Dressing and Addressing the Mental Patient: The Uses of Clothing in the Admission, Care and Employment of Residents in English Provincial Mental Hospitals, c. 1860-1960.

Scholars of insanity and its historical antecedents have paid very little attention to personal and institutional clothing. Such dress, distributed to patients in mental institutions, has always been inscribed with the conflicting narratives of the period in which it was made and worn. The language of civil and medical authority is more evident than personal choice in the shape and address of the attire. This article examines clothing worn by patients in three Devon mental hospitals during the century before 1960. We consider the ways in which institutional clothing formed part of a hospital regimen of overt control, as well as suiting considerations of economy and employment that figured in these institutions.

Beyond a shadow of a doubt? Experts, lay knowledge, and the role of radiography in the diagnosis of silicosis in Britain, c. 1919-1945.

The history of silicosis provides an important chapter in the history of occupational and environmental health. Recent historical scholarship has drawn attention to the importance of patient attitudes, popular protests, and compensation claims in the formation of a "lay epidemiology" of such a disease, frequently challenging the scientific orthodoxies devised by large corporations and medical specialists. Surprisingly little research has been undertaken on the United Kingdom, which provided much of the early expertise and medical research in respiratory diseases among industrial workers. This article examines the introduction of a particular technique, x-radiography, and its use by radiologists and others in debates on the causes and consequences of silica inhalation by the laboring population in Britain during the early decades of the twentieth century. In contrast to some recent interpretations, and also to the narrative of progress that practitioner historians have developed since the 1940s, this article suggests that the use of this technology was contested for much of this period and the interpretation of X-rays remained disputed and uncertain into the 1950s. The article also questions recent accounts of lay epidemiology as an adequate model for understanding the progress of such innovations in medical history.

Code of Sustainable Practice in Occupational and Environmental Health and Safety for Corporations.

At a conference held at Stony Brook University in December 2007, "Dangerous Trade: Histories of Industrial Hazard across a Globalizing World," participants endorsed a Code of Sustainable Practice in Occupational and Environmental Health and Safety for Corporations. The Code outlines practices that would ensure corporations enact the highest health and environmentally protective measures in all the locations in which they operate. Corporations should observe international guidelines on occupational exposure to air contaminants, plant safety, air and water pollutant releases, hazardous waste disposal practices, remediation of polluted sites, public disclosure of toxic releases, product hazard labeling, sale of products for specific uses, storage and transport of toxic intermediates and products, corporate safety and health auditing, and corporate environmental auditing. Protective measures in all locations should be consonant with the most protective measures applied anywhere in the world, and should apply to the corporations' subsidiaries, contractors, suppliers, distributors, and licensees of technology. Key words: corporations, sustainability, environmental protection, occupational health, code of practice.

Coming up for air: experts, employers, and workers in campaigns to compensate silicosis sufferers in Britain, 1918-1939.

Government regulation of dangerous trades and the compensation of those injured by their work remains a matter of considerable debate among medical historians. Trade unions have frequently been criticized for pursuing financial awards for their members rather than demanding improvements in health and safety at the workplace. This article examines the neglected subject of silicosis injuries in Britain from the time when the first legislation was passed for compensation of those suffering from the harmful affects of silica dust in 1918 to the outbreak of war in 1939, when a major new study was under way which would transform the scientific understanding and the legal compensation of those who were diagnosed as being ill with pneumoconiosis. It is argued that in framing legislation from compensation, politicians and their civil servants sought to retain the legal framework created in 1897-1906 and developed a model of industrial insurance which depended to a large extent on a co-operative relationship with leading employers. Medical scientists identified silica as a uniquely hazardous agent in workers' lung disease, which emphasizing the specialist knowledge required for its diagnosis. One remarkable feature of the selective compensation schemes devised after 1918 was the reliance on geological rather than pathological evidence to prove compensation rights as well as strict employment limits on those eligible to claim. only the campaigning of labour organizations and persistent evidence of lung disease among anthracite coal miners led to a significant relaxation of compensation rules in 1934 and the fresh scientific investigation which transformed the medical understanding of respiratory illness among industrial workers.

Sex and sensibility in cultural history: the English governess and the lunatic asylum, 1845-1914.

This chapter is concerned with the experience of the Victorian governess and other female teachers in the lunatic asylum during the Victorian period. There is now a formidable and complex literature on the governess but little discussion of her experience behind the walls of the asylum. The chapter offers two kinds of comparison: the distinctive pattern of care of governesses in three different institutions in Victorian Devon; and secondly, the progress of those identified as 'governess' with other groups of female teachers in the same period. A number of interesting contrasts emerge. The evidence also indicates the importance of cultural and social influences in the construction of the persona of the female teacher.