The admission of children to the Milton Union Workhouse, Kent, 1835-1885

Audrey Perkyns is a retired teacher, formerly of Rainham in Kent but now living in Northumberland. She has been a regular contributor to LPS over the years, and retains an active interest in nineteenth-century Kentish demographic and social history.

"Be receptive to the good earth": health, nature, and labor in countercultural back-to-the-land settlements

Modern environmental activists unified behind calls for a change in how humans understood their relationships with nature. Yet they approached their concerns through a variety of historical lenses. Countering arguments that suggest environmentalism had its deepest roots in outdoor leisure, the countercultural back-to-the-land movement turned to a markedly American practice of pastoral mythmaking that held rural life and labor as counter to the urban-industrial condition. Counterculturalists relied specifically on notions of simple work in rural collective endeavors as the means to producing a healthy body and environment. Yet the individuals who went back-to-the-land often failed to remedy conflicts that arose as they attempted to abandon American consumer practices and take up a "primitive" and down-to-early pastoral existence. Contact with rural nature time and again translated to physical maladies, impoverishment, and community clashes in many rural countercultural communes. As the back-to-the-land encounter faded, the greater movement's ethos did not disappear. Counterculturalists used the consumption of nature through rural labor as a fundamental idea in a growing cooperative food movement. The back-to-the-land belief in the connection between healthy bodies, environments, and a collective identity helped to expand a new form of consumer environmentalism.

Rural poverty reduction through centrally sponsored schemes

This paper discusses the evolving profile of poverty in India and reviews the national performance of selected anti-poverty programmes between 1997-1998 and 2005. For each programme, it outlines the budgetary allocation principle used for the States and districts and analyzes budgetary performance over the period. The main objective is to explore the extent to which the anti-poverty programmes are reaching their target groups effectively. Finally, it identifies the specific factors responsible for under-performance and provides a set of recommendations for policy makers and programme implementers which could help improve the outcomes of the schemes.

Poverty nutrition linkages

At the time of independence majority of Indians were poor. In spite of spending over 80 per cent of their income on food, they could not get adequate food. Living in areas of poor environmental sanitation they had high morbidity due to infections; nutrition toll due to infections was high because of poor access to health care. As a result, majority of Indians especially children were undernourished. The country initiated programmes to improve economic growth, reduce poverty, improve household food security and nutritional status of its citizens, especially women and children. India defined poverty on the basis of calorie requirement and focused its attention on providing subsidized food and essential services to people below poverty line. After a period of slow but steady economic growth, the last decade witnessed acceleration of economic growth. India is now one of the fastest growing economies in the world with gross domestic product (GDP) growth over 8 per cent. There has been a steady but slow decline in poverty; but last decade's rapid economic growth did not translate in to rapid decline in poverty. In 1970s, country became self sufficient in food production; adequate buffer stocks have been built up. Poor had access to subsidized food through the public distribution system. As a result, famines have been eliminated, though pockets of food scarcity still existed. Over the years there has been a decline in household expenditure on food due to availability of food grains at low cost but energy intake has declined except among for the poor. In spite of unaltered/declining energy intake there has been some reduction in undernutrition and increase in overnutrition in adults. This is most probably due to reduction in physical activity. Under the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) programme food supplements are being provided to children, pregnant and lactating women in the entire country. In spite of these, low birth weight rates are still over 30 per cent and about half the children are undernourished. While poverty and mortality rates came down by 50 per cent, fertility rate by 40 per cent, the reduction in undernutrition in children is only 20 per cent. National surveys indicate that a third of the children from high income group who have not experienced any deprivations are undernourished. The high undernutrition rates among children appears to be mainly due to high low birthweight rates, poor infant and young child feeding and caring practices. At the other end of the spectrum, surveys in school children from high income groups indicate that between 10-20 per cent are overnourished; the major factor responsible appears to be reduction in physical activity. Some aspects of the rapidly changing, complex relationship between economic status, poverty, dietary intake, nutritional and health status are explored in this review.

'Because of poverty brought into hospital: ...' A casenote-based analysis of the changing role of the Edinburgh Royal Maternity Hospital, 1850-1912

Although the shift from a social to a medical function which occurred in nineteenth-century general hospitals has been explored, the occurrence of such a change in maternity hospitals has not been considered. Recent analyses of such institutions have examined particular aspects only, and thus give a somewhat static picture. This paper uses analysis of patient records (themselves an under-exploited resource) to explore the changing function of the Edinburgh Royal Maternity Hospital from a provider of shelter during childbirth to the destitute to a source of skilled medical care. It concludes that, although the Hospital had adopted the outward features of a medical institution by 1890, its casebooks suggest that its purpose only decisively changed in the early twentieth century, and thus can perhaps be more appropriately linked with national anxiety regarding the health of babies and their mothers.

The discovery of southern childhoods: psychology and the transformation of schooling in the Jim Crow South

Although the psychology of race in America has been the subject of significant research, psychological science in the principal region of racial interaction before Brown v. Board of Education-the South--has received little attention. This article argues that the introduction of psychological ideas about children by means of school reform in the South during the half-century before the Brown decision established a cultural foundation for both Black resistance to segregated schools and White determination to preserve them. In 1900, southern children and their schools were an afterthought in a culture more committed to tradition and racial stability than innovation and individual achievement. The advent of northern philanthropy, however, brought with it a new psychology of childhood. Although the reformers did not intend to subvert segregation, their premises downplayed natural endowment, including racial inheritance, and favored concepts highlighting nurture: that personality is developmental, childhood foundational, and adversity detrimental. Decades of discussion of children in their learning environment gave southern Blacks a rationale for protest and Whites a logical defense for conservative reaction.

