Anna Clark's presidential plenary to the 2018 North American Conference on British Studies in Vancouver, British Columbia, compares scandals over the mistreatment of patients and nurses that led to demands for popular control of hospitals in both Britain and New Zealand in the 1890s. A high death rate at the Chelsea Hospital for Women in London, located near a Pasteur Institute for animal research on vaccination, incited fears of human vivisection. The high death rate of nurses at the London Hospital provoked newspaper exposés and parliamentary investigations and calls for the municipalization of voluntary hospitals. In Christchurch, New Zealand, a debate over the rudeness of doctors and nurses enraged citizens. The flames of these scandals were sparked by newspaper agitation but fanned by feminists, socialists, trade unionists, and animal-rights organizations. In response to fears around experimentation, Fabian socialists Havelock Ellis, Harry Roberts, and Honnor Morten proposed democratic control of hospitals. These demands, focusing on patients’ rights and nurses’ health, differed from the hospital reform movement that urged hospitals to become more economical by forcing patients to pay. They also diverged from Beatrice and Sidney Webb's admonitions that the state must oversee citizens’ health for the nation to function efficiently. Although the calls for the democratic control of hospitals did not succeed, they might be seen as germs of a patient-centered approach to hospital care.

In 1881, Andrew Gontshi became the first black law agent in the Colony of the Cape of Good Hope and thus South Africa's first black lawyer. Records of court cases argued by Gontshi and his fellow black law agents provide a rich new archive for understanding the political sensibilities of the nineteenth-century Eastern Cape, where Gontshi practiced law and participated in the development of new forms of political organization, as well as the meaning of law to black intellectuals. In both law and politics, Andrew Gontshi employed procedural tactics to hold the state accountable to its own formalities. In Gontshi's world, law provided not a source of justice but a set of tools that could be used to advance a political agenda. Gontshi's story thus prompts a reconsideration of law's place in the intellectual tradition of South Africa's liberation struggle.

As part of the “One British Thing” series, this essay explores Ena V. McDonald's The Hair Weavers Text-Book, published in 1967, as a source for exploring Black women's intellectual histories in Britain during the twentieth century.

Nurses and their labor are essential to the provision of health care. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the flagship institution of postwar British welfare, the National Health Service. When it launched in 1948, a shortage of thirty-five thousand nurses endangered its future. This article examines the National Health Service's nursing shortage and its most enduring solution: the recruitment of Caribbean and African nursing staff for struggling British hospitals. It follows the manner in which British civil servants, hospital administrators, and nursing leaders came to recruit nurses from the colonies and the deep ambivalence that marked their project. What began as a reformulated colonial development project gave rise to a sprawling and unregulated market for nursing labor that powered the National Health Service for decades. The so-called dark stranger, deemed unworthy of membership in the national community, in fact carried out its most intimate work—caring for the bodies of sick white citizens.