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A History of Psychiatry in Objects

by Bettina Alavi and Ralph Höger Using the agency of objects as an approach in university-based teacher training seminar During the winter semester of 2017/18, students on the teacher training course at Heidelberg University of Education and students at the University of Heidelberg took part in the seminar “A History of Psychiatry in Objects”. This seminar was designed and taught by the history educationalist Bettina Alavi and Ralph Höger, a doctoral candidate at the Heidelberg School of Education. The seminar adopted Disability History (Waldschmidt/Bösl 2017; Bösl 2010) as its approach, focusing in particular on the question of the “agency” of material culture (that is, the agency of things and objects). The seminar enquired to which extent objects both contribute to and constitute 20th- and 21st-century understandings of psychiatry: how are the boundaries drawn between healthy/unhealthy, normal/not normal, socially acceptable/inacceptable? Our underlying assumption was that soci

Parental Advocacy and the Changing Attitudes Towards Down syndrome in Post-war Britain

By Sophie George This article is based on a wider dissertation on ‘The Changing Attitudes Towards Down syndrome in Post War Britain’ written in 2019. It discusses the role of parental advocacy as a force for evolutionary change towards the inclusion of people with Down syndrome in post war Britain. I will therefore be focusing on the movements towards integrated education and the process of de-institutionalisation, as well as commenting on the introduction of the pre-natal test and its effects on the parental community. At the start of the post war era, most children with Down syndrome were transferred to institutions and many were deemed ‘uneducable’. With the help of the parental movement, institutions were improved, community living was becoming a reality and education for people with intellectual disabilities like Down syndrome was more accessible and integrated. Whilst the parental movement helped change attitudes towards Down syndrome, it was not revolutionary and represents a

Eating Dirt, Treating Slaves

By Rana Hogarth Historians of slavery must often contend with how the power imbalances of the slave system continue to shape the archival record, and, more importantly, influence the types of stories that get told. I certainly found this to be the case when writing my first book, Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780-1840 (University of North Carolina Press 2017). I felt overwhelmed as I weighed the written correspondence, published medical treatises, military records, and plantation records, medical lectures etc. by white physicians, military officers, colonial elites, and slave owners, against the dearth of written sources left behind by enslaved and free black people. Thus, it was a great challenge to construct a narrative using sources whose faithfulness in accounting for black people’s experiences in sickness and health were tenuous to say the least. Given the realities of the archives related to slavery, my approach to research became

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