The (un)dress of the mad poor in England, c.1650-1850. Part 2

The second part of this paper assesses how far the dominant imagery of the (un)dress of the mad poor, found in the literary, medical and representational sources discussed in Part 1, corresponds with actual conditions and provisions for the poor insane as revealed in institutional and documentary sources. This is necessarily attempted through a selective sample of sources, in particular clothing procurement for the poor insane as chronicled in parochial records. More especially, the documentary accuracy of prevailing cultural representations is assessed through a case study of the records of Bethlehem (or 'Bedlam'/Bethlem) Hospital, the archetypal English madhouse.

Variations in the official prevalence and disposal of the insane in England under the poor law, 1850-1900

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, the vast majority of those recognized as insane were pauper insane. The local poor law officials and magistrates determined who was regarded as one of the pauper insane and what happened to them. This paper shows that there was considerable variation across England in the proportion of the population regarded as insane. Although most of the insane were committed to an asylum, a substantial minority (20-25%) were retained in the workhouse, and there was also considerable variation in the numbers dealt with in this way. Contrary to views expressed at the time and more recently, areas with higher levels of industrialization did not have higher rates of insanity. In fact the trend was definitely in the reverse direction. The factors that influenced the poor law authorities to retain the insane in the workhouse did not appear to be the additional expense of asylum care or the availability of beds in local asylums. The majority of the insane retained in the workhouse were idiots and imbeciles rather than lunatics, although some workhouses contained considerable numbers of the latter. The management of the insane in the workhouse was generally poor.

The (un)dress of the mad poor in England, c.1650-1850. Part 1

Part 1 of this paper discusses the representation of the mad poor in literature and (to a lesser extent) art, emphasizing how commonly they are found in states of undress. It delineates the meanings behind such portrayals, arguing that the mad were thus displayed: (a) to signify their putative intellectual/ moral degradation, irrationality and 'otherness', and to designate them as an ontologically distinct (and inferior) species of person; (b) to denote their animality/childishness, and their proximity to Nature; (c) to reflect perceived phenomenological realities, such as that the mad were innately prone to denudation, and to tearing or destroying their clothes; and (d) as a direct appeal to charity and relief, and as a sign of their personal neglect (of decency/social codes) or neglect by others. It additionally explores medical representations and explanations of the (un)dress of the insane, before (in Part 2) comparing such representations with actual clothing provision for the mad as recorded in parochial and institutional records.

Tore Godal: pragmatic opportunist championing global public health

Recently retired as head of the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI) secretariat and as a health advisor to leading global entities, Tore Godal is now a Special Advisor to the Norwegian Prime Minister. He is nevertheless continuing to fight for better global health, cogently articulating the needs of the world's poor and disadvantaged. He is a leading leprosy expert, ex-director of the world's premier agency for research and training in tropical diseases, instigator and prime mover of some global innovative public-private health sector partnerships, adept fund mobilizer, and advocate of the 'let's get it done' school of leadership. Few individuals are, therefore, more experienced or better suited for such a crucial and much-needed role.

Social disadvantages in childhood and risk of all-cause death and cardiovascular disease in later life: a comparison of historical and retrospective childhood information

BACKGROUND

Childhood socioeconomic circumstances have been shown to contribute to adult mortality. The purpose of this study was to compare the association between objective historical records and recalled questionnaire-based information on childhood socioeconomic position (SEP) with regard to cardiovascular and all-cause mortality.

METHODS

We examined the association between a socially disadvantaged childhood and all-cause mortality, cardiovascular disease (CVD) mortality, coronary heart disease (CHD) mortality, and acute coronary events among male participants in the Kuopio Ischemic Heart Disease (KIHD) Risk Factor Study, a population-based cohort study in eastern Finland with follow-up until 2002. The historical data on childhood factors were collected from school health records (n = 698), mainly from the 1930s to the 1950s. Recall data on socioeconomic conditions in childhood were obtained from the baseline examinations of the KIHD cohort (n = 2,682) in 1984-89.

RESULTS

According to original school health records the men who were socially disadvantaged in childhood had a 1.41-fold (95% confidence interval 1.01-1.97) age-adjusted and examination-year-adjusted risk of all-cause death, a 1.32-fold (0.83-2.11) risk of CVD death, a 1.48-fold (0.85-2.57) risk of CHD death, and a 1.50-fold (1.02-2.20) risk of acute coronary events. After adjustment for biological and behavioural risk factors and for the SEP in adulthood the association was attenuated in all-cause death but did not change in CVD death, CHD death, and acute coronary events. On the contrary, the questionnaire-based recalled childhood data on childhood SEP showed no associations with mortality or acute coronary events.

CONCLUSIONS

With regard to adult mortality, the use of historical records concerning hygiene and living conditions collected in childhood may either provide more accurate measures of early-life socioeconomic conditions or capture more relevant aspects of childhood socioeconomic disadvantage than retrospective recall data.

Health, human rights, and malaria control: historical background and current challenges

Malaria, a parasitic infection, causes hundreds of millions of disease episodes and more than a million deaths every year, nearly all of them occurring in the poorer and more vulnerable sectors of the world's developing countries. In spite of the great burden of suffering caused by malaria, the human rights implications of this disease have not been well described. This article summarizes important associations between the spread of malaria and human rights abuses (such as those associated with slavery and armed conflict) and between poverty, socio-economic inequity, and access to malaria-control measures. The author concludes that malaria control merits inclusion as a core element in global strategies to achieve progressive realization of the right to health.