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Displacing the physiological model that had held sway in 19th-century medical thinking, early 20th-century medical scientists working on hormones promoted a new understanding of the body, psychological reactions, and the sexual instinct, arguing that each were fundamentally malleable. Hormones came to be understood as the chemical messengers that regulated an individual's growth and sexual development, and sexologists interested in this area focused primarily on children and adolescents. Hormone research also promoted a view of the body in which ‘hermaphroditism’, homosexuality, and ‘sexual perversions’ such as masochism and sadism were attributed to anomalies in the internal secretions produced by the testes or the ovaries. This article focuses on Spanish, Italian, Argentinian, and Brazilian sexology shaped by endocrinological research in the interwar period. First, it shows the key role hormone treatments played in the historical development of sexology in Southern Europe and Latin America. Second, it looks at how sexologists employed hormone research to study human sexual development in the early stages of life, and how they set about ‘correcting’ what they viewed as ‘sexual anomalies’.

This article examines health, human–animal relationships and environments within nineteenth-century France, focusing on Hirudo medicinalis , the medicinal leech. Drawing upon medical, environmental and ‘more than human histories’, we investigate how a ‘mania’ for bloodletting in the wake of Parisian medicine and what Michel Foucault has characterised as the ‘birth of the clinic’ produced a trade in leeches that threatened to push the species to extinction. While urban-educated naturalists, physicians, pharmacists, merchants and politicians worried over the scarcity of what was widely considered a commodity of national economic and medical importance, rural ‘leech gatherers’ quietly developed ways to breed leeches artificially. The outcome was hirudiculture: the farming of leeches on an industrial scale. We argue that the birth of hirudiculture was more than a practical and commercial response to the needs of medicine; it reflected and embodied similar shifts in knowledge and reveals the complex and diverse ways in which rural and urban environments, human and non-human relationships, have shaped each other in the pursuit of shared visions of health. This article was published open access under a CC BY 4.0 licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

AbstractMedieval paper, a handmade product, is made with a mould which leaves an indelible imprint on the sheet of paper. This imprint includes chain lines, laid lines and watermarks which are often visible on the sheet. Extracting these features allows the identification of the paper stock and gives information about the chronology, localisation and movement of manuscripts and people. Most computational work for feature extraction of paper analysis has so far focused on radiography or transmitted light images. While these imaging methods provide clear visualisation of the features of interest, they are expensive and time consuming in their acquisition and not feasible for smaller institutions. However, reflected light images of medieval paper manuscripts are abundant and possibly cheaper in their acquisition. In this paper, we propose algorithms to detect and extract the laid and chain lines from reflected light images. We tackle the main drawback of reflected light images, that is, the low contrast attenuation of chain and laid lines and intensity jumps due to noise and degradation, by employing the spectral total variation decomposition and develop methods for subsequent chain and laid line extraction. Our results clearly demonstrate the feasibility of using reflected light images in paper analysis. This work enables feature extraction for paper manuscripts that have otherwise not been analysed due to a lack of appropriate images. We also open the door for paper stock identification at scale.

Which population factors have predisposed people to disregard government safety guidelines during the COVID-19 pandemic and what justifications do they give for this non-compliance? To address these questions, we analyse fixed-choice and free-text responses to survey questions about compliance and government handling of the pandemic, collected from tens of thousands of members of the UK public at three 6-monthly timepoints. We report that sceptical opinions about the government and mainstream-media narrative, especially as pertaining to justification for guidelines, significantly predict non-compliance. However, free text topic modelling shows that such opinions are diverse, spanning from scepticism about government competence and self-interest to full-blown conspiracy theories, and covary in prevalence with sociodemographic variables. These results indicate that attempts to counter non-compliance through argument should account for this diversity in peoples’ underlying opinions, and inform conversations aimed at bridging the gap between the general public and bodies of authority accordingly.

