Travel medicine in Basel - 450 years before CISTM18

Concern for travellers' wellbeing and safety is as old as humankind. Historic documents offer insights into how a safe journey was prepared or travel ailments treated based on the prevailing knowledge of body and (dys)function. In 1561, Guilhelmo Gratarolo published a comprehensive book on what we call today 'travel medicine'. Many then problems are still today's travel malaises. How they were dealt with 450 years ago is uncovered in his fascinating publication.

Contested Tracks to Modernity: Negotiating Narratives at Taiwan's Railway Department Park

This essay looks at the exhibitions of Taipei's Railway Department Park, a museum exhibiting Taiwan's "railway culture." It explores how the history of the island's railway system and the Railway Department as the symbol of modernity have been intricately linked to contested interpretations of Taiwan's history, which is shaped by wars, Japanese imperialism, and Chinese nationalism from the nineteenth century to the present day. It also reviews how the contents of the exhibitions may appeal to the general public, invoking shared memories of railway travel and creating a sense of community in a time when bickering over history has strained relationships among the Taiwanese people.

An Analysis of the United States and United Kingdom Smallpox Epidemics (1901-5) - The Special Relationship that Tested Public Health Strategies for Disease Control

At the end of the nineteenth century, the northern port of Liverpool had become the second largest in the United Kingdom. Fast transatlantic steamers to Boston and other American ports exploited this route, increasing the risk of maritime disease epidemics. The 1901-3 epidemic in Liverpool was the last serious smallpox outbreak in Liverpool and was probably seeded from these maritime contacts, which introduced a milder form of the disease that was more difficult to trace because of its long incubation period and occurrence of undiagnosed cases. The characteristics of these epidemics in Boston and Liverpool are described and compared with outbreaks in New York, Glasgow and London between 1900 and 1903. Public health control strategies, notably medical inspection, quarantine and vaccination, differed between the two countries and in both settings were inconsistently applied, often for commercial reasons or due to public unpopularity. As a result, smaller smallpox epidemics spread out from Liverpool until 1905. This paper analyses factors that contributed to this last serious epidemic using the historical epidemiological data available at that time. Though imperfect, these early public health strategies paved the way for better prevention of imported maritime diseases.

"That crosscountry 1969 vw squareback and holiday inn affair": lesbian mobility

This article argues that lesbian mobility contributed to the development of lesbian identity in North America in the 1960s and 1970s. Drawing primarily on published accounts, it explores the ways in which women achieved and sustained their lesbian identity in part through their access to what cultural geographers term a transportation assemblage or constellation of mobility. This was constituted through the symbolic meaning of mobility for predominantly white women, the existence of new highway networks and Volkswagen vehicles, which were popularized through countercultural branding, and lesbians' embodied experiences of fear and desire.

Spatial constraints on the diffusion of religious innovations: The case of early Christianity in the Roman Empire

Christianity emerged as a small and marginal movement in the first century Palestine and throughout the following three centuries it became highly visible in the whole Mediterranean. Little is known about the mechanisms of spreading innovative ideas in past societies. Here we investigate how well the spread of Christianity can be explained as a diffusive process constrained by physical travel in the Roman Empire. First, we combine a previously established model of the transportation network with city population estimates and evaluate to which extent the spatio-temporal pattern of the spread of Christianity can be explained by static factors. Second, we apply a network-theoretical approach to analyze the spreading process utilizing effective distance. We show that the spread of Christianity in the first two centuries closely follows a gravity-guided diffusion, and is substantially accelerated in the third century. Using the effective distance measure, we are able to suggest the probable path of the spread. Our work demonstrates how the spatio-temporal patterns we observe in the data can be explained using only spatial constraints and urbanization structure of the empire. Our findings also provide a methodological framework to be reused for studying other cultural spreading phenomena.

Travel and professional networks in the origins of Spanish psychiatry

This article examines the importance of travel and professional networks in the origins of Spanish psychiatry. After reviewing the early alienists' Enlightenment predecessors and their therapeutic and professional trajectories, it describes the trips to foreign psychiatric institutions made during the second third of the nineteenth century by a group of exiled Spanish doctors, commissioners and pioneers. Later, as they became more socially, institutionally and professionally established, some figures of Spanish psychological medicine cultivated their connections and international profile by organizing or attending conferences and other scientific events. This case illustrates the important role of international relations and scientific and professional networks in the spread of psychiatric discourses and practices.

