Hydraulic Engineers and Antiquarians: Political Use of the Past in Nineteenth-Century Venice.

The article analyzes the relationship between hydraulics and history in the nineteenth century, often described as a period when the humanities and the sciences split into "two separate cultures." Venice, amphibious city par excellence, is a good starting point for exploring the use of history in water management debates. In the early nineteenth century, humanists and hydraulic engineers came together through multiple disciplinary approaches and in constant confrontation with the Republic of Venice's water policies. In the following decades, while making extensive use of history, these engineers realized and emphasized the diversity of both disciplines' methodologies. This evolution-seen through the writings of renowned hydraulic engineer at the time Pietro Paleocapa-illustrates how history was no longer a source of empirical knowledge but came to be used for rhetorical and political purposes.

Special operations: a hidden chapter in the histories of facial surgery and human enhancement.

During the Second World War, Britain's Special Operations Executive (SOE), a secret service established to encourage resistance and carry out sabotage, employed various techniques of enhancing the ability of its personnel to operate undetected in enemy territory. One of these methods was surgery. Drawing on recently declassified records, this article illuminates SOE's reasons for commissioning this procedure, the needs and wants of those who received it, and the surgeons employed to carry it out. It also aims to underline the role of context in shaping perceptions of facial surgery, and the potential for surgery for wartime disguise to resonate with current debates about human enhancement.

'A higher form of listening': a commentary on 'the human bodies of World War II: beyond the battlefield'.

This issue's interdisciplinary range parallels the generative multidisciplinary scope in the developing field of medical humanities. A closely detailed and empathic interdisciplinary analysis of physical and mental injury can offer additional historical and cultural resources to medical practitioners, thus broadening potential patient treatment options beyond institutional and disciplinary boundaries.

Psychosocial Reactions to Plagues in the Cultural History of Medicine: A Medical Humanities Approach.

The aim of this work is to elucidate psychosocial reactions to plagues by analyzing three landmark descriptions from different eras: Thucydides' description of the plague of Athens (430 BC) in The History of the Peloponnesian War, Giovanni Boccaccio's description of the plague in Florence (1348) in The Decameron, and Albert Camus' description in The Plague (1947). Using a narrative inquiry, we found psychosocial reactions to be complex and ambivalent and could discern several coping strategies. We propose that this knowledge can help psychiatrists and other healthcare professionals during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

'Between-time stories': waiting, war and the temporalities of care.

This article analyses how World War II shifted and contained embodied experiences of waiting in relation to broader ideas of lived time in modernity. The trench warfare of World War I has often been imagined as a limit experience of anxious waiting, but World War II produced compelling accounts of experiences of suspended time in civilian populations exposed to the threat and anticipation of 'total war'. This article analyses representations of this suspended present drawn from Elizabeth Bowen and Virginia Woolf, alongside materials in the Mass Observation Archive, to develop an account of how exposure to a future shaped by the potential of annihilation from the air reshaped experiences of durational temporality and the timescapes of modernity in the London Blitz. It also explores the relationship between anxiety, waiting, and care by attending to psychoanalytic theories that developed in the wartime work of Wilfred Bion and Melanie Klein. Extending Freud's account of anxiety as producing 'yet time', this article describes how and why both literary and psychoanalytic texts came to understand waiting and thinking with others as creating the conditions for taking care of the future.

Psychedelic crossings: American mental health and LSD in the 1970s.

This article places a spotlight on lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) and American mental health in the 1970s, an era in which psychedelic science was far from settled and researchers continued to push the limits of regulation, resist change and attempt to revolutionise the mental health market-place. The following pages reveal some of the connections between mental health, LSD and the wider setting, avoiding both ascension and declension narratives. We offer a renewed approach to a substance, LSD, which bridged the gap between biomedical understandings of 'health' and 'cure' and the subjective needs of the individual. Garnering much attention, much like today, LSD created a cross-over point that brought together the humanities and arts, social sciences, health policy, medical education, patient experience and the public at large. It also divided opinion. This study draws on archival materials, medical literature and popular culture to understand the dynamics of psychedelic crossings as a means of engendering a fresh approach to cultural and countercultural-based healthcare during the 1970s.

