Biomedical subjects
Roger Cooter
Publications and source records attributed to Roger Cooter.
The rise and decline of the medical member: doctors and Parliament in Edwardian and interwar Britain.
This paper challenges the view that British medical parliamentarians were a rare breed whose limited presence was felt most during the late-Victorian period. Focused on the interwar "movement" for a medical lobby in Parliament, it idenitifies 159 medical candidates (of whom 72 were elected). It traces the motivations of the British Medical Association in promoting this movement, and shows how the BMA's goals were subverted in part by the identity interests and agendas of the medical men and women who sought election. The paper also highlights some of the alternative political strategies that the profession attempted to use to promote its interests. In addition to providing a window on the culture and politics of British medicine in the interwar period, it explains why the place of doctors in the House of Commons cannot be seen as contributing to the emergence of professional society as defined by Harold Perkin.
Of war and epidemics: unnatural couplings, problematic conceptions.
The relationship between war and epidemics is usually cast pathogenically. This article pursues a different perspective: that of the history of the idea of relating wars to epidemics. lt considers how this notion was formulated, deployed, and transformed overtime. The first section reviews prevailing approaches to the war and epidemics dyad, and outlines the reasons for its "denaturalization" within contemporary historical demography. The article then turns to a series of publications between the 1830s and 1940s that sought to make retrospective comparisons between combat deaths and deaths from epidemic diseases during military operations. This tight focus permits some boundary to be drawn around a subject that otherwise easily extends to the whole history of civilization and disease. It enables us to concentrate on the different socio-political and professionalizing contexts within which the "ideal partnership" between war and disease was fashioned, and eventually deposed, in epidemiology. By thus historicizing the relationship, the article contributes to a view of epidemiology and historical epidemiology as socially-constructed discourses. As such, it cautions against borrowing uncritically from the writings of the original framers of the retrospectively fashioned war-and-epidemics couplet - borrowings, arguably, that have served to constrain the imaginative capacities of historians ever since.
In the name of the child beyond.
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The traffic in Victorian bodies: Medicine, literature, and history.
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Historical keywords: bioethics.
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