One of the most hyped possibilities for chemically strengthening love and attachment is the hormone oxytocin. This chapter surveys the evidence on oxytocin-enhanced relationships and identifies a number of gaps in the literature that would need to be filled before oxytocin could be used as a love drug. If stronger evidence comes out supporting real-world effectiveness of oxytocin in a relationship context, clear guidelines would need to be put in place to ensure that it was used responsibly and ethically. Building on this insight, the chapter concludes with an outline of key ethical constraints that should apply to any drug-assisted mode of couples therapy.

This chapter analyses Spanish royal control over migration to the Americas throughout the sixteenth century. It starts with the evolution of the Crown’s migratory policy from its relatively liberal beginning, and follows the imposition of a centralised licensing system run by the Casa de Contratación in the first half of the century. The aims of this were to manage and affect both the numbers and the quality of migrants required to settle Spanish territories abroad in order to recreate social rules and hierarchies close to those enforced in the metropole. Non-Christians, converts, foreigners and people of dubious morality were especially targeted by the exclusionary measures, attesting to the Crown’s desire to extend its control over its subjects in the remotest corners of its empire. The second part of this chapter demonstrates the limits imposed by colonial management upon the desire for uniformity and constancy in the power exerted by royal agents over distant territories. In spite of considerable, repetitive legislative and institutional efforts, evasion and fraud were rampant, highlighting the weakness and porosity of royal control over the licensing system it had established. The chapter proceeds with an analysis of the measures taken during the middle of the century to strengthen licensing measures through information requirements at each step of a migrant’s journey, and to punish those who transgressed them. Moving from Spain to the Americas, the analysis ends on the fraud, corruption and evasion at work in New Spain, to highlight the contradictions inherent in Spanish royal migratory policy.

At the height of the miners’ strike Neil Kinnock, leader of the opposition, danced in the pop music video for Tracey Ullman’s single ‘My Guy’. The video had a loose story line about a girl arguing with her boyfriend, working in a burger bar and struggling to live with her mother’s parental control. Kinnock’s appearance in the video is generally treated as an aside in the secondary literature on the Labour Party. It is read as a shadow or echo of the Labour Party’s troublesome embracing of spin, PR and choreographed media events. Instead this chapter takes Kinnock’s Ullman video as a significant event in itself. It raises the key issues faced by Labour. How much difference did new technologies make to social relations? And how to engage with a new generation without alienating the traditional Labour supporters? The search for the sweet spot between political form and political content, the medium and the message, popular culture and politics defines Labour’s transition in the 1980s. Kinnock’s appearances on television, in the Houses of Parliament, supporting political benefit concerts, in chat shows, music videos and election broadcasts blur production and consumption but also let us take the popular seriously.

Who could benefit from using anti-love drugs, and what are the most serious ethical concerns raised by the prospect of a chemical breakup? This chapter identifies several cases where the use of a drug—in combination with appropriate psychosocial measures—might be justified as a way of blocking or degrading love, lust, attraction, or attachment: for example, victims of intimate partner violence who want to sever a feeling of addiction to their abuser; individuals with pedophilia who risk causing harm to children and who need help to control their urges; people suffering from unrequited love leading to suicidal thoughts or tendencies. By working through these and other case studies, the chapter develops a set of ethical conditions for the responsible use of anti-love biotechnology.

Charting the response by authorities since the 2011 ‘riots’ following the killing of Mark Duggan, Adam Elliott-Cooper assesses the ways in which Black lives and culture have been pathologised as potentially dangerous through the policing of the Nottingham Hill Carnival and drill music. The chapter takes influence from Stuart Hall’s notion of ‘moral panic’ in his 1978 book Policing the Crisis in relation to what was then presented as a specific problem of ‘mugging’ within Black communities by presenting the four stages of moral panic. Taking the reader on a journey through the way the media, politicians and the general public have responded to drill music, the chapter goes through their shock, anger, sadness and finally acceptance of the cost that must be borne by Black communities through increased profiling and policing. While Elliott-Cooper is a scholar resisting racism, he simultaneously cannot escape its violence as he demonstrates how he is expected to condemn his own communities in the process of calling for alternative ways of understanding cultural forms of expression. Although providing a critique of public policy and the development of what the author calls public safety racism, it also operates as an important autho-ethnographic account of the complex ways in which racism operates in the UK.

Implementing Systems Prevention requires a re-examination of the meaning of ‘health’. A positive definition is needed to replace the negative definition (absence of disease) that is common currency. Political philosophy provides this positive definition. Lawrence Hamilton is concerned with the role of values versus the role of needs in democratic discourse. He recognises that human needs change and he describes some basic categories of these needs. He equates ‘health’ with satisfaction of these needs. In this chapter, these needs are discussed using insights from biology and ‘health’ is redefined as the optimal satisfaction of these needs. The needs are contrasted with definitions of health by the World Health Organisation.

Epidemiology aims to understand, prevent and control diseases and conditions that affect populations of plants, animals or humans. Its method rests on observation and action. When applied to a health problem it leads to conclusions on prevention. The father of epidemiology, John Snow, used his observations to advocate actions by government that he predicted would curtail a major cholera outbreak in Victorian London. However, this experimental approach was soon abandoned so that, today, epidemiology has become primarily an observational science. The case is made for the rebirth of epidemiology combining observation and experiment.

The Covid-19 pandemic provides contemporary evidence on the parallels between ending an infectious pandemic and ending pandemics in the modern plagues.