School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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Item'Survival of the fittest in contraceptives': charting the British Family Planning Association's scientific and medical efforts to standardise contraception, 1920-1969( 2017)This thesis argues that the Family Planning Association (FPA), its predecessor the National Birth Control Association (NBCA), and affiliated societies and groups, developed and shared an ideology during the 1920s that supported the scientific legitimisation and standardisation of contraceptives as a result of sexological, medical and scientific advances that made the matter a viable research concern. In addition they worked toward perfecting their methodology throughout the next decade in order to pass their regulatory responsibilities to the medical profession and government as soon as was viable. To achieve this scientists in Scotland and Oxford were commissioned to develop a replicable qualitative technique to assess the efficacy and safety of available spermicidal products. Once convinced this had been achieved, the NBCA developed and published an annual approved list of contraceptives, which was touted as a definitive register of effective contraceptive devices and compounds sold in Britain. They then convinced the majority of local contraceptive manufacturers that gaining NBCA/FPA approval, through passing their standard tests and having products appointed to the list, would be fiscally practicable, as the Association increasingly dominated public support and custom through their contraceptive clinics, and eventually aimed to be considered the arbiter of contraceptive products and advice in Britain. The NBCA/FPA recruited physicians and scientists to undertake clinical and research work to implement and increasingly raise contraceptive standards. Clinical trials were initiated from the early 1930s to investigate product safety, effectiveness, quality, ease of use, and acceptability to users, and were increasingly employed to regulate products that passed approved list quality testing. Further, the Association introduced a regulated universally applicable clinical procedure, and standardised record keeping, developing and implementing patient case cards and standardised equipment and dressings in Association clinics. This ensured medical and lay machinations of Association clinics were effectively identical throughout the United Kingdom as the century progressed. The gaining and sharing of sexual and contraceptive expertise framed scientifically and medically, offered the NBCA/FPA a means to standardise another aspect of contraception. The Association’s medical and administrative staff grasped that if they could fill gaps in sexual, physiological and contraceptive knowledge, they would be able to formulate and direct lay and medical training in those areas. This was achieved through the introduction and refinement of a medical training curriculum for doctors and nurses, the setting of educational standards for contraceptive clinic medical staff, and the introduction of public lectures and marital and sexual guidance courses. The success of the medicalised regulatory aspirations of the NBCA/FPA is apparent in the British experience of oral contraceptives in their first decade. The Association was by 1960 seen as the arbiter of safety and efficiency, and in that capacity founded a specialised research body, the Council for the Investigation of Fertility Control. The Council, in collaboration with the medical profession and health authorities, developed and implemented large-scale chemical and animal trials of oral contraceptive preparations before they would consider human clinical and acceptability trials. Their scientific and medical authority allowed them to stagger the release of oral contraceptives, until means were developed for their regulation, as per the standards applied to all other contraceptives issued by FPA clinics, which dominated the contraceptive landscape of Britain at the close of the 1960s.
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ItemCraft to applied science : the Institution of Civil Engineers, London and the development of scientific civil engineering in Britain, 1818-1880( 1996)This thesis examines civil engineering practitioners and practice in Britain in middle part of the nineteenth century. The background and education of a sample of the engineers of the period, who were members of the Institution of Civil Engineers, London, have been determined from the published records of that Institution. This showed, contrary to what has been commonly believed, that civil engineers were drawn from the middle and upper strata of society. They were well educated for the time. Many had advanced schooling, and almost a quarter of them has some university education. The technical papers on civil engineering subjects were also examined over the period from when they commenced publication in 1837 to 1880 to assess any change that may have taken place in the way the engineers approached their problems by adopting or adapting techniques developed in areas of science to their task so as to turn engineering towards applied science. This examination had to be restricted to a few representative areas of civil engineering activity, and structural design, hydrology and hydraulics, foundations and stability of slopes, materials and railway construction were taken as being fairly representative of the range of tasks faced by civil engineers. This study showed a slow and erratic movement towards embracing "scientific methods" into engineering practice. It became established in the field of structural design, but hardly impacted on the approach to railway permanent way or design, or in the area of foundations and slope stability. There were moves however in all areas. Interestingly these moves were generally led by members who had a university training. Their names appear in many of the areas studied indicating they made a significant contribution to shifting engineering towards applied science.
