This chapter considers the portrayal of medical practices and practitioners in the 1970s British historical drama When the Boat Comes In, produced by the BBC between 1976 and 1981. Set in the depressed town of Gallowshields in north-east England, and spanning the period from World War I to the Spanish Civil War, When the Boat Comes In is perhaps best remembered for its charismatic central character Jack Ford (James Bolam), but this chapter pays attention instead to the broader ensemble of characters. In particular, it focuses upon the character of Billy Seaton (Edward Wilson), first introduced as a trainee doctor. As time progresses, we follow Billy’s completion of his studies and his moral dilemmas about the community role of the ‘good doctor’. Although When the Boat Comes In is not remembered as a ‘medical’ drama, this chapter notes how many of its plotlines hinge upon health crises or questions, in a way comparable with other long-running serial dramas such as Poldark (1975–1977; 2015–2019) and Downton Abbey (2010–2015). But more than just providing historical texture or the motor for melodramatic turns of events, the medical issues woven into When the Boat Comes In are crucial to the show’s conceptualisation of conflicts between collectivism and individualism, and between socialism and capitalism.

Claire Randall Fraser, the heroine in Diana Gabaldon’s time-travelling book series Outlander and its television adaptation, practises as a nurse, healer, and physician in backdrops where women have historically struggled for recognition as bona fide medical practitioners. In settings such as eighteenth-century Jacobin Scotland, pre-Revolutionary France, colonial America, World War II European battlefronts, and 1950s–1960s Harvard University, Claire’s medical acumen proves she is a talented healer despite the frequent scepticism and disapproval of those around her. In all time periods Claire finds herself, she must negotiate the gender politics and cultural expectations of women’s gendered roles, which often results in Claire taking a stand to defend her medical expertise. This chapter examines the ways in which Claire utilises her medical skill – holistically and scientifically – as an avenue of agency and survival, and assesses the ways in which Outlander utilises communitarian ideology to service Claire’s modern-day progressivism and romanticise the historical narrative. The show’s presentation of gender politics across three centuries reminds historians of the back-and-forth shifts women have made as practitioners in medicine and science.

Historians of municipal corruption have generally focused on particular ‘scandals’ and ‘affairs’. The corruption scandals that afflicted the Metropolitan Board of Works in the 1880s and the Poulson affair of the 1970s have been especially well served. Such scandals have been seen as a product of multiple factors, among them personal greed and lax morals, confused understandings of ‘corruption’ on the part of key players and insufficiently robust cultures of administrative accountability. Yet the attention lavished on high-profile scandals and the actions of individuals, or groups of individuals, has not been without some costs. In particular, it has obscured the existence of more endemic, durable and, in some respects, more mundane and communal forms of civic corruption, born of peculiarly fractious and divided urban societies. This chapter examines two cities where corruption assumed this more diffuse, socially embedded form: Belfast and Glasgow, from roughly the 1920s to the 1960s. Arguably, they were the most corrupt cities in the UK during the mid-twentieth century; but they certainly shed light on how social and political antagonisms – in both cases profoundly etched with sectarianism – as well as poverty and economic dislocation can undermine civic trust and probity and foster forms of corruption rooted in group loyalty and party faction. The chapter examines each city in turn, before discussing their commonalties and differences in the conclusion.

Unlike many period dramas, Harlots, a Hulu original show, does not feature professional medical practitioners, despite frequent references to medicine, disease, and death. Instead, the show’s writers weave the history of medicine into the everyday lives of its characters. Through a close reading of ‘Episode Two’, season one, we argue that Harlots decentres early modern medicine by portraying how syphilis and its bodily effects formed a regular part of life for Londoners. Building on historical studies of medical drama and period pieces, we use Harlots to consider the effect of depersonalised or sensational representations of disease in scholarship and popular fiction. By eschewing the perspectives of professional healers and moralists found in most studies of early modern venereal disease, Harlots reminds us of the everyday lives of sufferers and the women who acted as lay healers and medical experts. Harlots’ reenactment of the material realities of sex work invites viewers to consider the dynamics of a disease that was simultaneously stigmatised and commonplace. The syphilitic character appears for the first (and last) time in this episode; Mary Cooper, we are told, was once a prostitute of great renown. By the time viewers see her, it is through the lens of illness; we become part of the public space that observes and makes meaning of her diseased body. As with the episode’s other characters, we are forced to confront our own notions of gender, sickness, and profession, and the stigmas attached to each.

The concluding chapter examines the persistence of phrenology into the twentieth century, and the relative success of a small number of practitioners in Britain who maintained not merely a programme of instruction but also continued to offer consultations and cranial analysis. The chapter contemplates the significance of the British Phrenological Society which was founded by Lorenzo Fowler in 1886 and which survived until 1967. The activities, pedagogical programme and publications of the society are acknowledged, as is the ostensible value of the endorsement it provided to practitioners through the status of membership or fellowship signified by postnomial letters. The effective cessation of phrenological practice in the decades that followed the society’s dissolution is noted.

Since the EU referendum, much attention has focused on the role of feelings in voting decisions. This chapter picks up this theme but, rather than treating distinct emotions as a straightforward causal factor (e.g. anger led to Leave votes), we look at the ways that people consciously drew on their feelings as a form of evidence, alongside (and intertwined with) reason. It is notable that, while the EU referendum was frequently framed as a choice between ‘heads’ and ‘hearts’ in media discourse, Mass Observers rarely articulated such a distinction. Instead, they turned to an altogether messier organ: the gut. In the context of an unhelpful and confusing campaign, ‘gut feelings’ about Brexit were represented as an apolitical, morally neutral source of knowledge, which depended upon the seemingly natural authority of feeling and the authenticity of individual experience. We show that this turn to ‘feelings-evidence’ has a history rooted in the increasing legitimacy of ‘ordinariness’ as a form of political expertise in post-war Britain but also influenced by long-standing Conservative, and newer neoliberal, privileging of individual experience over collective ideology.

