CFP: Urban History Group Conference, Keele University 2018

Healthy or Unhealthy Cities? Urban environments, cultures and economies of public and private health, 1600 to the present.

By their very nature towns and cities were and still are potentially unhealthy spaces, beset by problems of disease, pollution and inadequate housing. Yet cities have also been centres for reform and significantly improved 'health' provision: the great leaps forward in sanitation, environmental and industrial regulation, provision of hospitals and other medical services were themselves driven by the pressures of urbanisation. Although this ‘progress’ was neither linear nor without significant resistance, the impetus to promote change and to extend provision could and did bind city communities together. Indeed, as recent assessments have shown, cities became the increasingly healthy option as services and environments improved.
The health of urban populations and healthiness of urban environments and experience, therefore, remain central to our understanding of how towns and cities do or do not function.  The 2018 UHG conference will explore how we interpret and historicise the highs and lows of urban health and environment alongside the responses and experiences these produce.
In framing your paper or making a proposal for a panel you may wish to consider some of the following:

• How healthy or unhealthy were cities compared to say rural environments; in what sense were problems localised or area specific, and did this impact on the city’s aggregated view of itself? 
• How has the (un)healthy city been represented to urban dwellers? How important were the perceptions of health and/or inequality over empirical knowledge in determining outcomes?

• What drove forward health, pollution, environmental, housing and sanitary reform?  Was it largely pragmatic or idealistic; economic or research driven; led by locals or national agents? 
• What role did protest and radical action play in changing approaches to urban health?
• What is the role of class, age, gender, sexuality, or ethnicity in determining access to a healthy urban life?
• What was the correlation between economic activity and urban health?  How has regulation and planning impacted upon economic and industrial productivity; what tensions arise in creating cities that are both healthy and wealthy?
• In terms of medical provision, who were the key actors, why were they involved and what did they achieve? 
• What were the limits and strengths of ‘voluntaryism’, how involved was the community in this and in what ways did the voluntary, religious and state systems inter-react?

Lives in the Asylum Record, 1864 to 1910

Το νέο τεύχος του περιοδικού Medical History περιλαμβάνει το άρθρο των McCarthy, A., Coleborne, C., O’Connor, M., & Knewstubb, E. (2017). "Lives in the Asylum Record, 1864 to 1910: Utilising Large Data Collection for Histories of Psychiatry and Mental Health." Medical History, 61(3), 358-379. doi:10.1017/mdh.2017.33

Το άρθρο παρουσιάζει ένα μεγάλο ερευνητικό πρόγραμμα με βάση το αρχειακό υλικό τεσσάρων ψυχιατρικών ιδρυμάτων στην Αυστραλία και τη Νέα Ζηλανδία και επικεντρώνεται σε μεθοδολογικά ζητήματα γύρω από τη συλλογή και την ανάλυση του υλικού αυτού. Στην περίληψη διαβάζουμε:

This article examines the research implications and uses of data for a large project investigating institutional confinement in Australia and New Zealand. The cases of patients admitted between 1864 and 1910 at four separate institutions, three public and one private, provided more than 4000 patient records to a collaborative team of researchers. The utility and longevity of this data and the ways to continue to understand its significance and contents form the basis of this article’s interrogation of data collection and methodological issues surrounding the history of psychiatry and mental health. It examines the themes of ethics and access, record linkage, categories of data analysis, comparison and record keeping across colonial and imperial institutions, and constraints and opportunities in the data itself. The aim of this article is to continue an ongoing conversation among historians of mental health about the role and value of data collection for mental health and to signal the relevance of international multi-sited collaborative research in this field.

Περισσότερα στοιχεία στον σύνδεσμο:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/medical-history/article/lives-in-the-asylum-record-1864-to-1910-utilising-large-data-collection-for-histories-of-psychiatry-and-mental-health/A7E7AB7E943558C43BE7C0689842B287

Από την κ. Δέσπω Κριτσωτάκη