This article is concerned with the history of eugenic sterilisation in Britain through the 1920s and 1930s. In this period, the Eugenics Society mounted an active but ultimately unsuccessful campaign to legalise the voluntary surgical sterilisation of various categories of people, including those deemed ‘mentally deficient’ or ‘defective’. We take as our explicit focus the propaganda produced and disseminated by the Eugenics Society as part of this campaign, and especially the various kinds of data mobilised therein. The parliamentary defeat of the Society’s Sterilisation Bill in July 1931 marks, we argue, a significant shift in the tactics of the campaign. Before this, the Eugenics Society framed sterilisation as a promising method for eradicating, or at least significantly reducing the incidence of, inherited ‘mental defect’. Subsequently, they came to emphasise the inequality of access to sterilisation between rich and poor, (re)positioning theirs as an egalitarian campaign aimed at extending a form of reproductive agency to the disadvantaged. These distinct phases of the campaign were each supported by different kinds of propaganda material, which in turn centred on very different types of data. As the campaign evolved, the numbers and quantitative rhetoric which typified earlier propaganda materials gave way to a more qualitative approach, which notably included the selective incorporation of the voices of people living with hereditary ‘defects’. In addition to exposing a rupture in the Eugenics Society’s propagandistic data practices, this episode underscores the need to further incorporate disabled dialogues and perspectives into our histories of eugenics.

Surgical sterilisation practices significantly increased in contraceptive capacity as the twentieth century unfolded. Despite this prolific uptake, sterilisation is markedly absent from histories of birth control and family planning and instead has remained addressed within histories of eugenics and coercion. The purpose of this article is twofold: firstly, to demonstrate a voluntary, contraceptive history of sterilisation that is distinct from, though connected to, involuntary and eugenic sterilisation; and secondly, to explain the integral role that individual doctors and their private practice played in the rise of contraceptive sterilisation in twentieth-century Australia. Through a combination of archival material and oral history interviews with twentieth-century practitioners of tubal ligation and vasectomy, this article reframes the history of surgical sterilisation, situating it firmly within the history of birth control.

Cross-gender behaviour gradually entered the spheres of aetiology and diagnosis during the eighteenth century with reference to scattered instances of male cross-dressing. But well into the nineteenth century, “gender identity” (a mid-twentieth-century term) remained a poorly theorised instance of medicalisation. Late eighteenth-century concepts of “dynamic hermaphroditism” accounted for gender-nonconforming behaviours and aspirations, but could not account for the observed heterogeneity in disparities between sexed body and mind. Increasingly substantive contributions to aetiology were seen during the late 1870s and 1880s, particularly in response to Carl Westphal’s convoluted, 1869 concept of “contrary sexual feeling” (conträre Sexualempfindung). Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s notion of metamorphosis sexualis paranoica provided one of the most authoritative approaches to the question of gender identification in “sexual inversion”. The notion, which took the first seven German editions of his Psychopathis sexualis to achieve a definitive formulation, needs to be seen in light of Krafft-Ebing’s earlier conceptions of sexual delusion, which straddled the realms of the experienced sexual body and sense of self. Moreover, Krafft-Ebing was not the first to outline a theory of non-cisgender identity, as demonstrated by the mid-1880s work of Théodule-Armand Ribot and Rudolph Arndt, as well as various significantly earlier approaches to what had been considered the “monomania of sexual transformation”.

This article explores the cultivation of medical knowledge via popular health guides among the Finnish lay populace from the 1890s to the 1970s. By using written reminiscences and newspaper articles as source material, the article discusses the relevance, popularity, and practical use of various printed health guides and manuals throughout Finland. We place particular focus on the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century as the period that experienced a high increase in lay education and literacy. By focusing on individual readers and their experiences of popular health guides, the article examines lay medical and health practices as the number of medical manuals dramatically increased from the late nineteenth century onwards. It also investigates the reception of medical, popular and irregular health movements, such as hygienism, nature cure, and Couéist autosuggestion, and the change in medical culture brought about by the appearance of patent medicines. As the information discovered in popular health guides tended to fluctuate between official and irregular medical theory, we analyse the relationship between learned, alternative, and vernacular medicine through the views and opinions expressed by people who engaged with health literature. Through these materials, we provide a novel understanding of the accessibility of medical knowledge, the spread and impact of health guides, and attitudes towards different medical practices among the Finnish reading public.

This article revisits the roots of anti-statism in the United States by analyzing opposition to the introduction of compulsory school vaccination and medical examinations at the local and state levels in the Progressive Era. It shows that the widespread use of compulsory schooling laws to promote vaccination in the late nineteenth century, which led to establishing compulsory school medical exams and school nurse programs in the early twentieth, precipitated intense conflicts over states’ police powers. Exploring the controversy over school vaccine requirements in Utah between 1899 and 1901, the article reveals that resistance to public health interventions in schools fused skepticism of science with a gendered defense of individual and parental rights to challenge states’ power over children. The article then traces how these conflicts filtered up to the federal level, framing arguments against a proposed federal department of health in the 1910s. Led by the National League for Medical Freedom, opponents directly linked the reach of the police powers via compulsory school health initiatives with the expansion of federal power, arguing they were connected in a plot to establish “state medicine” that imperiled the gendered freedom of the “individual”—i.e., the white male citizen—over the home.

