This article aims to explain why the notion of mania puerperalis, or puerperal insanity, was not used in the Netherlands to exonerate women accused of infanticide, in contrast to other countries. It applies the concept of ‘travelling knowledge’ as an approach to the history of forensic medicine, pointing to the fields of medicine and law as contact zones inviting, promoting or barring the transmission of knowledge. Although the notion of mania puerperalis was known in the Netherlands from 1822 on, psychiatric expertise was not requested in actual court cases of infanticide for several reasons. First, physicians and legal scholars continued to doubt the existence of this form of mania. Moreover, it was not always directly connected to infanticide. Also, the specific formulation of the law strongly determined what medical evidence was needed in court cases. Not only did the Code Pénal generally emphasise material evidence, the laws on infanticide specifically mentioned fear and therefore an additional reference to the mental condition of the accused was not needed. Most importantly, the article argues that the existing vocabulary on emotion, both vernacular and medical, already allowed for an analysis of psychic components.

In the nineteenth century the medicinal leech Hirudo medicinalis evolved into a lucrative commodity in great demand throughout the western world. In less than a century its trade became big business by any measure, involving tens of millions of animals shipped to every inhabited continent. In this context Ireland is particularly instructive in that it was the first country in Europe to exhaust its supply of native leeches. Concomitantly, it was also the first country to import leeches from abroad, as early as 1750. Being an island with manageable border controls, and a clearly definable medical market, Ireland serves superbly as a microcosm of the leech as a worldwide commodity. Being a relative small country it is possible for the first time to gain a balanced perspective of various economic factors underlying this trade, including supply and demand, exploitation of natural resources, and an evolving network of competitive traders.

This paper addresses these and other aspects of the leech trade in Ireland. The principal, and unexpected, finding of this paper is that leeches were unequivocally very expensive in Ireland and became a significant drain on hospital budgets. As such, they found little use amongst the Irish poor. An estimate of several million leeches were imported into Ireland in the nineteenth century, a practice which continued into the twentieth. They were imported initially from Wales and then from France following the defeat of Napoleon, but the bulk came ultimately from Hamburg, via importers in England.

In 1965 Jamaica was declared free of malaria by the World Health Organisation (WHO), thus ending centuries of death and suffering from the disease. This declaration followed the successful completion of the WHO’s Malaria Eradication Programme (MEP) on the island, initiated in 1958. This account first explores the antecedent control measures adopted by the government up to the MEP. These, as advocated by the previous malaria ‘experts’ who had reported on the disease on the island concentrated on controlling the vector and the administration of quinine for individual protection. Although Jamaica suffered no catastrophic epidemics of island-wide scope, malaria was a constant cause of mortality and morbidity. Major change came in the wake of the Second World War within the changing political context of national independence and international development. In 1957 the Jamaican government joined the global WHO programme to eradicate malaria. The Jamaican campaign exposes many of the problems noted in other studies of such top–down initiatives in their lack of attention to the particular circumstances of each case. Despite being described as ‘a textbook pattern’ of malaria eradication, the MEP in Jamaica suffered from a lack of sufficient preparation and field knowledge. This is most obviously illustrated by the fact that all literature on the programme sent to Jamaica in the first two years was in Spanish. That the MEP exploited the technological opportunity provided by dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) with advantage in Jamaica is not disputed but as this analysis illustrates this success was by no means guaranteed.

This article seeks to understand how the emergence of public dance hall culture affected the consumption of dance music among different social classes in Vienna between the years 1780 and 1814, when the number of dance halls more than tripled. Using mainly contemporary eyewitness accounts as sources, this article argues that social distinctions, rather than disappearing, were reinforced after the commercialization of the Viennese dance halls. As turn-of-the-century Vienna was a major city with a heterogeneous population, the diversity of social classes was reflected in its ballroom culture. This is because the Viennese elite, the nobility and the higher bourgeoisie, was very reluctant to share social space with the lower classes. Although to some degree the amount of social space expanded in the city at the time, the use of the space, however, remained socially diverse.

In this article, the origins of the modern metropolis are reconsidered, using the example of Cairo within its Ottoman and global context. I argue that Cairo's Azbakiyya Garden served as a central ground for fashioning a dynastic capital throughout the nineteenth century. This argument sheds new light on the politics of Khedive Ismail, who introduced a new state representation through urban planning and music theatre. The social history of music in Azbakiyya proves that, instead of functioning as an example of colonial division, Cairo encompassed competing conceptions of class, taste and power.

Doctoral theses have always had an important place in the historiography of crime, and indeed much of the discipline's most influential research has emerged from postgraduate study. For many years, the investigation of crime and justice in Britain was a staple topic of doctoral research, and theses by members of E.P. Thompson's ‘Warwick School’ had a shaping influence on the early debates of the discipline. In the British context, these early debates were concerned with questions about who could access the law and the extent to which the courts were used to enforce the values of particular social groups. More recently, scholars have given an increased amount of attention to the influence of newspaper reporting on perceptions of crime, and on the importance of printed accounts of crimes, trials and executions as texts which represented the function and effectiveness of the law in particular ways. Furthermore, over the last few decades our knowledge of policing and punishment in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe has greatly expanded, providing important insights into two very important aspects of the judicial process.

None of the logbooks or officers’ journals of the 1819–1821 Russian Antarctic expedition, commanded by Junior Captain Faddei Faddeyevich Bellingshausen, have yet been found. The discovery of Peter I Island was recorded in two reports from the commander, on Sheet 13 of a 15-sheet track chart of the expedition which he prepared during the voyage home (Belov 1963: 32), in his subsequent book (Bellinsgauzen 1831), and in narratives penned by four other eye-witnesses.

Polar bibliophiles, librarians and readers will be familiar with the three handsome facsimile volumes of the first Antarctic newspaper, published in 1907 and 1914 and edited in turn by E. Shackleton, L.C. Bernacchi and A. Cherry-Garrard during the National Antarctic Expedition, 1901–1904 and the British Antarctic Expedition 1910–1913. These expeditions were led by Captain R.F. Scott R.N. in Discovery and Terra Nova respectively. From S.Y. Discovery, beset for two winters in the ice of McMurdo Sound were made the first extensive sledge journeys into the interior of the Antarctic continent, including the great ice sheet or plateau. These were further prolonged, following Shackleton's Nimrod expedition, while the pursuit of science during both Scott expeditions led to the publication in London of two monumental sets of scientific and geographical results, plus new charts and maps.

This article links the nature of commercial masked balls in Paris in the 1830s and 1840s to urban development during these decades. The raucous and often destructive character of the balls, which united elites and popular classes under the mask's anonymity, coincided with a society undergoing social and political upheaval. The dress and conduct of revellers were expressions of their ambitions, fears and resentments. Changes in the urban landscape of the 1820s and 1830s – in particular, the construction of the grands boulevards and alignment of theatres sponsoring masked balls along this axis – sharpened potential conflict at such events by placing them in one of the most socially charged corridors of the city.

This note considers the 10–11th March 2013 Falkland Islands referendum. As accredited observers, the authors were granted access not only to the work of the international observation mission but also the actual organisation of the referendum itself. The background to the referendum is explained and thereafter the result and longer-term significance is considered. Notwithstanding Argentine opposition to the referendum, the latter was widely considered within the Falkland Islands and beyond to be the most significant event since the 1982 South Atlantic conflict.