Insanity, belonging and citizenship: mentally ill people who went to and/or returned from Europe in the Late Ottoman Era

The Ottoman Empire, which encompassed a vast territory, had several facilities for the protection and treatment of the mentally ill. By the late nineteenth century, some wealthy families had begun to send their patients to mental hospitals in Europe for better treatment. During the same period, the process of repatriation of mental patients who were Ottoman subjects also began. These processes, which resulted in complex bureaucratic measures, later found a place in regulations and laws. The Ottoman Empire had an additional incentive to protect mentally-ill patients during the Second Constitutional Era, when discussions about 'citizenship' reappeared. This article examines the practices of sending mentally-ill people to Europe and the repatriation of mentally-ill Ottoman subjects from European countries.

An eighteenth century travelling theodolite

An old topographic compass displayed in a showroom of the Museu de Astronomia e Ciências Afins (MAST), in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, took our curiosity namely because of its resemblance to a theodolite, described by J.H. de Magellan. Not many things were known about its previous history. From the different documents studied, and the characteristics of this singular theodolite, it must have belonged to the collections of instruments acquired for the Brazilian border demarcations undertaken after the Santo Ildefonso Treaty, agreed to by the Portuguese and Spanish courts in 1777. Several instruments were bought in London, and supervised and chosen by Magellan, the Portuguese instruments expert. We present arguments in favour of this conclusion.

Wilde's worlds: Sir William Wilde in Victorian Ireland

INTRODUCTION

Other contributors to this collection have evoked the disparate worlds inhabited by Sir William Wilde.

AIMS

To provide an overall assessment of his career.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

Looking at the historical conditions that made possible such a career spanning such disparate worlds. Deploying methodologies developed by historians of medicine and sociologists of science, the article brings together Wilde the nineteenth century clinician and Dublin man of science, the Wilde of the Census and of the west of Ireland, William Wilde Victorian medical man and Wilde the Irish medical man-the historian of Irish medical traditions and the biographer of Irish medical men, and William Wilde as an Irish Victorian.

CONCLUSIONS

A variety of close British Isles parallels can be drawn between Wilde and his cohort in the medical elite of Dublin and their clinical peers in Edinburgh and London both in terms of clinical practice and self-presentation and in terms of the social and political challenges facing their respective ancient regime hegemonies in an age of democratic radicalisation. The shared ideological interests of Wilde and his cohort, however, were also challenged by the socio-political particularities and complexities of Ireland during the first half of the nineteenth century culminating in the catastrophe of the Great Famine. William Wilde saw the practice of scientific medicine as offering a means of deliverance from historical catastrophe for Irish society and invoked a specifically Irish scientific and medical tradition going back to the engagement with the condition of Ireland by enlightened medical men in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

[From educational and health tourism for children to social tourism: vacation camps in the Province of Buenos Aires, Argentina]

The early twentieth century saw the rise of vacation camps for frail children as educational and health-giving experiences provided by medical and philanthropic organizations. This article analyzes some of these early experiences, seen here as the predecessors of social tourism, in the Province of Buenos Aires. A combination of written sources are examined, mainly institutional reports, periodicals such as the Monitor de la Educación Común - published by the Consejo Nacional de Educación (National Board of Education) - or laws, with photographs and plans for different examples. I argue that these buildings were both physical and cultural "brands" in the places where they were located, and that their architectural structure encapsulated ideas about leisure space and cures in unique natural environments.

[Portable pharmacies during the 19th century, starting from the example of Reichard' pharmacy in his guided for travelers in Europe (1805)]

The portable pharmacy of Reichard, in his 1805 Guide for travelers in Europe is an example among others of a growing determination to answer the needs of the people to have access to drugs even in absence of health care professionals. One can observe the ultimate result by looking at portable pharmacies offered for sale by companies such as Menier and Pharmacie Centrale de France, but also by individual pharmacists. In spite of favorable changes of health care in all countries during the XXe century, portable pharmacy and kits are still widely proposed for sale, on Internet for example, for frequent diseases, including for pets!

Lord Byron's death: a case of late malarial relapse?

The study examines the pathological circumstances related to Byron's death, the primary issue being malaria. Lord Byron died during the Greek War of Independence against the Ottoman Empire, in Messolonghi on 19 April 1824. Byron's medical profile consists of recurrent onsets of fever, which gave rise to the issue of malaria relapses. According to Byron's letters he reported crises of fever in Greece (1810), Malta (1811), Italy (1817-1819) and England. Evidence from Byron's autopsy, specifically the absence of hepatosplenomegaly, does not support a hypothetical diagnosis of malaria. Nonetheless, the relapsing fevers cannot be ignored and the same applies to the possibility of malaria relapse or re-infection in line with the endemic nature of the Messolonghi area. Our research on the chronologies of Byron's reported fevers found that new attacks occurred at intervals of 540 days on average. Moreover, the most outstanding feature of Plasmodium vivax and Plasmodium ovale is their ability to form dormant forms of hypnozoites in the liver which, when reactivated (110-777 days), cause true relapses of clinical disease. Of course, an ex post facto diagnosis is under debate, because the diagnosis is not clinical but microscopic. Byron's example raises alarm over a current medical problem, i.e. the diagnosis of unexplained fevers, and the need for a detailed travel or immigration history, which will include malaria in the differential diagnosis.

