Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Search

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

30 results

Page 1 of 2

  • 44 - Concluding Reflections

  • from Epilogue
  • Edited by Nick Hopwood, University of Cambridge, Rebecca Flemming, University of Cambridge, Lauren Kassell, University of Cambridge
  • Book:
    Reproduction
    Published online:
    16 November 2018
    Print publication:
    06 December 2018, pp 659-671

  • Summary

    In 1995, anthropologists Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp brought scholars together around the observation that ‘seemingly distant power relations shape and constrain local reproductive experiences’. Seeking in part to historicize a rich ethnographic literature, this chapter asks how reproduction was globalized after 1890, World War II and especially 1980. It addresses two main questions. First, how did practices of procreation travel, and to what extent did the connections make reproduction everywhere the same? Second, how have the most powerful influences changed and with what effects? The chapter tackles aspects of these questions for three topics: childbirth, which changed as countries converged on routine supervision by medical attendants leading to hospital delivery, but historians have given short shrift; the move to family planning, which by contrast dominates historical writing on reproduction in ‘developing countries’; and the global market in technologies of assisted reproduction that has grown since 1978. It concludes that globalization made reproduction global and local at the same time, thus enriching and refracting traditions from different regions of the world; that lines of continuity link arguments, practices and critiques, yet the constellation looks different in 1900, 1950 and today; and that nation-states remain paradoxically central even today.

  • 16 - Fruitful Bodies and Astrological Medicine

  • from Part II - Generation Reborn and Reformed
  • Edited by Nick Hopwood, University of Cambridge, Rebecca Flemming, University of Cambridge, Lauren Kassell, University of Cambridge
  • Book:
    Reproduction
    Published online:
    16 November 2018
    Print publication:
    06 December 2018, pp 225-240

  • Summary

    This chapter considers how questions about generation were expressed within and shaped by encounters between patients and practitioners in early modern Europe. It focuses on the casebooks of the English astrologer-physicians Simon Forman and Richard Napier, remarkable for their extensiveness and immediacy. The astrologer-physicians calculated the position of the stars at which a question was asked, used these and other signs, including their patient’s words, to judge the cause of the disease, and both patients and practitioners acted within conventions of what men and women could say and do. Roughly one in twenty women of childbearing age asked ‘Am I pregnant?’, thus opening a conversation about her health, sex life and the state of her marriage. Through an analysis of these dynamics, and rare cases of unmarried women asking about pregnancy, it argues that the medical encounter was part of the idiom in which women and their families and friends expressed and managed uncertainties about pregnancy. Questions about fertility and women’s health similarly document the ways in which doctors were entrusted with questions about fruitfulness. Ultimately the chapter suggests that doctors’ authority was modelled on their ability to answer questions about pregnancy and fertility by reading observed and reported signs.

  • 1 - Reproduction in History

  • from Introduction
  • Edited by Nick Hopwood, University of Cambridge, Rebecca Flemming, University of Cambridge, Lauren Kassell, University of Cambridge
  • Book:
    Reproduction
    Published online:
    16 November 2018
    Print publication:
    06 December 2018, pp 3-18

  • Summary

    This introductory chapter outlines the scope of generation and reproduction and argues that they should be more central to histories of health and medicine, the family and agriculture, and to historical writing more generally. It reviews how in the 1970s several intellectual enterprises—feminism, Michel Foucault’s account of biopower and François Jacob’s argument for a shift ‘from generation to reproduction’—engaged critically with pre-existing fields—histories of medical disciplines, of population, of ideas and of the family—to generate approaches that are still influential but did not coalesce into a new history of reproduction. It discusses how the major changes in historical practice that have accompanied an outpouring of histories of reproduction over the last thirty years have favoured studies of single topics, periods and places within rather separate sub-disciplines. We stress the new opportunities thus created for charting continuity and change, and that by standing back and drawing recent work together we can see beyond the old big pictures. We preview the structure of the book and outline how it tracks the reworking of an influential body of ideas and practice, primarily in the Mediterranean, western Europe, North America and their empires, from Graeco-Roman antiquity to the present day.

Page 1 of 2