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Promoted ContentScience & MathematicsApril 2021
Medicalising borders
Selection, containment and quarantine since 1800
by Sevasti Trubeta, Christian Promitzer, Paul Weindling, Hastings Donnan
The research of pandemics, epidemics, and pathogens like COVID-19 reaches far beyond the scope of biomedicine. It is not only an objective for the health, political and social sciences, but epidemics and pandemics are a matter of geography: foci and vectors of communicable diseases continue to test the efficacy of medical control at state borders. This volume illuminates these issues from various disciplinary viewpoints. It starts by exploring historical models of quarantine, spatial isolation and detention as precautionary means against the dissemination of disease and contagion by border crossers, migrants and refugees. Besides the patterns of prejudice with which these groups are confronted, the book also deals with various kinds of fear of contamination from outside of the nation state. The contributors address the implementation of medical techniques at state borders in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, as well as the presently practiced measures of medical and biometric screening of migrants and refugees. Uniquely, this volume shows that the current border security regimes of Western states exhibit a high share of medicalised techniques of power, which originate both in European modernity and in the medical and biological disciplines developed during the last quarter of the millennium. Drawing on the collective expertise of a network of international researchers, this interdisciplinary volume is essential reading for those wishing to understand the medicalisation of borders across the globe, from the early eighteenth century up to the present day.
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Promoted ContentHumanities & Social SciencesAugust 2023
Spectacles and the Victorians
Measuring, defining and shaping visual capacity
by Gemma Almond-Brown
This is the first full-length study of spectacles in the Victorian period. It examines how the Victorians shaped our understanding of functional visual capacity and the concept of 20:20 vision. Demonstrating how this unique assistive device can connect the histories of medicine, technology and disability, it charts how technology has influenced our understanding of sensory perception, both through the diagnostic methods used to measure visual impairment and the utility of spectacles to ameliorate its effects. Taking a material culture approach, the book assesses how the design of spectacles thwarted ophthalmologists' attempts to medicalise their distribution and use, as well as creating a mainstream marketable device on the high street.
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Trusted PartnerScience & MathematicsNovember 2023
Medicalising borders
by Sevasti Trubeta, Christian Promitzer, Paul Weindling
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Trusted PartnerMedicineSeptember 2022
Alcohol, psychiatry and society
by Waltraud Ernst, Thomas Müller, David Cantor