Arctic observers: Richard King, monogenism and the historicisation of Inuit through travel narratives

In 1848 the ethnologist, surgeon and Arctic explorer Richard King (1810-1876) published a three-part series on Inuit in the Journal of the Ethnological Society of London. This series provided a detailed history of Inuit from the eleventh century to the early nineteenth century. It incorporated a mixture of King's personal observations from his experience travelling to the Arctic as a member of George Back's expedition (1833-1835), and the testimonies of other contemporary and historical actors who had written on the subject. The aim was to historicise Inuit through the use of travel reports and show persistent features among the race. King was a monogenist and his sensitive recasting of Inuit was influenced by his participation in a research community actively engaged in humanitarian and abolitionist causes. The physician and ethnologist Thomas Hodgkin (1798-1866) argued that King's research on Inuit was one of the best ethnological approaches to emulate and that it set the standard for the nascent discipline. If we are to take seriously Hodgkin's claim, we should look at how King constructed his depiction of Inuit. There is much to be gained by investigating the practices of nineteenth-century ethnologists because it strengthens our knowledge of the discipline's past and shows how modern understandings of races were formed.

[Epidemics on the sea: migrants journeys in the nineteenth century]

In the nineteenth century travelling by ship became faster due to the introduction of the steam engine. Population growth, economic crises and food shortages forced millions of Italians to consider migration towards the Americas as a real opportunity. Travel conditions on ships and steamers were particularly difficult. People were crammed into dormitories where ventilation was poor, food was insufficient, hygiene was appalling and promiscuity was rife. Under such conditions, epidemics of cholera, typhus and measles were all too likely to develop, but mycobacterium tuberculosis also proliferated. The health authorities attempted to block the spread of epidemics by means of either health licenses - papers certifying good health of the crew and passengers, which had to be exhibited on arrival - or quarantine, involving the ship and all its contents, if infectious diseases were detected or suspicious deaths occurred during the ship's voyage. In this article the particularly unfortunate stories of Italian immigrants, who boarded ships and steamers, are reported. In the second half of the nineteenth century, but also in the first decades of the twentieth, millions of Italians whose aim was to reach the Americas paid a very high price. Italy did not provide acceptable living conditions for millions of farmers and town-dwellers, and migration in search of work was in many cases the only solution. Although many during their sea voyages became ill or died of starvation or infectious diseases, migration, supported by hope, continued.

[Freud in Carinthia. A historical search]

This paper sheds some new light on four visits of Freud to Carinthia between 1898 and 1923. New information from contemporary sources is added to already known facts (patient visit in 1898; encounters with Alban Berg in 1900 and 1907).

The Lourdes medical cures revisited

This article examines the cures recorded in Lourdes, France, between 1858, the year of the Visions, and 1976, the date of the last certified cure of the twentieth century. Initially, the records of cures were crude or nonexistent, and allegations of cures were accepted without question. A Medical Bureau was established in 1883 to examine and certify the cures, and the medical methodology improved steadily in the subsequent years. We discuss the clinical criteria of the cures and the reliability of medical records. Some 1,200 cures were said to have been observed between 1858 and 1889, and about one hundred more each year during the "Golden Age" of Lourdes, 1890-1914. We studied 411 patients cured in 1909-14 and thoroughly reviewed the twenty-five cures acknowledged between 1947 and 1976. No cure has been certified from 1976 through 2006. The Lourdes phenomenon, extraordinary in many respects, still awaits scientific explanation. Lourdes concerns science as well as religion.

Andreas Vesalius--the life

The details of Vesalius' life can be found in Charles O'Malley, Andreas Vesalius of Brussels, 1514-1564, (University of California Press, 1964) and in Stephen N Joffe, Andreas Vesalius: The Making, The Madman, and the Myth, (Persona Publishing, 2009). This session reviews the circumstances of his last voyage and his death and other aspects of his life.

