of Inuvialuit, Gwich’in, Tłı̨chǫ, Dene, Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in, Tagish, Tutchone, Dënesųłıné, and Métis. This chapter introduces these peoples as well as the earliest Euro-Canadian colonizers and settlers: fur traders, explorers, missionaries, police, state officials, and their families who arrived in the nineteenth century and describes the book’s objectives: to learn about the historical significance of major northern epidemics before 1940 from those who survived; to use ecological approaches to disease to understand how colonialism shaped northern health; and to demonstrate the influence of flaws ideas about isolation and vulnerability in shaping past interpretations of the role of disease in the process of colonization.

During the 1870s, popular scientist Professor Bruce grew accustomed to improvisation as he travelled through the Eastern colonies of Australia. While visiting the timber town of Bulahdelah, on the Central Coast of New South Wales, he lectured on phrenology in his Irish brogue within the best space set aside by town residents for the job. In a hut knocked together from slabs of Eucalyptus, the faint glow of six candles in bottles flickered over the faces of thirty or so locals. The audience crowded onto “three boards deposited on three boxes or casks, in the shape of a triangle” to watch the Professor read heads. “I have seen many entertainments in our bush villages and on stations, but never such a gloomy one,” declared a correspondent. “The more so, as I heard that this hut had been not long ago the depositary of a dead body, awaiting an inquest, and some one called it the ‘dead-house’.”1

The introduction provides a broad overview of the history of contraception and sexuality in Ireland from the formation of the Irish Free State while situating the book’s key arguments within the wider international historiography and outlining the social, religious and cultural context. A detailed explanation of the methodology and the value of utilising first-hand accounts and oral history interviews in order to uncover the history of contraception in Ireland is also provided.

This is the introduction to the volume as a whole. It opens by considering Apuleius’ claims to dissection as evidence for a widespread interest in anatomy and dissection in the ancient world, particularly in the Roman period. It goes on to define the terms dissection and anatomy as used throughout the book and to lay out the overarching subject and aims of the project, while situating it within existing literature related to the topic. It particularly seeks to highlight the prevalence and importance of animal dissection, as opposed to the much rarer instances of human dissection, and to emphasize the pivotal role of the Roman period, which has often been underplayed in favor of the Hellenistic period. It concludes with an overview of the structure and contents of the book.

From 1720 to 1722, the French region of Provence and surrounding areas experienced one of the last major epidemics of plague to strike Western Europe. The Plague of Provence (or Great Plague of Marseilles) was a major disaster that left in its wake as many as 126,000 deaths, as well as new understandings about the nature of contagion and how best to manage its threat. Although the infection never left southeastern France, all of Europe, the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, and parts of Asia mobilized against its threat, and experienced its social, commercial, and diplomatic repercussions. Accordingly, this transnational study explores responses to this biological threat in some of the foremost port cities of the eighteenth-century world, including Marseilles, Genoa, London, Cádiz—the principal port for the Carrera de Indias or Route to the Indies – as well as some of the principal colonial towns with which these cities were most closely associated. In this way, this book reveals the ways in which a crisis in one part of the globe can yet transcend geographic and temporal boundaries to influence society, politics, and public health policy in regions far removed from the epicenter of disaster.

What can the emotions add to our understanding of the history of surgery? Opening with George Wilson’s account of the amputation of his foot in 1842, this Introduction suggests that ‘the black whirlwind of emotion’ that defined his experience of pre-anaesthetic operative surgery should prompt us to take the place of emotions in surgery seriously. It provides a brief account of the argument advanced by the book, the historiographical context in which it is situated, the theoretical framework it employs, the chronological and conceptual parameters that determine its focus, and the rich body of source material on which it draws. It also provides an overview of the chapters that follow in terms of content and argument. Overall, it establishes how Emotions and Surgery charts the changing place of emotions within British surgery across the long nineteenth century, from an emotional regime of Romantic sensibility to one of scientific modernity, demonstrating the ways in which emotions shaped surgeons’ and patients’ experiences and identities.

Veterinary medicine can be defined as the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of animal health problems in the context of human–animal relationships. This broad definition is used in this book to include many types of animal healing throughout history. However, this "concise" history of veterinary medicine does not attempt to include all important topics in the history of animal healing. Instead, the history of animal healing and veterinary medicine is framed using a global and world history approach. Activities are included at the end of each chapter that encourage readers to explore the veterinary history of their own region and nation. Every chapter considers how animal healing interacted with tensions between the economic, military, and cultural value, status, and uses of domesticated animals. Who were the animal healers? What was their social status? How were they trained? What skills and knowledge did they have? How did people explain or theorize, and respond to, animal health problems in each place and time period?

The Introduction makes an argument for the importance of disability as an analytical category and sets out an agenda for doing this work. The basis of this argument lies both in the historiographical demand for this kind of analysis, and the historical, political and theoretical importance of including disability as a key concept in discussions of the nineteenth-century British empire. The relationship between disability and race is an element to this and historical examples are used to demonstrate this argument. The introduction also defines key terms that are used throughout such as ‘disability’, ‘disablism’, ‘ableism’ and sketches out the scope and structure of the book.