From postcard to book cover: illustrating connections between medical history and digital humanities.

This article illustrates the value and impact of collaboration among scholars, archivists, and librarians working across universities and government institutions, and how changes in medium-from a born-physical photograph and printed postcard to a digital reproduction to a simultaneously born-digital and printed book-create new possibilities for scholarly analysis, interpretation, and dissemination, which in turn suggest future directions for research and engagement across fields of inquiry. In doing so, this article argues that history matters by illuminating past networks that, through humanistic inquiry, continue to connect people, ideas, and institutions in the present and into the future.

The centenary of 'The Old Humanities and the New Science,' the last public address of Sir William Osler (1849-1919).

On 16 May 1919, Sir William Osler (1849-1919) gave what would be his last public address, 'The Old Humanities and the New Science,' to the Classical Association of which he was president. British educators were locked in a struggle between classics teachers, who wished to preserve their dominance in public schools and universities, and science teachers, who wanted more time in the curriculum. Osler had supported the science teachers' position three years earlier in his presidential address to the Association of Public School Science Masters. What could he now say to the classicists without making enemies? He gently chided both groups, but he was less concerned that day with the curricular dispute than with the question whether 'Science … can rule without invoking ruin.' He averred that 'there must be a very different civilization or there will be no civilization at all.' He invoked the Hippocratic ideal of 'philanthropia and philotechnia' (love of humanity and love of science of technology) not just for medicine, but for all of humankind.

[The French Revolution as Moral Shock : On the Political Dimension of the Research and Therapy of the Human Mind, ca. 1792-1806]. / Die Französische Revolution als moralischer Schock : Zur politischen Dimension der Erforschung und Therapie des menschlichen Geistes, ca. 1792­1806.

The paper describes how, in the context of the development of the French human sciences (sciences de l'homme) around 1800, the reference to the Reign of Terror was constitutive for the formulation and legitimation of a procedure, which was based on what Jean-Étienne Esquirol called "moral shocks" (sécousse morale). The psychiatric and pedagogical discussion of non-physical effects on the spirit (esprit) of human subjects and patients essentially dealt with the question: could people have been liberated by the shocking surge of the Revolution from the demeaning and dependent habits of the Old Regime (ancien régime), or could this violent revolution have had a pathological effect? This article shows that, after 1800, the latter interpretation became accepted. A professional self-image of psychiatric and pedagogical expertise formed in the relationship between physician and patient or teacher and student. This expertise justified employing shocks in professionally controlled settings, while the healing power of the revolutionary was negated. This article thereby distinguishes between four different perspectives on the pathological or healing effect of what was perceived as a "revolutionary shock": firstly, a positive perspective that interprets the shock of the Revolution as healthy, stimulating the vital forces of the people languishing in inactivity; secondly, a cautious perspective that emphasizes the necessity of curbing and controlling the passions of the people; thirdly, a perspective that recognizes in the outburst of passions an aberration from the natural state, and fourthly, a therapeutic perspective that recommends the use of passions by experts in very controlled spaces. Based on published texts and material from the Archives nationales as well as the Institut national de jeunes sourds, this article provides a political history of the development of moral shocks and argues that the development of epistemological and therapeutic technologies in the human sciences were essentially the result of a demarcation from revolutionary violence as well as the desire in the human sciences for a stable government.

Medical Nemesis 40 years on: the enduring legacy of Ivan Illich.

Ivan Illich's attack on modern medicine, Medical Nemesis, appeared in 1974. The book famously opened with the statement: 'The medical establishment has become a major threat to health.' Forty years after its publication, this paper examines the major themes of the book, and asks whether events since its publication have added weight to Illich's thesis.