AbstractThis article examines crop varietal standardization in the United States. Numerous committees formed in the early twentieth century to address the problem of nomenclatural rules in the horticultural and agricultural industries. Making shared reference to a varietal name proved a difficult proposition for seed-borne crops because plant conformity tended to change in the hands of different breeders. Moreover, scientific and commercial opinions diverged on the value of deviations within crop varieties. I review the function of descriptive difference in the seed trade and in the framework of evolutionary theory before examining the institutional history of varietal standardization. Pimento peppers are used to represent how vegetables were treated differently than cereals. Lack of stability within a popular pimento variety caused problems for food packers in middle Georgia, which public breeders addressed by releasing new peppers. To conclude, the article questions the role of taxonomy in intellectual property, as breeding history and yield became defining attributes for making varietal distinctions.

Summary Leagues of Friends are charities that provide ‘personal service to patients’ and ‘supply hospitals with equipment not likely to come from the budgeting of authorities’. Hundreds continue to exist, and many trace their origins to before the NHS’s foundation in 1948. Despite the rich and growing historiographies of voluntarism and the NHS, Leagues have received little attention. This article uses case studies of Leagues in the English West Midlands to show how ‘friendship’ symbolised the relationship between local NHS institutions and the communities they served. The cases show that voluntarism in British healthcare has not always been based around activism and consumerism, two areas that recent scholarship has rightly highlighted, especially from the 1960s. This allows historians to interrogate the regional and local differences within, ostensibly, a highly centralised national health system.

This paper contends that Edinburgh’s international reputation as a centre for intellectual excellence rested on a unique context which favoured the spread of ideas and research. Crucially, strands which coalesced were its excellence in medicine, related to other scientific enquiry; its topography, which dictated a mutual proximity in the parts of the city concerned with the advancement of such knowledge; and buildings, both ancient and modern. By using Christian Jacob’s notion of lieux de savoir, I argue Edinburgh’s identity emerged from the entanglement of lieux de mémoire and lieux de savoir. By focusing on the spaces and social activities of Edinburgh’s medical lieux de savoir this paper traces how the epistemic fields of new medicine and science influenced Edinburgh’s international reputation as an Enlightenment city. I argue that in the potting sheds of the botanical gardens, on the benches of the anatomy theatres, within the walls of Royal Colleges and the University, and between the pages of books, Ancient and Modern learning and culture was hotly debated, and the application and management of new knowledge was negotiated. Edinburgh’s lieux de savoir was a crucible forging the Enlightenment city that was projected across academic departments, and through its publications and influential alumni including surgeons on British ships, to imperial contact zones across the world. Cet article affirme que la réputation internationale d'Édimbourg en tant que pôle intellectuel d'excellence tient à un contexte unique, lequel était favorable aux échanges d’idées et à la recherche. On observait une combinaison de facteurs inédits : l’excellence en médecine et dans d’autres domaines de la science, et une topographie urbaine particulière permettant une concentration géographique des lieux de promotion du savoir, dans des bâtiments anciens et modernes. En reprenant la notion de « lieux de savoir » développée par Christian Jacob, j’affirme ici que l’identité d’Édimbourg émergeait d’une combinaison entre « lieux de mémoire » et « lieux de savoir ». À partir d’une analyse des « lieux de savoir » en médecine, de leurs espaces et de leurs activités sociales, cet article retrace comment les champs épistémiques de la médecine et des sciences nouvelles ont influencé la réputation intellectuelle d'Édimbourg comme ville des Lumières. Au sein des serres et des jardins botaniques, sur les bancs des théâtres d'anatomie, derrière les murs des Collèges royaux et de l'Université, et dans les livres, le savoir et les méthodes des Anciens et des Modernes étaient vivement débattus, tandis que les connaissances nouvelles étaient testées et apprivoisées. Ces « lieux de savoir » à Édimbourg formaient le creuset de la ville des Lumières dont la réputation était projetée au sein des départements de l’Université et de tout l’Empire, grâce aux publications et au réseau d’anciens élèves, et notamment parmi les chirurgiens embarqués à bord des navires britanniques voguant à travers le monde.