English employs a variety of comparative formation strategies. Theoretical and corpus-based research has established that their distribution depends on a variety of factors. In this article, we take an experimental approach to test analytic, synthetic and double comparative forms in relation to register in American and British English. We report on a rating study investigating the appropriateness and interpretation in terms of evaluativity of the three comparative forms. Our findings confirm the hypothesis that the comparative variants are not considered equally appropriate, but the effect is not as strong as would be expected under the hypothesis that frequency of occurrence is directly related to linguistic judgments. The analytic and double comparative alternatives exhibit lower appropriateness levels than the synthetic comparative. Analytic and double comparative forms are rated as less appropriate in formal than in informal contexts, which did not show an effect on the synthetic form. Furthermore, the analytic variant shows a different behavior in terms of the interpretation than the other forms in that a stronger effect of evaluativity is detected. Limitations and future directions are discussed. Our study is the first to provide experimental evidence for certain hypotheses emerging from corpus-based research.

The experimentally backed and hitherto overlooked empirical observation of the paper is a contrast among indefinite Positive Polarity Items regarding their possibility of being rescued under certain operators with different rescuing potential. If/surprise/only/don’t think can rescue some-indefinites, suspending their anti-licensing (i.e., their impossibility to occur in the scope of a clausemate negation): while some-pronouns (in English and French) and des-indefinites in French exhibit the expected rescuability, English some-NPs remain unexpectedly degraded. Our account relies on the hypothesis that ‘rescuing’ is due to sentential negation being interpreted as ‘external’ (vs. nullified as in most literature). The definition we propose for external negation is syntactic: rescuing operators allow sentential negation to raise to an illocutionary functional projection above Tense Phrase (TP). Thus at LF (Logical Form), the negation takes that higher projection (rather than TP) as complement and becomes harmless for some-indefinites. The semantic correlate of this syntactic proposal is the interpretation of external negation as a propositional operator. As it involves the illocutionary periphery, rescuing is pragmatic in nature. The different rescuing potential between some-pronouns and some-NPs arises from the interplay between their distinct LF-representations and a minimal-event pragmatic constraint on rescuing.

Three decades after the Good Friday Agreement, repositories such as the Linen Hall Library in Belfast have built collections that explore the impact of sectarian violence and the path to peace. While the Northern Ireland Political Collection is a must for any scholar of The Troubles, the library is also filled with resources for British scholars in a number of areas. One such innovative resource – the ExtraORDINARY Women collection – helps scholars answer questions of how gender history interacts with contemporary and local political history. The collection documents the history of a range of women's political and civil rights in holdings that range from 1965 to the present.

This article introduces the scope, content, and capabilities of a new born-digital archive. The Medieval Londoners Database (MLD) uses an online platform to collect from and connect to both documents (printed and archival) and digitized resources (such as British History Online and the History of Parliament Online). As a digital prosopography, MLD is a freely available resource that offers sophisticated search options to discover more about the lives of both the civic elite and ordinary individuals who resided in the city of London or its suburbs of Southwark and Westminster between ca. 1100 and 1520. MLD exemplifies how digitization and the semantic web enhance historical research by creating super-powered archival collections that are ever-expanding, accessible via multiple entry points, and able to facilitate highly analytical research.

In 1805, during a lull in hostilities between England and France, minor Warwickshire landowner and slaveholder Bertie Greatheed was on a European tour with his family when his son died, leaving behind an illegitimate child. Greatheed acquired his granddaughter from her Dresden-based mother and brought the child up as his own. This article revisits Steedman's earlier scholarship on Greatheed, which focused on questions of domestic service, through the lens of slavery. It uses the seventeen volumes of his diary-writing compiled between 1805 and 1825 to explore the connections between Greatheed's ownership of enslaved people on his St. Kitts estate and his possession and nurturing of his grandchild. It considers the contradiction between Greatheed's position as an abolitionist and his profit from slavery and slave ownership, which he used not only to sustain a way of life, but also to develop Leamington, Warwickshire, into a spa town and pleasure resort.

This article takes a micro-history approach, focusing on the life of a man identified only in the British records as “Ned” in order to illuminate the complexity and slipperiness of categories of “race.” Ned had lived in the Zulu Kingdom and, after fleeing a civil war there, became employed in Natal by an English colonist-settler, Thomas Handley. Ned traveled with the Handley family to England in 1859, and during this time, unexpectedly “disappeared” from the Handley's residence near Sheffield. A manhunt ensued and, as locals ruminated on Ned's possible status as a “slave,” the case attracted the interest of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. Ned was eventually taken to London and housed in the Strangers’ Home for Asiatics, Africans and South Sea Islanders before his tragic death a few months later. His repeated escapes transfixed the public and resulted in detailed press coverage. Numerous parties became interested in his case, and complex and changing processes of racialization were key to the shifting ways in which he was represented. In this article, we both search for Ned's agency and volition, and demonstrate how the case also speaks to major issues in British history, including race, humanitarianism, and enslavement.

Historians of colonial and postcolonial attempts to deal with undernutrition in Africa have generally argued that, after the Second World War, scientists and doctors “medicalized” hunger by emphasizing specific deficiencies that could be medically “cured” or alleviated through dietary supplements, thereby covering up the economic, social, and political causes of (post)colonial hunger. This article argues that this explanation obscures the persistence of a more holistic approach immediately after the Second World War, which rejected this narrow vision of hunger and, on the contrary, framed it as a very broad problem requiring interdisciplinary research and ambitious economic and social solutions. It focuses in particular on the work of British nutrition specialist B. S. Platt and his “experiment” in The Gambia that was meant to devise a replicable recipe to cure colonial malnutrition through mechanization and agricultural development. Like many other such colonial projects, the project ended in dismal failure, but it illustrates how malnutrition was understood at the end of the war as a broad economic and social problem. It also shows how this more holistic approach was tightly associated with the postwar project of colonial “development” and was predicated on an ambition to thoroughly re-engineer colonial landscapes and subjects.