The Open Air School Movement was a major public health initiative created within the Western World in the first half of the 20th century. Open air nursery and primary schools were introduced in the first decade of the century throughout Europe and North America and over the next 20-30 years became numerous and widespread. This paper examines the influences behind the Open Air school movement predating the influential School opened in Charlottenberg, Germany in 1904 and the working philosophy of these schools both in relation to health and more generally. It also documents the day to day working practices of the schools, their changing role as they were affected by changes in treatment and prevention of infectious disease and their subsequent decline and closure after the 2nd world war. The School movement is examined in the context of a more general social health agenda with particular emphasis on the ideas of “fresh air “ providing a desirable and healthy environment as a method of ( particularly ) control a…
Comparisons are key to all fair tests of the effects of treatments. Sometimes patients experience responses to treatments which compare dramatically with past experiences and the natural history of health problems. In these circumstances, confident conclusions about treatment effects can be reached without carefully controlled research. Such dramatic effects of treatments are rare, however, and reliable detection of moderate but important differential effects of treatments requires carefully designed, formal comparisons. A key principle in such formal treatment comparisons is that like will be compared with like – that, before the treatment(s) to be assessed have been started, the patients in the treatment comparison groups should have similar chances of recovery. In the middle of the 20th century, random allocation to treatment comparison groups began to be adopted as an unbiased way of creating similar groups. It is widely assumed that the adoption of random allocation in controlled trials reflected the inf…
In this seminar, Christian Bonah explores the protracted and often contentious history of the BCG vaccine against Tuberculosis, questioning the various approaches to therapeutic evaluation and human experimentation with the vaccine throughout the twentieth century.
Brian Balmer and Norma Morris present their research on (women) volunteers’ experience of participating in experimental medical research, in this case the testing of a novel breast imaging technology likely to have potential for the diagnosis of breast cancer. The data collected from interviews and participant observations highlighted the often overlooked social challenges of participation in an experiment, including how volunteers’ concerns about their ‘performance’ outweighed those surrounding risk or physical discomfort. Morris and Balmer also elaborate on their finding that volunteers were commonly active, enthused, and resourceful, a conclusion that chimes better with current ideas of doctor-patient partnerships and active consumer participation in research rather than the commonly encountered construction of the vulnerable and passive ‘subject’ that informs current ethical and regulatory structures. Although Morris and Balmer do not claim that their research setting was representative, as volunteers’ as…
Kevin Siena is Associate Professor at Trent University, Canada, and held an Oxford Brookes International Research Fellowship in 2011. Kevin’s research focuses on early modern British history with special interests in medical history, sex and disease, urban poverty and social welfare. This seminar took place at Oxford Brookes University on 15 February 2011
Today safety education seems to be everywhere – just think of the annual Christmas anti-drink/driving campaign, using TV and radio adverts, posters, newspaper messages and more. Where did this idea of using the media to try to persuade people to change their behaviour start? Drawing on his Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded work, in this seminar Mike Esbester explores the origins and spread of safety education, from the pre-First World War workplace, to road safety and even into the home. He looks at the techniques that were used to spread messages (including handkerchiefs, milk bottle tops and Christmas paper), the relationships between health education and safety education, and the role of voluntary and government organisations in producing safety education. Mike considers what messages were put forward – including the idea that people must look after themselves – and questions whether or not safety education has reduced deaths and injuries. This seminar took place at Oxford Brookes Universi…
Early modern Venice was economically wealthy, politically powerful and socially cosmopolitan; one sixteenth-century contemporary described the city as a hotel for the people’s of the world. Like many ports with a high turnover of people and where trade provided the economic ‘lifeblood of the city’, protection against disease was of paramount importance. Introductions against the plague have often been characterised as knee-jerk, reactive, desperate, temporary and ineffective and, as such, have been studied separately from other medical and charitable introductions, famous in Renaissance Italy for their sophistication and scale. This paper illustrates that concerns about the plague were permanent in Venice, because of the magnitude of the problem of the disease, the uniqueness of the city’s environment and the wide-ranging concern for morality and reform in Renaissance states. As such, it adds to our understanding of early modern Italian medical, physical and religious history. This seminar took place at Oxfor…
This seminar focuses on Greek child welfare institutions and initiatives in from the early 20thcentury unto 1940, exploring the combination of eugenics and ‘puericulture’ that emerged, as well the social hygienic measures adopted by Greek governments towards improving children’s health. This seminar hence also investigates the contributions pediatricians made to the wider eugenic discourse during the interwar years along with the intellectual currents that framed these debates and policies. This seminar took place at Oxford Brookes University on 5 April 2011
From the beginning of the eighteenth century a pattern of different forms of institutional provision for mentally disordered people emerged in England, which included workhouses, private madhouses, the voluntary mental hospitals, and then from 1808 the publicly funded county and borough mental hospitals. The historiography of mental hospitals has concentrated almost exclusively on the public mental hospitals, and continues to focus mostly on the nineteenth century. Little primary research has been done on the Registered Hospitals, as the voluntary mental hospitals became in 1845, and relatively little attention has been paid to the period in the twentieth century between c1920 and c1960, in which significant changes took place to the whole pattern of provision. This seminar took place at Oxford Brookes University on 3 May 2011
For more than forty years, Brian Abel-Smith, a health economist and political adviser, was closely involved with the development of health and social welfare policies worldwide. From his seminal research with Claude Guillebaud on the cost of the British National Health Service in the 1950s, he quickly developed an international reputation as a consultant who could be relied upon to produce useful reports with speed and efficiency. His research centred on the determinants of health, health service planning and financing, population control and poverty. He pioneered international comparisons on health services finance for the World Health Organisation in 1958, and completed numerous assignments in over 80 countries - ranging from short reports to (in the case of Mauritius) the creation of a fully-fledged social welfare system. From 1983-86 he was senior adviser to the WHO Director-General Halfdan Mahler on the economic strategy for the Health For All (by the year 2000) programme. This talk will use Abel-Smith’s…