This article shows how funding research on Alzheimer’s disease became a priority for the British Medical Research Council (MRC) in the late 1970s and 1980s, thanks to work that isolated new pathological and biochemical markers and showed that the disease affected a significant proportion of the elderly population. In contrast to histories that focus on the emergence of new and competing theories of disease causation in this period, I argue that concerns over the use of different assessment methods ensured the MRC’s immediate priority was standardising the ways in which researchers identified and recorded symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease in potential research subjects. I detail how the rationale behind the development of standard assessment guidelines was less about arriving at a firm diagnosis and more about facilitating research by generating data that could be easily compared across the disciplines and sites that constitute modern biomedicine. Drawing on criticism of specific tests in the MRC’s guidelines, which some psychiatrists argued were ‘middle class biased’, I also show that debates over standardisation did not simply reflect concerns specific to the fields or areas of research that the MRC sought to govern. Questions about the validity of standard assessment guidelines for Alzheimer’s disease embodied broader concerns about education and social class, which ensured that distinguishing normal from pathological in old age remained a contested and historically contingent process.

This paper focuses on homeopaths’ strategies to popularise homeopathy from 1850 to 1870. I argue that homeopaths created a space for homeopathy in Mexico City in the mid-nineteenth century by facilitating patients’ access to medical knowledge, consultation and practice. In this period, when national and international armed conflicts limited the diffusion and regulation of academic medicine, homeopaths popularised homeopathy by framing it as a life-enhancing therapy with tools that responded to patients’ needs. Patients’ preference for homeopathy evolved into commercial endeavours that promoted the practice of homeopathy through the use of domestic manuals. Using rare publications and archival records, I analyse the popularisation of homeopathy in Ramón Comellas’s homeopathic manual, the commercialisation of Julián González’s family guides, and patients’ and doctors’ reception of homeopathy. I show that narratives of conversion to homeopathy relied on the different experiences of patients and trained doctors, and that patients’ positive experience with homeopathy weighed more than the doctors’ efforts to explain to the public how academic medicine worked. The fact that homeopaths and patients used a shared language to describe disease experiences framed the possibility of a horizontal transmission of medical knowledge, opening up the possibility for patients to become practitioners. By relying on the long tradition of domestic medicine in Mexico, the popularisation of homeopathy disrupted the professional boundaries that academic physicians had begun to build, making homeopaths the largest group that challenged the emergent medical academic culture and its diffusion in Mexico in the nineteenth century.

In 1970 the medical associations of South Africa and Rhodesia (now, Zimbabwe) were expelled from the Commonwealth Medical Association. The latter had been set up, as the British Medical Commonwealth Medical Conference, in the late 1940s by the British Medical Association (BMA). These expulsions, and the events leading up to them, are the central focus of this article. The BMA’s original intention was to establish an organisation bringing together the medical associations of the constituent parts of the expanding Commonwealth. Among the new body’s preoccupations was the relationship between the medical profession and the state in the associations’ respective countries. It thus has to be seen as primarily a medico-political organisation rather than one concerned with medicine per se. Although, there were also tensions from the outset regarding the membership of the Southern African medical associations. Such stresses notwithstanding, these two organisations remained in the BMA-sponsored body even after South Africa and Rhodesia had left the Commonwealth. This was not, however, a situation which could outlast the growing number of African associations which joined in the wake of decolonisation; and hardening attitudes towards apartheid. The article therefore considers: why the BMA set up this Commonwealth body in the first place and what it hoped to achieve; the history of the problems associated with South African and Rhodesian membership; and how their associations came to be expelled.

How did the complex concepts of psychoanalysis become popular in early twentieth-century Britain? This article examines the contribution of educator and psychoanalyst Susan Isaacs (1885–1948) to this process, as well as her role as a female expert in the intellectual and medical history of this period. Isaacs was one of the most influential British psychologists of the inter-war era, yet historical research on her work is still limited. The article focuses on her writing as ‘Ursula Wise’, answering the questions of parents and nursery nurses in the popular journal Nursery World, from 1929 to 1936. Researched in depth for the first time, Isaacs’ important magazine columns reveal that her writing was instrumental in disseminating the work of psychoanalyst Melanie Klein in Britain. Moreover, Isaacs’ powerful rebuttals to behaviourist, disciplinarian parenting methods helped shift the focus of caregivers to the child’s perspective, encouraging them to acknowledge children as independent subjects and future democratic citizens. Like other early psychoanalysts, Isaacs was not an elitist; she was in fact committed to disseminating her ideas as broadly as possible. Isaacs taught British parents and child caregivers to ‘speak Kleinian’, translating Klein’s intellectual ideas into ordinary language and thus enabling their swift integration into popular discourse.

This article reviews some of the main theoretical claims made in Jonathan David Bobaljik’s 2012 book, which deals with root suppletion in adjectival degree expressions. My first goal is to make the reader familiar with a coherent fragment of the overall system and the data that motivate it. The second goal is to discuss one specific part of the account, namely that words, understood as complex heads, are special for suppletion in the sense that suppletion is impossible beyond this domain. I argue that it is possible to abandon this assumption with no loss of descriptive coverage, and argue that in doing so, we can formulate a unified theory which covers both suppletion and morpheme order.