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ItemAn unreasonable profession : spiritualism and mediumship between the wars in Britain( 1996)In the latter half of the nineteenth century, Spiritualist claims that the dead survive in another world and communicate with the living became a subject of heated debate within English society. Originating in America in the eighteen-forties, Spiritualism found ready converts in England. By 1870, many periodicals were devoted to chronicling the activities of believers, while newspaper articles, church sermons and scientific reports issued a stream of diverse interpretations to a fascinated audience. Spiritualism has become a subject of lively historical interest in recent times, but most historians assume that it was a Victorian and Edwardian phenomenon, with little relevance in post World War I Britain. I began this study with similar assumptions, but as my research progressed, it became clear that the number of people who identified as Spiritualists grew in the interwar years and that Spiritualism was as controversial during this period as in the previous century. In sketching its passage and growth between the wars, I emphasise Spiritualism's ability to absorb and organise both modem and ancient tropes. As the movement continued to gain in popularity the debate over its meaning and possibilities for humankind grew apace. At the centre of these controversies stood the figure of the medium. The mediumistic persona was constructed inside and outside the Spiritualist movement as feminine. This project engages with issues of gender, subjectivity and power in relation to the development of the mediumistic identity. In doing so I stress the profound ambiguity of that identity. The medium, as represented through diverse narratives, appeared as both subject and object, the source of truth and lies, and the mother of life and death. It was always unclear whether she was psychically gifted or demented, or whether she intended to harm or heal. Confronted with opposing narratives, a coherent sense of "self' was not easily achieved by a medium. Ultimately, this study attempts to show that the mediumistic "self' was never a stable result of private conviction, but a deeply unstable and continually shifting production that developed within particular historical circumstances
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ItemThe early Royal Society of London( 1989)The Early Royal Society of London - Alan B. H. Taylor This thesis examines the factors that influenced the Royal Society from c1663 to c1681. Included in these factors are the approaches to knowing of the time and the background intellectual beliefs from which they were derived, as well as the Society's administration, its activities and its approaches The findings of this thesis are that the classical intellectual framework played an influential role, as did the administration' of the Society, in its operations, also it is claimed that the Fellows of the Royal Society did not achieve their plans to conduct the investigations carried out at the Society in a Baconian style. I commence this work with an evaluation of the historical methods employed by writers on the Royal Society to date. In section one the emphasis of the writing is on the influence of the classical inteIlectual structure (in contrast to its content) on influential thinkers of the time. The section commences with the argument that the classical structure was implanted at Oxford and Cambridge in the thoughts of its students. Included in this chapter is a list of the influential Fellows of the Royal Society showing those who attended Oxford and Cambridge. These Fellows listed are assigned a weighting according to their degree of activity in the Society. An examination is made in subsequent chapters of the influence of the classical framework on Bacon, Harvey and Hooke. Included in the latter is the point that Hooke believed he could use the processes of analysis and synthesis as part of a process of discovery. Finally in this section the approaches to knowing of a mystic and a non-mystic are contrasted and the commoalities and differences highlighted. Again the classical framework is shown to be of influence. With the above as a background an evaluation is then carried out of the administration, approaches and activities of the Royal Society. Initially the focus is on the intended administration and approach of the Society. The claim is made that the Society's intention was to empirically evaluate all claims to knowing, both those made in the past and in the future. The Fellows were not against the teachings of Aristotle per se but were opposed to the blind acceptance of any claims on the basis of authority The planned administration and approach of the Royal Society, as will be shown in subsequent chapters, were of considerable influence on the day-to-day operations of the Society. In the following chapters, which cover the periods spanned by the years 1663, 1672 and 1680, the fortunes of the above facets of the Society's existence are addressed. It is argued that although initially the Society planned to conduct its operations in a Baconian style, this did not eventuate. The Society moved from its putative goal of initiating and conducting co-operative research to being an institution that reacted to and facilitated the contributions of its members. Nonetheless it is shown that in 1680 the Fellows did conduct a co-operative investigation, and investigation in which the Fellows placed theory first propounded by Hooke. In the approaches to knowing that are carried out under the Society's auspices the debt to the classical framework is most revealed in the episode of Newton's theory of colour and in the process of analysis, with its classical connotations, in the above mentioned 1680 investigation. Also discussed is the style of reporting that the Fellows employed in the investigations carried out at the Society and in the journals. It is argued that the Philosophical Transactions and the Philosophical Collections did not reflect the activities carried out at the Society.
