Category: Healthcare
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Will Africa be included in a global history of Covid-19?
ANNA ADIMA Over a year into the Covid-19 pandemic, one would be hard-pressed to deny that future history books will record this as a global milestone in the 21st century. Every individual around the world has in some way been affected by the virus; however, mainstream – Western – media remains guilty of underreporting the pandemic…
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Lacquer as Art and Medicinal Material in Early Modern England
CHENG HE Look up the word ‘lacquer’ in an art dictionary, or on Google, and you usually find the word ‘varnish’; a sticky liquid applied to the surface of objects to form a shiny coating. The word can also refer to the objects coated with varnish themselves, which are sometimes decorated with additional materials like…
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Feeling Sickness: Emotional responses to pandemic diseases
DR MONICA O’BRIEN It’s a wintery afternoon and, once again, I’m scrolling through news articles about Covid-19. Since countries entered their first lockdowns, much has been written on the pandemic’s emotional and psychological impacts. Loss, loneliness, fear, stress, anger; these emotions figure prominently in many narratives of the pandemic. It seems that emotional consequences will…
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Lucy Jane Santos’ ‘Half Lives: The Unlikely History of Radium’
Lucy Jane Santos In the late 19th century that Wilhelm Röntgen discovered a previously unknown form of powerful radiation that was invisible to the human eye. This type of ray, which no one (including Röntgen) fully understood at the time, was so mysterious that he simply named it ‘X’. In 1896, working from Röntgen’s findings,…
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Worrying about the Field of the History of Emotions in Ireland – A report
Sara Honarmand Ebrahimi Back in November, when the world was still in a relatively ‘normal’ state, I asked Dr Hannah Parker about the possibly of writing a report for the new History website concerning a series of events I was organising under the title, “Worrying about the Field of the History of Emotions in Ireland”.…
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Emotions and Work: an interview with Agnes Arnold-Forster and Alison moulds
In November 2019, Agnes Arnold-Forster and Alison Moulds held ‘Emotions and Work’, a day-long conference funded by the Royal Historical Society and the Wellcome Trust via the Living with Feeling Project at QMUL, exploring the troubled relationship between emotions and labour, and considering how frameworks and methodologies of the history of emotions can be critically…
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Hospitals for All?
Barry Doyle As the nation struggles with the most pervasive health crisis for one hundred years, the central role of hospitals as community resources for all, irrespective of residence, nationality or ethnic background, is obvious. Today we would expect patients to be treated solely on medical need. Yet in the interwar period, an era of…