In August, 1880, George Murray Humphry, in his presidential address to the British Medical Association (BMA), called for “collective action” by the country's “eight thousand physicians” to accumulate observations concerning the role of “temperamental, climacteric, and topographical agencies upon disease”. Through participating in organized inquiries, practitioners would “deepen their interest in the science of medicine, and impart the charm of wider usefulness to the daily routine of life”. By December 1881, the BMA had funded a Collective Investigation Committee, which over the next eight years would sponsor nearly a dozen inquiries into the natural history of disease. Beyond Great Britain, Humphry's appeal would launch an international movement for collective investigation, with physicians in Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and the United States following the British example.

This paper analyses how, prior to the work of Sigmund Freud, an understanding of infant and childhood sexuality emerged during the nineteenth century. Key contributors to the debate were Albert Moll, Max Dessoir and others, as fin-de-siècle artists and writers celebrated a sexualised image of the child. By the beginning of the twentieth century, most paediatricians, sexologists, psychologists, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts and pedagogues agreed that sexuality formed part of a child’s ‘normal’ development. This paper argues that the main disagreements in discourses about childhood sexuality related to different interpretations of children’s sexual experiences. On the one hand stood an explanation that argued for a homology between children’s and adults’ sexual experiences, on the other hand was an understanding that suggested that adults and children had distinct and different experiences. Whereas the homological interpretation was favoured by the majority of commentators, including Moll, Freud, and to some extent also by C.G. Jung, the heterological interpretation was supported by a minority, including childhood psychologist Charlotte Bühler.

This special issue adopts a comparative approach to the politics of reproduction in twentieth-century France and Britain. The articles investigate the flow of information, practices and tools across national boundaries and between groups of experts, activists and laypeople. Empirically grounded in medical, news media and feminist sources, as well as ethnographic fieldwork, they reveal the practical similarities that existed between countries with officially different political regimes as well as local differences within the two countries. Taken as a whole, the special issue shows that the border between France and Britain was more porous than is typically apparent from nationally-focused studies: ideas, people and devices travelled in both directions; communication strategies were always able to evade the rule of law; contraceptive practices were surprisingly similar in both countries; and religion loomed large in debates on both sides of the channel.

On 20 July 1870, Catherine Tyrrell found herself transferred to another asylum. The 32-year-old nurse suffering from melancholia had previously been a private patient in Bethlem Hospital; but, having had her twelve months expire at that institution, she was conveyed across the metropolis and into the bucolic countryside and county asylum of Buckinghamshire. Up to this point, Catherine had had a long and sad history of suicide attempts and food refusal. Indeed, when she was transferred the following year, this time from Buckinghamshire to the Surrey County Asylum at Wandsworth, she was listed as “very suicidally disposed”. Now diagnosed as suffering from “mania”, she managed only three months before arriving at her fourth institution in as many years—the Surrey County Asylum at Brookwood. On admission, the medical superintendent described, with transparent disapproval, the precautionary clothing that held her suicidal impulses in check:

She was brought in a canvas garment which fitted her person even down to her ankles, the arms however not going through the sleeves, but being folded across her chest close to her skin, the hands being locked in leather gloves. The jacket or whatever it is called being [fastened] at the back by 5 locks. All this complicated arrangement was immediately removed. There was no clothing of ordinary kind under it.

The introduction and assimilation of chemotherapy to treat pulmonary tuberculosis (TB) during the mid-twentieth century appears at first sight to be a success story dominated by the use of streptomycin in a series of randomised clinical trials run under the auspices of the Medical Research Council (MRC). However, what this standard rhetoric overlooks is the complexity of TB chemotherapy, and the relationship between this and two other ways of treating the disease, bed rest and thoracic surgery. During the late 1940s and 1950s, these three treatment strands overlapped one another, and determining best practice from a plethora of prescribing choices was a difficult task. This article focuses on the clinical decision-making underpinning the evolution of successful treatment for TB using drugs alone. Fears over the risk of streptomycin-resistant organisms entering the community meant that, initially, the clinical application of streptomycin was limited. Combining it with other drugs lessened this risk, but even so the potential of chemotherapy as a curative option for TB was not immediately apparent. The MRC ran a series of clinical trials in the post-war period but not all of their recommendations were adopted by clinicians in the field. Rather, a range of different determinants, including the timing of trials, the time taken for results to emerge, and whether these results ‘fitted’ with individual experience all influenced the translation of trial results into clinical practice.

This article explores crossovers from Eastern philosophy and spirituality to contemporary science and medicine in the West. My interest is not so much in specific lines of historical transmission, as in the channels through which they flow. In particular, my argument is that different ontologies – visions of how the world is – either facilitate or block such exchanges. As an example, think about physics. The ontology of mainstream physics is a modern, dualist one, inasmuch as physical thought revolves around a material world from which anything human is absent, and the human leftovers fall to the humanities and social sciences. This ontology, more or less by definition, blocks any resonance with Eastern ideas or practices, and, accordingly, they are almost entirely absent from the history of physics, except, importantly, in lines of work on the foundations of physics, especially quantum mechanics. If one meditates on the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, for instance, boundaries between the observer and the observed start to unravel, the dualist ontology erodes, and there, indeed, one finds all sorts of resonances with the East, as elaborated in an endless list of books that includes, for example, The Tao of Physics and The Dancing Wu Li Masters. That is my basic idea: resonances with the East spring forth in Western science whenever modern dualism starts to fray around the edges. But this essay is not about physics, and I turn now to the post-war history of cybernetics in Britain and its rather different non-modern ontology.