Endeavour
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Historical Article
Barefoot Doctors and the "Health Care Revolution" in Rural China: A Study Centered on Shandong Province.
Barefoot doctors were rural medical personnel trained en masse, whose emergence and development had a particular political, economic, social, and cultural background. Like the rural cooperative medical care system, the barefoot doctor was a well-known phenomenon in the Cultural Revolution. Complicated regional differences and a lack of reliable sources create much difficulty for the study of barefoot doctors and result in differing opinions of their status and importance. ⋯ After the Cultural Revolution ended, the cooperative medical system began to disintegrate-a process that accelerated in the 1980s until the system's collapse in the wake of the de-collectivization. As a result, the number of barefoot doctors also ran down steadily. In 1985, "barefoot doctor" as a job title was officially removed from Chinese medical profession, demonstrating that its practice was non-universal and unsustainable.
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Historical Article
'His nerves gave way': Shell shock, history and the memory of the First World War in Britain.
During the First World War soldiers suffered from a wide range of debilitating nervous complaints as a result of the stresses and strains of modern warfare. These complaints--widely known as shell shock--were the subject of much medical-military debate during the war and became emblematic of the war and its sufferings afterwards. One hundred years after the war the diagnosis of PTSD has not resolved the issues initially raised by First World War shell shock. The stigma of mental illness remains strong and it is still difficult to commemorate and remember the mental wounds of war in a culture which tend to glory or glamorise military heroes.
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Historical Article
Pelvimetry and the persistance of racial science in obstetrics.
In the late nineteenth century, Mexican scientists became fixated on pelvic structure as an indicator of racial difference and hereditary worth. Forty years later, in his 1931 dissertation, medical student Gustavo Aldolfo Trangay proposed the implementation of a eugenic sterilization campaign in Mexico. ⋯ Trangay reasoned that his patients were unfit for motherhood, and he claimed that their small pelvic cavities were a sign of biological inferiority. His focus on anatomical measurements--and especially pelvic measurements--was not novel in Mexico, but his work shows how doctors used nineteenth century racial science to rationalize eugenic sterilization.
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Biography Historical Article
Heroes for the past and present: a century of remembering Amundsen and Scott.
In 1911-1912 Roald Amundsen and Robert Falcon Scott led rival parties in a race to the geographic South Pole. While both parties reached the Pole--Amundsen first--Scott's men died on the return journey. Amundsen became a Norwegian icon through his record-setting travels; Scott became a symbol of courage and devotion to science. ⋯ Scott's status as a scientific figure was central to the Scott Polar Research Institute, while Amundsen's lack of scientific legacy became a way for British polar explorers to differentiate themselves from Norwegian contemporaries during the interwar years. After 1945 Scott and Amundsen were again invoked as exemplars of national polar achievement, even as the rise of large-scale science on the continent overshadowed past British and Norwegian achievements. In the present Amundsen and Scott remain wedded to particular values, focused respectively on national achievement and sacrifice in the name of science, while their race has become secondary.
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Biography Historical Article
Murdered bread, living bread: Doris Grant and the homemade, wholemeal loaf.
Doris Grant (1905-2003), a middle-class, British housewife, published numerous books from the 1940s into the 1970s urging her fellow housewives to bake organic, wholemeal bread for their families. This article argues that Grant's arguments defy easy categorization as either 'conservative' or 'progressive'. ⋯ On the other hand, Grant also pushed her readers to look beyond their homes and recognize a dangerous food supply system that was impinging on their daily lives. She demanded that her readers reject comfortable complicity in this system and preached the value of individual action in effecting substantive change.