The sense of the radical newness of Spanish America found in literary works from the chronicles of the conquest to the work of the criollistas has more recently given way to a stronger recognition of the transatlantic roots of much Spanish-American literature. This indebtedness does not imply subservience; rather, the New World's cultural and literary autonomy lies in the distinctive ways in which it assimilated its cultural inheritance. Professor Perez Firmat explores this process of assimilation or transculturation in the case of Cuba, and proposes a new understanding of the issue of Cuban...

Charitable Knowledge explores the interconnections among medical teaching, medical knowledge and medical authority in eighteenth-century London. The metropolis lacked a university until the nineteenth century, so the seven major voluntary hospitals--St. Bartholomew, St. Thomas, Guy, the Westminster, St. George, the Middlesex, and the London--were crucial sites for educating surgeons, surgeon-apothecaries and visiting physicians. Lawrence explains how charity patients became teaching objects, and how hospitals became medical schools. She demonstrates that hospital practitioners gradually...

A large part of the effort of the food industry is spent in attempting to understand the limitations of the type of food that animals can eat. An understanding of the factors that influence feeding behavior can then be used to produce foodstuffs that are more attractive to the animals in question, whether they be humans, cattle, dogs, or cats. This book examines both the texture of food and the adaptations of various animals (including fish, mammals, primates, and humans) to the type of food they commonly eat. Zoologists, material scientists, and food scientists are assembled to present for...

This collection of essays presents fresh interpretations of the growth of medico-legal ideas, institutions and practices in Britain, Europe and America over the past four hundred years. Based on a wealth of new research, it brings the historical study of legal medicine firmly into the realm of social history. Case studies of infanticide, abortion, coroners' inquests, and criminal insanity show that legal medicine has often been the focus of social change and political controversy. The contributors also emphasize the formative influence of legal systems on medico-legal knowledge and practice....

Sociocultural Studies of Mind addresses the question of how mental functioning is related to the cultural, historical, and institutional settings in which it takes place. There are three unifying ideas that run through the volume: 1) one of the basic ways that sociocultural setting shapes mental functioning is through the cultural tools employed, 2) mediation provides a formulation of how this shaping occurs, and 3) in order to specify how cultural tools exist and have their effects, it is essential to focus on human action as a unit of analysis. This landmark volume defines a general...

This is the first thorough study of charity and of medical and poor relief in post-Renaissance Italy. It departs from current interpretations by putting much greater emphasis on the various circumstances that motivated individual men and women to become involved in charity, and argues that conflicts and tensions in their social and political surroundings were crucial in prompting their charitable activity and defining perceptions of the needy.

A Social History of Wet Nursing in America: From Breast to Bottle examines the intersection of medical science, social theory, and cultural practices as they shaped relations among wet nurses, physicians, and families from the colonial period through the twentieth century. It explores how Americans used wet nursing to solve infant feeding problems, shows why wet nursing became controversial as motherhood slowly became medicalized, and elaborates how the development of scientific infant feeding eliminated wet nursing by the beginning of the twentieth century. Janet Golden's study contributes...

This is a collection of original studies on the international health and welfare organizations between the First and the Second World Wars. The diversity of such organizations and their many-sided activities make this a rich and complex area of historical investigation that has direct relevance to current issues in international health. Multilateral organizations such as the League of Nations and a variety of types of non-governmental organizations are discussed. The role of scientific and professional factors, as well as the priorities of women's employment, eugenics and pronatalism are also...

Mystical Bedlam explores the social history of insanity of early seventeenth-century England by means of a detailed analysis of the records of Richard Napier.