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ItemFactory girls: gender, empire and the making of a female working class, Melbourne and London, 1880-1920( 2007)Between 1880 and 1920, something remarkable happened among the women and girls who worked in the factories of the British Empire. From being universally represented as the powerless victims of industrial capitalism, women factory workers in the cities of Melbourne and London burst onto the stage of history, as bold, disciplined and steadfast activists and demanded their rights, not merely as the equals of working-class men, but as the equals of ladies. The proletarian counterpart of that other subversive fin de siecle type, New Woman, the factory girl became visible at a time when the nature of femininity was being hotly contested, and coincided with the growing militancy of the organised working-class. Her presence in the streets, economic autonomy and love affair with the new mass culture, represented a radical challenge to conventional bourgeois ideas of how women should behave. Her emergence as a new social actor also coincided with a crisis of confidence in Empire, radical disillusionment with the project of modernity and a growing unease about the consequences of urban poverty. As middle-class anxieties proliferated, so surveillance of the factory girl intensified. In this way, female factory workers came under the scrutiny of missionaries, medical men, demographers, social workers, socialists and sociologists. This study traces the role of female factory workers in the emergence of a transnational movement for working-class women's rights. As more women entered the factories in search of independence, their shared experience of exploitation emboldened and empowered them to demand more. During this period, increasing numbers of female factory workers in both cities thus confounded the stereotype of female workers as submissive, shallow and innately conservative, by organising and winning strikes and forming unions of their own. Such explosions of militancy broke down trade unionist prejudice against women workers and laid the foundations of solidarity with male unionists. They also forged of a new model of working-class femininity; based not on the pale imitation of gentility, but one which expressed a profoundly modern sensibility. In the process, women workers fashioned a new political culture which articulated their common interests, and shared identity, as members of a female working class. Yet the rise of working-women's militancy also coincided with the mature articulation of a racialised labourism and the rise of male breadwinner regimes. As the white populations of Empire were re-configured as one race with a common imperial destiny, the corresponding preoccupation with the white settler birth rate, increased hostility and suspicion of women workers. The first decades of the twentieth century thus saw the solidification of a regulatory apparatus which sought to police and discipline young working women in preparing them for their racial destiny as mothers. The contemporaneous demand of the labour movement for a family wage worked to further marginalise wage-earning women, and ultimately reinforced the sexual division of labour.
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ItemNot just routine nursing: the roles and skills of the Australian Army Nursing Service during World War 1( 2006)This comparative labour history seeks to reveal the working life and nursing practices of female military nurses I the Australian Army Nursing Service (AANS) during this period, and to highlight the importance of trained female professionals in caring for soldiers within many allied medical services. Official histories concern themselves with the logistics and administrative arrangements for the AANS rather than discussing the elements of hands-on nursing, and secondary sources tend to highlight the travel adventures of, and the impact of war on, the nurses themselves. Through a detailed examination of archival sources, this thesis explores the development of the AANS’s roles and skills from a military perspective. From an examination of pre-war civilian nursing, it explores in detail the impact of foreign physical environments, other allied personnel and systems, the military itself and war diseases and injuries on nursing work. While A.G. Butler, the official medical historian, may have thought that work in Australia hospitals in France was ‘routine’, this study explores the many events such as the ebb and flow of war that make military nursing different to civilian nursing. Australian army nurses did not limit their war work to nursing care. The exigencies of war expanded the scope of nursing into medical, military and non-nursing roles. The AANS performed military administrative roles such as Orderly Officer and in known roles such as that of Home Sister, now transformed into something akin to a hotel manager. They took on medical roles such as anaesthetist and assistant surgeon. Often providing the only female presence to soldiers who had been at the front for months, they also provided important mental comfort, moral support and friendship. In many cases, the expansion of their roles, skills and authority helped them to save more lives. During World War I, military nurses formally became part of the Australian military system for the first time. In doing so, they created a recognized niche for future military nurses.
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ItemPrivate diseases in public discourse: venereal disease in Victorian society, culture and imagination( 1999)In this thesis I explore the construction of knowledge about venereal disease in Victorian Britain through many different texts and by many authors. I wish to examine how this knowledge was constituted through the disparate discourses of activists, politicians, and doctors, and was not to be found in one discourse, but in many. This knowledge was also mediated by issues of class, race and gender and these texts suggest the ways in which such cultural constructs cohere around the symbol of venereal disease. I have argued that the definition of the social and cultural meanings of venereal diseases, particularly syphilis and gonorrhoea, was not in the control of either the official public discourse of parliament or the medical profession. Both of these bodies contributed to the meanings which attached to venereal disease in this period, but they were only two of the actors in this epistemological process. Activists campaigning for the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts, social purity campaigners, feminist novelists, 'quack' doctors, socialists and pornographers, contributed to the social and cultural definitions of venereal disease. Concern over venereal disease was reawakened in the 1850s and 1860s, coinciding with the rise of interest in public health and public health legislation. Through the second half of the nineteenth century venereal disease was used by numerous groups with very different social, political, cultural and sexual concerns. The anti-Contagious Diseases Acts campaigners used venereal disease to talk about sexuality and morality publicly. The New Woman novelists of the 1880s and 18908, as well as a variety of social reformers mostly associated with the left, used venereal disease to question the existing patriarchal order and to voice concerns over issues of masculinity and male sexuality, marriage and women's political representation. In the 1890s and the early twentieth century venereal disease played a significant role in shaping fears over the degeneration of the British race and the future viability of the Empire. This thesis shows that the knowledge and discourse of and around venereal diseases in the nineteenth century was a contested terrain shaped by many diverse agencies.