This chapter argues that the Irish women’s magazines of the 1960s positioned themselves as a new form of marriage manual, providing an insight into attitudes towards marriage during a period of transformation, and allowing us to assess the extent to which transformation occurred. Their regular publishing schedule meant they could function as a type of ‘living’ manual, able to respond to their readers’ needs in a way that traditional manuals could not, while the readers’ pages added a crucial interactive element that was absent from their prescriptive literature counterparts. In order to evaluate the contribution made by the magazines, they are explored in the wider advice-giving genre, with particular reference to the Catholic publications produced for an Irish audience. In the readers’ responses, we see varying attitudes towards marriage and gender roles, an interesting and revealing insight into the ‘old’ and ‘new’ Ireland that coexisted in the 1960s. The chapter also explores the more difficult side of marriage, and reveals how the magazines provided a ‘safe space’ for readers to disclose difficulties they were experiencing, whether in terms of domestic violence or marital breakdown. Separate articles in the magazines also tackled these issues. Although this was not a regular occurrence, it nonetheless meant that domestic challenges were being discussed before they became more visible in social and national discourse in the late 1960s.

This chapter examines the varied ways in which domestic workers in Lusaka and other southern African cities have pursued collective organising, from efforts to establish formal associations and trade unions to participation in informal relations of solidarity. In the Zambian case, despite the efforts of successive groups of domestic workers and labour activists from the 1930s onwards, formal organisations have failed to secure broad support amongst the labour force or achieve significant improvements in domestic workers’ rights. This resulted from the limited financial and organisational capacity of such organisations, the government’s dismissive attitude towards the sector, and the failure of workers’ organisations to tailor their interventions to reflect the breadth of domestic service practices. Formal worker organisations in Lusaka and across the region’s urban centres were dominated by adults engaged in wage labour, with no efforts to organise working children and limited engagement with kin-based domestic workers, most of whom were female and, often, young. The formal labour movement model was also unsuccessful because male and female domestic workers of all ages could pursue alternative solutions to their grievances at work, from individual strategies of resistance to informal collective organising.

Existing work has shown that colonial sinecures and agencies were vital stays in the edifice of Old Corruption during the early nineteenth century; but historians have yet to explore in any detail contemporary arguments about the nature and consequences of corrupt rule in Britain’s overseas possessions. This chapter addresses this neglect by focusing on the criticism aimed at the Colonial Office during the period 1820 to 1850, when it administered Britain’s empire outside of India. This critique was not just a Radical project: Conservative and Liberal commentators were equally convinced of the dangers of allowing imperial corruption to continue unchecked. The chapter opens by exploring the various forms of corruption which contemporaries detected in operation under the Colonial Office. It then moves to discuss how these accusations of corrupt practice were linked to wider political arguments about the centralising ‘tyranny’ of the Colonial Office, and the social effects of irresponsible government over distance. The final part of the chapter asks how ‘the Office’ had come by the early 1850s to be seen as a model of administrative probity, worthy of emulation by other departments of government. In this way, the chapter restores the empire as a crucial site of the politics of Old Corruption. It speaks in equal measure to the increasingly rich historiography on the idea of ‘corruption’ and to the wider literature on politics and ideas in early Victorian Britain.

Chapter 2 examines how the emergence of the beat trend in 1965 problematised the image of ‘youth-as-fun’ which circulated in the early 1960s. The term ‘beat’ was used in popular media to describe both a British-inspired style – made up of trends such as the miniskirt and long hair for men – and political movements that were inspired by the American beatniks. Magazines like Big and Giovani culturally translated the beat trend for Italian youth, by either ‘mirroring’ or ‘othering’ language and practices from other countries. The media’s emphasis on leisure activities in the Italian beat culture encouraged young people’s consumption of commercial goods, and implicitly suggested the youth’s political and social disengagement. The defusion of the beat trend’s subversive potential is underscored by its recurrent representation as a disguise in Musicarelli films. The chapter also examines how style elements like long hair for young men and an androgynous appearance for young women threatened established gender norms in Italian society. Popular media stripped these elements of their subversive connotations, namely gender bending and sexual emancipation. For example, the androgynous appearance of young pop icons Rita Pavone and Caterina Caselli was balanced in popular media with a normative representation of their private lives.

Privacy is sometimes assumed to be a human cultural universal, both across separate cultures and between different historical stages of the same culture. This chapter does not defend that position but argues that, first, the application of privacy conceptions to any society is possible, even one that is carefree about privacy, and second, while cultural divergence does not necessarily entail conceptual difference, two societies remote from each other will probably struggle to understand each other’s privacy ideas because a different set of conceptions is in play within each of them. It is argued that the seven-level framework will be an aid to understanding the interplay between an insider’s hermeneutic account of a society, and an outsider’s interpretative one. The history of the English use of the term ‘privacy’ is sketched, to illustrate the hermeneutic effort required for interpreting historical terms. Examples of cross-cultural privacy studies are given, taken from the Chinese novel Dream of the Red Chamber, male Tuareg veiling norms, confidentiality in Somali livestock market negotiations, the medieval anchorite movement and modern data protection diplomacy.