How death should be measured was a subject of intense debate during the late 1960s, and one in which transplant surgeons had a particular interest. Legislation required a doctor to first pronounce ‘extinct’ the patients from whom ‘spare parts’ were sought for grafting. But transplant surgeons increasingly argued the moment of death was less important than was the moment of establishing that a patient was beyond the point of no return in dying, at which time she or he should be passed to the transplant team. This raised concerns that people identified as being a potential source of organs might not be adequately cared for in their own right. In 1968 the World Medical Association issued an international statement on death at its meeting in Sydney, Australia following a debate between delegates about how and by whom death should be assessed prior to organ removal. Soon afterwards Australian surgeons performed two of the one hundred and five heart transplants carried out around the world that year, dubbed by the New York Times to be one during which an ‘international epidemic’ of such grafts were carried out. This essay examines debates about death and transplanting, then analyses the pioneering Australian heart transplants, in the context of the Declaration of Sydney and continuing international discussions about whether these operations were moral and legal.

Shopping during the eighteenth century is increasingly viewed by scholars as an important leisure activity, and an integral part of wider schemes of urban improvement. However, the physical evidence in the form of standing buildings is rarely considered. This article will demonstrate how a detailed examination and reconstruction of the urban landscape of York can illuminate how these practices were performed. The use of building biographies also allows owners to be identified and linked with specific shop types and surviving fabric. This enables exploration of how the physical environment influenced perceptions of the streetscape and the experience of interior retail space.

After losing the importance it had held around 1900 both as a colonial power and in the field of tropical medicine, Germany searched for a new place in international health care during decolonisation. Under the aegis of early government ‘development aid’, which started in 1956, medical academics from West German universities became involved in several Asian, African and South American countries. The example selected for closer study is the support for the national hygiene institute in Togo, a former German ‘model colony’ and now a stout ally of the West. Positioned between public health and scientific research, between ‘development aid’ and academia and between West German and West African interests, the project required multiple arrangements that are analysed for their impact on the co-operation between the two countries. In a country like Togo, where higher education had been neglected under colonial rule, having qualified national staff became the decisive factor for the project. While routine services soon worked well, research required more sustained ‘capacity building’ and did not lead to joint work on equal terms. In West Germany, the arrangement with the universities was a mutual benefit deal for government officials and medical academics. West German ‘development aid’ did not have to create permanent jobs at home for the consulting experts it needed; it improved its chances to find sufficiently qualified German staff to work abroad and it profited from the academic renown of its consultants. The medical scientists secured jobs and research opportunities for their postgraduates, received grants for foreign doctoral students, gained additional expertise and enjoyed international prestige. Independence from foreign politics was not an issue for most West German medical academics in the 1960s.

Why is semantic change in grammaticalization typically unidirectional? It is a well-established finding that in grammaticalizing constructions, more concrete meanings tend to evolve into more schematic meanings. Jäger & Rosenbach (2008) appeal to the psychological phenomenon of asymmetric priming in order to explain this tendency. This article aims to evaluate their proposal on the basis of experimental psycholinguistic evidence. Asymmetric priming is a pattern of cognitive association in which one idea strongly evokes another (i.e. paddle strongly evokes water), while that second idea does not evoke the first one with the same force (water only weakly evokes paddle). Asymmetric priming would elegantly explain why semantic change in grammaticalization tends to be unidirectional, as in the case of English be going to, which has evolved out of the lexical verb go. As yet, empirical engagement with Jäger & Rosenbach's hypothesis has been limited. We present experimental evidence from a maze task (Forster et al.2009), in which we test whether asymmetric priming obtains between lexical forms (such as go) and their grammaticalized counterparts (be going to). On the asymmetric priming hypothesis, the former should prime the latter, but not vice versa. Contrary to the hypothesis, we observe a negative priming effect: speakers who have recently been exposed to a lexical element are significantly slower to process its grammaticalized variant. We interpret this observation as a horror aequi phenomenon (Rohdenburg & Mondorf 2003).

Medical historians have recently become interested in the veterinary past, investigating the development of animal health in countries such as France, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States. An appreciation of the German context, however, is still lacking – a gap in the knowledge that the present article seeks to fill. Providing a critical interpretation of the evolution of the veterinary profession, this investigation explains why veterinary and medical spheres intersected, drifted apart, then came back together; it also accounts for the stark differences in the position of veterinarians in Germany and Britain. Emphasis is placed on how diverse traditions, interests and conceptualisations of animal health shaped the German veterinary profession, conditioned its field of operation, influenced its choice of animals and diseases, and dictated the speed of reform. Due to a state-oriented model of professionalisation, veterinarians became more enthusiastic about public service than private practice, perceiving themselves to be alongside doctors and scientists in status, rather than next to animal healers or manual labourers. Building on their expertise in epizootics, veterinarians became involved in zoonoses, following outbreaks of trichinosis. They achieved a dominant position in meat hygiene by refashioning abattoirs into sites for the construction of veterinary knowledge. Later, bovine tuberculosis helped veterinarians cement this position, successfully showcasing their expertise and contribution to society by saving as much meat as possible from diseased livestock. Ultimately, this article shows how veterinarians were heavily ‘entangled’ with the fields of medicine, food, agriculture and the military.

The history of ‘electroshock therapy’ (now known as electroconvulsive therapy (ECT)) in Europe in the Third Reich is still a neglected chapter in medical history. Since Thomas Szasz’s ‘From the Slaughterhouse to the Madhouse’, prejudices have hindered a thorough historical analysis of the introduction and early application of electroshock therapy during the period of National Socialism and the Second World War. Contrary to the assumption of a ‘dialectics of healing and killing’, the introduction of electroshock therapy in the German Reich and occupied territories was neither especially swift nor radical. Electroshock therapy, much like the preceding ‘shock therapies’, insulin coma therapy and cardiazol convulsive therapy, contradicted the genetic dogma of schizophrenia, in which only one ‘treatment’ was permissible: primary prevention by sterilisation. However, industrial companies such as Siemens–Reiniger–Werke AG (SRW) embraced the new development in medical technology. Moreover, they knew how to use existing patents on the electrical anaesthesia used for slaughtering to maintain a leading position in the new electroshock therapy market. Only after the end of the official ‘euthanasia’ murder operation in August 1941, entitled T4, did the psychiatric elite begin to promote electroshock therapy as a modern ‘unspecific’ treatment in order to reframe psychiatry as an ‘honorable’ medical discipline. War-related shortages hindered even the then politically supported production of electroshock devices. Research into electroshock therapy remained minimal and was mainly concerned with internationally shared safety concerns regarding its clinical application. However, within the Third Reich, electroshock therapy was not only introduced in psychiatric hospitals, asylums, and in the Auschwitz concentration camp in order to get patients back to work, it was also modified for ‘euthanasia’ murder.