This book aims to get the Anthropocene right in three senses. First, it conveys the scientific evidence of our altered Earth, showcasing how the concept of the Anthropocene captures the magnitude and complexity of the planet’s dangerous transformation. Second, we try to get the Anthropocene right in human terms, exploring the kaleidoscope of experiences, contingencies, and decisions that led to the Anthropocene, from the deep history of our relationship with infectious diseases to recent nuclear disasters. These histories are echoed and expanded through fiction with two short stories bringing the vast scales of geology and Earth System science “to earth” in emotional and ethical terms, especially around the issues of colonialism and inequality. Finally, we talk about what hope might look like in this pretty hopeless situation, proposing mutualistic cities, greater equity, and new political forms. “Right” in this book means being as accurate as possible in describing the physical phenomenon of the Anthropocene; as balanced as possible in weighing the complex human developments, some willed and some unintended, that led to this predicament; and as just as possible in envisioning potential futures.

This chapter introduces the theme of mental illness in prison, situating it in the broader historiography of crime and punishment and the history of psychiatric care and institutional provision. It explains how our book redresses the neglect of prisons as a locus for the management of mental disorder, a major oversight given the number of mentally ill people confined in them during the nineteenth century. The introduction elucidates our particular methodology, with its emphasis on individual prison archives that provide a rich counter-balance to the sifted and mediated accounts of official inquiries and published annual reports. It outlines the potential of drawing on examples from England and Ireland, which, while sharing ideologies and with similar systems of prison administration, varied in interpretation and implementation. We summarise the expansion and remit of prisons in the nineteenth century, including the importance of the prison cell as a carefully curated space for reform and rehabilitation.

In 1918, former colonial administrator Luiz de Mello e Athayde published an article in the influential Bulletin of the Geographical Society of Lisbon, warning about the ongoing depopulation of Angola, Portugal’s long-standing colony in West Central Africa. While old calculations, he argued, had assumed a total population of 10–12 million, or a density of nine inhabitants per square km, newer ones suggested a density of six, or even as low as 3.3, confirming his intuition that Angola’s once abundant population had been and was still diminishing markedly. For the causes, Athayde pointed at the old emigration of slaves to the Americas, new emigration flows to Angola’s neighbouring colonies and various factors that diminished fertility and augmented mortality. For the Ganguela population in southern Angola that he had administrated and studied, these were constant raids by the neighbouring Kwanyama, who enslaved Ganguela people and destroyed their livelihoods; diseases such as smallpox and the lesser-known local scourges of michila and lindunda; alcoholism; and birth-spacing practices. Athayde’s rationales were less humanitarian than political and economic. If depopulation continued, he argued, Angola would soon face the same labour problem as other colonies, since only ‘natives’ could provide the necessary labour force needed for the colonial economy.1

It was a year of contrasts, culture, and crises. In 1857, James Buchanan presided over a United States in which African Americans were not regarded as citizens and slaves could not sue for their freedom. Queen Victoria sat comfortably on the British throne with Palmerston as her prime minister, while India mutinied. Charlotte Brontë, Charles Baudelaire, Charles Dickens, Gustave Flaubert, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Anthony Trollope were among the many writers with new books published during the year, and new musical offerings by Franz Liszt and Giuseppe Verdi were to be heard in the concert halls. In America an economic crisis led to recession, the collapse of a New York financial institution, and a run on the banks.

Stories of family deceits and deceptions have become commonplace in a media receptive to personal tales of triumph and tragedy. A distinguished geneticist learns in his mature years that his mother, while married to his legal father, had a secret affair that begat him. A best-selling author discovers that her paternal DNA was from a medical student serving as a sperm donor and not her legal father, who traced her ancestry deep into Eastern Europe. A woman who, as a newborn, was left in a bag abandoned in the foyer of a Brooklyn apartment building searches for her biological parents 23 years later. These revelations are the result of the millennial DNA ancestry revolution.

How did we come to think of the Early Modern period as one of intellectual decline in the Middle East? This Introduction reviews how narratives of the development of the natural sciences have been previously constructed and lays out an alternative history of intellectual vibrancy in Early Modern Morocco in which the natural sciences were considered revealed and divinely sanctioned.

This introduction outlines a new interpretation of the history of the idea of progress, focusing on the transition from a goal-directed model to an open-ended view in which there can be multiple forms of improvement. Developments in thinking about the history of life on earth are used as a guide to wider changes in the perception of how progress can operate. Early ideas based on the chain of being saw humanity as the goal of biological evolution, just as the first theories of social progress saw it as the ascent of a linear hierarchy of steps towards a future paradise or utopia. Darwinism transformed evolutionism by introducing the image of a branching 'tree of life' with no single goal of progress. Parallels to this transformation can be seen in twentieth-century approaches to human history and predictions of multiple possible futures based on the unpredictability of technological innovations. Progress has become less clear-cut and more open to criticism by those who reject the utilitarian basis of technological advance.