[Illness, conflicts, and medical supply problems: patients and their petitions in the last decade of the GDR]. / Krankheit, Konflikte und Versorgungsmängel: Patienten und ihre Eingaben im letzten Jahrzehnt der DDR.

This article contributes to historical research on medical care in the GDR by using patients' written petitions to the Central Committee of the Socialist Party submitted in the 1980s. It investigates how patients experienced everyday medical care in the GDR beyond the ideals of official health policy. What were their experiences with doctors and nurses and what possibilities for managing conflicts did sick and needy people have? Starting with a critical consideration of sources and some remarks about the culture of petitioning in GDR society, the article provides insight into the lives of patients in the late GDR. An analysis of medical petitions reveals individual ways of coping with disease and indicates that patients made particular demands of the socialist state and its health system. Patients articulated their expectations quite critically, using characteristic patterns of argumentation and, at times, successfully exerting pressure on the regime to answer their demands.

The family is worthy of being rebuilt: perceptions of the Jewish family in Mandate Palestine, 1918-1948.

Although the Jewish community of Palestine was an extremely family-oriented society and the institute of the family played a major role in the establishment of the new Zionist nationhood, the historiography has henceforth paid little attention to its role, images, and functions. This article will examine the diverse and often contradictory perceptions and influences that have shaped the Zionist period. Traditional Jewish perceptions intertwined with modern, bourgeois, and revolutionary notions of the family, whether national or socialist. These contradictory perceptions were manifested in the contested professional and public discourse regarding the many dysfunctional urban families in Tel Aviv, who were treated by welfare authorities and mental health specialists during the 1930s and 1940s.

A heuristic blunder: notes on an ethnographic situation in southwest China.

During long-term fieldwork the increasing involvement of the ethnographer in the lives of others raises a series of methodological and ethical issues. These can become even more pronounced when one is working with ethnic minorities in a socialist country. Yet, a seldom acknowledged reality of ethnographic fieldwork experience are the 'little failures' that occur along the way, alongside ethnographic blunders. I argue that these are difficult to avoid and can be part of an important learning process, oftentimes for both researcher and researched. Through the detailed description of a blunder that the author made during his research in southwest China with members of the Drung ethnic minority, this article advocates for the heuristic value of such mishaps, suggesting that one can learn a lot from accidents and unexpected events while undertaking in-depth ethnographic fieldwork. In this case, this helped to shed light on the micropolitics of Drung village life in southwest Yunnan, and the place of a 'minority nationality' in wider Chinese society.

Anti-alcohol posters in Poland, 1945-1989: diverse meanings, uncertain effects.

We provide a historical study of the anti-alcohol public health poster in Poland between 1948 and 1990. Our case study illuminates public health policies under communism, with the state as the dominant force in health communication. Poland has a distinctive history of poster art, moving from a Stalinist phase of socialist realism to the diverse styles of the later Polish School. Quantitative and qualitative analysis of 213 posters establishes the major themes and differentiates community approaches, which depict the drinker as a social or political deviant, from those emphasizing individual risk. Medical issues were a minor theme, reflecting public policies geared more toward confinement than treatment. However, Polish School artists used metaphor and ambiguity, and references to the contested cultural symbolism of drink, to complicate and subvert the narrow propaganda intent. Thus, although apparently unsuccessful in restraining overall consumption, these posters offer valuable lessons for policymakers on the use of visual media in health campaigns.

On the appropriate use of rose-colored glasses: reflections on science in socialist China.

In the 1970s and early 1980s, many Westerners wrote enthusiastically about science as practiced in socialist China. They applauded the mobilization of broad sectors of the population for science that truly "served the people." By the mid-1980s, revelations about the many horrors of the Cultural Revolution worked to discredit these early, optimistic accounts. At the same time, the post-Mao privileging of economic development over social revolution (which meshes well with dominant Western attitudes) now strongly colors almost all analyses of science in socialist China. This essay encourages historians to retrieve the largely discarded rosy accounts of earlier years. Such sources provide insight into the goals of historical actors and challenge us to recognize the specificity and contingency of our own values. Used in tandem with the later sources, they can help us achieve a critical understanding of science in both socialist China and our own historical context.