Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

Thomas Robert Malthus's reputation has lately been rehabilitated in the fields of social biology, demography, environmentalism, and economics. In the midst of this current interest and with the chance to mark the occasion of the bicentenary of the first edition of the Essay on Population (1798), the contributors to this volume take this timely opportunity to examine the historical conditions in which Malthus constructed his theory, and in which the concept of a ‘Malthusian' and ‘Neo-Malthusian' philosophy first emerged. The essays redress the balance between Malthus's original argument, the immediate responses to Malthus by medics and theologians in Britain and on the Continent, and some of the ways that his ideas were later attacked, appropriated, or misrepresented. Included here are essays that not only re-evaluate the development of Malthus's theory, but also offer critical perspectives on the generation of the ‘Malthusian league' and debates about birth control in Britain and on the Continent, and Malthus's influence on the emergence of social science and Darwinian evolutionary biology.

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

This book explores the role of Venereal Disease in shaping perceptions of sexuality in twentieth-century Scotland, and in defining the response of the Modern State to patterns of sexual behaviour. It examines how civic, medical and political authorities reacted to the ‘Hideous Scourge' in times of peace and war and how far policy was informed by anxieties surrounding social change and public morality as much as by the incidence of disease and developments in medical knowledge. It focuses in particular on the moral assumptions underpinning epidemiological debate, and the various dimensions of stigmatisation and control within VD discourse, including gender, generation and class. This study also highlights the protracted campaign in Scotland for legal controls over those suffering from VD, and the enduring problem, resurrected by the threat of HIV and AIDS, of balancing the demands of public health against those of civil liberties in the regulation of ‘dangerous sexualities'.

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

The essays in this volume, which range across Europe, America and Africa, and from the 18th to the 20th centuries, argue that the experience of travel, and the business of representing that experience, involved an obligatory engagement with the disturbing perception that travel's pleasures were inseparable from its dangers and ennuis. Despite the confidence of some medical authorities in their recommendations of the therapeutic benefits to be derived from ‘change of air' as a way of restoring a state of health, such opinions failed to establish a consensus, either amongst those who followed such peripatetic prescriptions, or amongst the medical professions in general. Mad doctors and climatologists alike were forced to adopt an essentially partisan stance in arguing their case for such recommendations, and were confronted by rival practitioners who could marshal counter-case histories which demonstrated diametrically opposed conclusions concerning the advisability of travel. To this extent, the history of travel and its pathologies is a particularly revealing instance of the way medical thinking was dependent on localised studies which might do more to challenge the universal applicability of generally accepted theories than they did to confirm their diagnostic reliability. The essays collected here not only contribute to our understanding of the conception and application of a variety of medical ideas, showing how they depended on beliefs about climate and corporeal constitution as well as often inconsistent data or récits culled from travellers and geographically dispersed case histories, but also open up illuminatingly complex perspectives on the uncertainties and dangers of the phenomenon of modern travel.