L2 speakers of Nigerian English in parts of northeastern Nigeria occasionally insert an alveolar coronal stop [t] or fricative [s] following another alveolar coronal pre-pausally and phrase-internally. The article discusses this typologically unusual phenomenon for the Nigerian English of speakers whose L1 is the Adamawa language Bena (ISO 639-3: yun). I also consider comparable cases of word-final consonant epenthesis in several other varieties of English, both the so-called New Englishes and Inner Circle varieties, and provide an account of the details of epenthesis with respect to which they differ. At first sight, hypercorrection of the tendency for word-final consonant cluster simplification in Bena English may seem an obvious explanation. However, I argue that hypercorrection alone falls short of explaining the observed pattern. In addition, we need to call on phonetic properties of Bena L1 such as pre-pausal glottalisation and lengthening of consonants to be able to account for both the actuation of the hypercorrection and the phonologisation of the epenthesis. Although the availability of a clear phonetic explanation makes this sound pattern conceivable as a natural rule, its typological rarity in non-contact lects highlights the positive bias induced by hypercorrection as a necessary part of the mix in creating the conditions for a reanalysis.

Following the history of western constitutional history, studies of Chinese constitutionalism have tended to focus on its intellectual origins, or, more commonly these days, its failure to restrain official behavior. Drawing upon new archival materials, this article takes a different tack. I zero in on a critical period of constitutional gestation, when officials read the 1954 constitution in draft form, posed questions about its text and suggested revisions. How did officials react when told that citizens, many of whom were recently persecuted, now enjoy “freedom of assembly”? These materials allow us to see “the state” in real time: How did officials understand core legal concepts such as “right,” “constitution” and “citizen” as well as their role in the new polity? In many respects, the discussion surrounding the draft constitution turned out to be a venue for officials to talk about the meaning of the revolution they had just experienced.

The layout and development of field systems may reflect significant aspects of prehistoric societies such as agricultural strategies, use rights and inheritance practices. This article presents a method for analysing the developments of field systems in their entirety, based on a hierarchical sorting of field boundaries whose intersections have been used to define relations of equivalence and subordination. The formalized relational expression of the field system is analysed using a stochastic optimization algorithm. The method was successfully applied to three Danish Celtic fields from the Late Bronze/Early Iron Age, making it possible to identify five principles behind the layout: primary boundaries (probably established at community level), major parcels (administered at a household level), structured subdivisions (presumably related to inheritance), irregular subdivisions, and small-scale expansions of the field systems. The initial degree of regularity of the field systems seems to have influenced later modifications.

The future is uncertain for Antarctica, with many possibilities – some more plausible, others more preferable. Indeed, the region and its governance regime may be reaching (or may have reached) a crossroads moment as a result of a series of challenges, including the changing Antarctic climate and environment, increasing human activity, shifting values among Antarctic states and a low-cost, somewhat benign governance regime (the Antarctic Treaty System). Within this context there are a number of interdependent drivers that are likely to influence Antarctica's future over, say, 25 years: global environmental and socio-economic developments; Antarctic governance; Antarctic research, including national Antarctic programme operations; and Antarctic tourism. The research presented here involved a thorough examination of Antarctic literature on current Antarctic developments and challenges, and an assessment of global trends. Scenarios were developed through a facilitated workshop process. From these, four future scenarios were developed based on interactions between these drivers. The resulting scenarios provide a dynamic, evolving possibility space to be explored as a means of understanding where Antarctic issues might evolve, depending on the growth or diminishing importance of drivers. In turn these suggest that more structured polar futures are needed based on formal quantitative and qualitative data.

In this article I argue that the claims made about the efficacy of the Responsibility to Protect (RtoP) echo the pejorative conceptions of “utopianism” as advanced by E. H. Carr and Ken Booth in two ways: through the determination of RtoP supporters to claim “progress” in spite of countervailing empirical evidence; and through the exaggerated importance that supporters ascribe to institutionalization, which mistakenly conflates state support with a change in state behavior and interests. I argue that RtoP's impact on the behavior of states has been and will continue to be limited. Moreover, while RtoP has garnered widespread support among states, this is due to it having been rendered largely impotent through a process of norm cooptation. While both Carr and Booth criticized a particular form of utopianism, they both also defended the articulation of normative prescriptions that are not immediately feasible. To this end, I conclude by suggesting a potential reform of the existing international legal order that meets Carr's preference for normative thinking that is “utopian in the right sense.”

Climate engineering is subject to the “playing God” critique, which charges that humans should not undertake to control nature in ways that seem to overstep the proper scope of human agency. This argument is easily discredited, and in fact the opposite—that we should “play God”—may be equally valid in some circumstances. To revive the playing God critique, I argue that it functions not on a logical but on a symbolic and emotional level to highlight nostalgia for functional dualisms in the face of the bewildering problem of climate change. It also raises significant questions about the virtue of those who might engineer the climate. These two concerns point to questions about the proper role of human agency. I use the scholarship of Aldo Leopold and H. Richard Niebuhr to argue for a model of human agency based on contextual awareness and responsive, communal responsibility. I conclude with some implications of this view for decision-makers engaging the topic of climate engineering.

Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote in his Letter from Birmingham Jail: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” That was in April 1963, more than a half-century ago. He had been jailed for his agitation to end injustice against non-white people in his own country, and he would be killed soon after by an assassin who hated him and his vision.