Compassion in healthcare has received significant attention recently, on an international scale, with concern raised about its absence during clinical interactions. As a concept, compassionate care has been linked to nursing. We examined historical discourse on this topic, to understand and situate current debates on compassionate care as a hallmark of high‐quality services. Documents we looked at illustrated how responsibility for delivering compassionate care cannot be consigned to individual nurses. Health professionals must have the right environmental circumstances to be able (...) to provide and engage in compassionate interactions with patients and their relatives. Hence, although compassionate care has been presented as a straightforward solution when crisis faces health services, this discourse, especially in policy documents, has often failed to acknowledge the system‐level issues associated with its provision. This has resulted in simplistic presentations of ‘compassion’ as inexpensive and the responsibility of individual nurses, a misleading proposal that risks devaluing the energy and resources required to deliver compassionate care. It also overlooks the need for organisations, not just individuals, to be charged with upholding its provision. (shrink)

How can we assess the reciprocal impacts of politics and medicine in the contemporary period? Using the example of rickets in twentieth century Britain, I will explore the ways in which a preventable, curable non-infectious disease came to have enormous political significance, first as a symbol of socioeconomic inequality, then as evidence of racial and ethnic health disparities. Between the 1920s and 1980s, clinicians, researchers, health workers, members of Parliament and later Britain's growing South Asian ethnic communities repeatedly confronted the (...) British state with evidence of persistent nutritional deficiency among the British poor and British Asians. Drawing on bitter memories of the ‘Hungry Thirties’, postwar rickets—so often described as a ‘Victorian’ disease—became a high-profile sign of what was variously constructed as a failure of the Welfare State; or of the political parties charged with its protection; or of ethnically Asian migrants and their descendants to adapt to British life and norms. Here I will argue that rickets prompted such consternation not because of its severity, the cost of its treatment, or even its prevalence; but because of the ease with which it was politicised. I will explore the ways in which this condition was envisioned, defined and addressed as Britain moved from the postwar consensus to Thatcherism, and as Britain's diverse South Asian communities developed from migrant enclaves to settled multigenerational ethnic communities. (shrink)

Is the gene 'special' for historians? What effects, if any, has the notion of the 'gene' had on our understanding of history? Certainly, there is a widespread public and professional perception that genetics and history are or should be in dialogue with each other in some way. But historians and geneticists view history and genetics very differently - and assume very different relationships between them. And public perceptions of genes, genetics, genomics, and indeed the nature and meanings of 'history' differ (...) yet again. Here, in looking at the meaning, and the implications - the significance - of the gene (and its corollary scientific disciplines and approaches) specifically to historians, I will focus on two aspects of the discourse. First, I will examine the ways in which historians have thus far approached genes and genetics, and the impact such studies have had on the field. There is considerable overlap between the subject matter of genetics/genomics and many of the most widely used analytic categories of contemporary historiography - race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, (dis)ability, among others. Yet the impact of genetics and genomics on society has been studied principally by anthropologists, sociologists and ethicists.2 Only two historical sub-disciplines have engaged with the rise of genetics to any significant degree: the histories of science and of medicine. What does this indicate or suggest? Second, I will explore the impact of the 'gene' and genetic understandings (of, for example, the body, health, disease, identity, the family, and evolution) on public conceptions of history itself. (shrink)

How do cultures of self-quantification intersect with the modern state, particularly in relation to medical provision and health promotion? Here I explore the ways in which British practices and representations of body weight and weight management ignored or interacted with the National Health Service between 1948 and 2004. Through the lens of overweight, I examine health citizenship in the context of universal health provision funded from general taxation, and track attitudes toward “overweight” once its health implications and medical costs affected (...) a public service as well as individual bodies and households. Looking at professional and popular discourses of overweight and obesity, I map the persistence of a highly individual culture of dietary and weight self-management in postwar Britain, and assess the degree to which it was challenged by a new measure of “obesity” – the body mass index – and by visions of an NHS burdened and even threatened by the increasing overweight of the citizens it was created to serve. (shrink)

Between 1946 and 1960, a new phenomenon emerged in the field of bacteriology. "Bacterial sex," as it was called, revolutionized the study of genetics, largely by making available a whole new class of cheap, fast-growing, and easily manipulated organisms. But what was "bacterial sex?" How could single-celled organisms have "sex" or even be sexually differentiated? The technical language used in the scientific press -- the public and inalienable face of 20th century science -- to describe this apparently neuter organism was (...) explicit: the cells "copulated," had "intimate contract," "conjugal unions," and engaged in "ménage à trois" relationships. And yet, to describe bacteria as sexually reproducing organisms, the definition of sex itself had to change. Despite manifold contradictions and the availability of alternative language, the notion of sexually active (even promiscuous) single-celled organisms has persisted, even into contemporary textbooks on cell biology and genetics. In this paper I examine the ways in which bacteria were brought into the genetic fold, sexualized, and given gender; I also consider the issues underlying the durability of "bacterial sex.". (shrink)