[Cranial surgery in XVIIth century Vienna: a case from Evliya Celebi's Book of Travel]

Book of Travel (Seyâhatnâme) of Evliya Celebi has always been an invaluable resource for history and ethnography researchers. And it is found out via our paper about "neurosurgical operation" that the above mentioned work can be studied for researches concerning the history of medicine. It is seen that Evliya Celebi reports a neurosurgical operation for curing a gunshot wound, and that he is very well aware of medical paradigm of his era. And he reports the situation without departing from the work and the dominant literary language of the work and without passing over the technical details, and he also does not get lost in the details. He also reports all the general stages of the operation by giving all the techniques and methods of his era. This work can also be considered as an evidence for the origins of western medicine and surgery in the east. Because it is observed that eastern scientists such as Ibn Sina and Zehravi have been referenced for the situation the surgeon took care of, the methods the surgeon used and the stages during the operation.

Fat, desire and disgust in the colonial imagination

This article tracks the relatively unexamined ways in which ethnographic, travel and medical knowledge interrelated in the construction of fat stereotypes in the nineteenth century, often plotted along a temporal curve from ‘primitive’ corpulence to ‘civilized’ moderation. By showing how the complementary insights of medicine and ethnography circulated in beauty manuals, weight-loss guides and popular ethnographic books – all of which were aimed at middle-class readers and thus crystallize certain bourgeois attitudes of the time – it argues that the pronounced denigration of fat that emerged in Britain and France by the early twentieth century acquired some of its edge through this ongoing tendency to depict desire for and acceptance of fat as fundamentally ‘savage’ or ‘uncivilized’ traits. This tension between fat and ‘civilization’ was by no means univocal or stable. Rather, this analysis shows, a complex and wide-ranging series of similarities and differences, identifications and refusals can be traced between British and French perceptions of their own bodies and desires and the shortcomings they saw in foreign cultures. It sheds light as well on those aspects of their own societies that seemed ‘primitive’ in ways that bore an uncomfortable similarity to the colonial peoples they governed, demonstrating how a gendered, yet ultimately unstable, double standard was sustained for much of the nineteenth century. Finally it reveals a subtle and persistent racial subtext to the anti-fat discourses that would become more aggressive in the twentieth century and which are ubiquitous today.

Consuming the forest in an environment of crisis: nature tourism, forest conservation and neoliberal agriculture in south India

This article engages ethnographically with the neoliberalization of nature in the spheres of tourism, conservation and agriculture. Drawing on a case study of Wayanad district, Kerala, the article explores a number of themes. First, it shows how a boom in domestic nature tourism is currently transforming Wayanad into a landscape for tourist consumption. Second, it examines how tourism in Wayanad articulates with projects of neoliberalizing forest and wildlife conservation and with their contestations by subaltern groups. Third, it argues that the contemporary commodification of nature in tourism and conservation is intimately related to earlier processes of commodifying nature in agrarian capitalism. Since independence, forest land has been violently appropriated for intensive cash-cropping. Capitalist agrarian change has transformed land into a (fictitious) commodity and produced a fragile and contested frontier of agriculture and wildlife. When agrarian capitalism reached its ecological limits and entered a crisis of accumulation, farming became increasingly speculative, exploring new modes of accumulation in out-of-state ginger cultivation. In this scenario nature and wildlife tourism emerges as a new prospect for accumulation in a post-agrarian economy. The neoliberalization of nature in Wayanad, the authors argue, is a process driven less by new modes of regulation than by the agrarian crisis and new modes of speculative farming.

Visiting the USSR: a trip of a lifetime

To Russia, who me? That is actually how it all began. A decade or more ago, I had the opportunity to visit what was then known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), Russia. Although, this place held high priority on my list of places to go, I never thought such a trip was within my reach. This idea was quite fascinating to me because of the events that did happen there, including the Russian space ship Sputnik and the dog, the high stepping military officers, Red Square and the St. Basil's Cathedral. After reading a lot about Russia, I thought it would be great to see a clean place, where it was unlawful to throw paper on the streets, and ride in public transportation such as the buses, taxis and the subway system, which were immaculately clean. It was an exciting trip, one, I will always remember, but would be a difficult adjustment to make, to live.

Earthsickness: circumnavigation and the terrestrial human body, 1520-1800

From their distinctive experience of going around the world, maritime circumnavigators concluded that their characteristic disease, sea scurvy, must result from their being away from land too long, much longer than any other sailors. They offered their scorbutic bodies as proof that humans were terrestrial creatures, physically suited to the earthly parts of a terraqueous globe. That arresting claim is at odds with the current literature on the cultural implications of European expansion, which has emphasized early modern colonists' and travelers' fear of alien places, and has concluded that they had a small and restricted geographic imagination that fell short of the planetary consciousness associated with the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But circumnavigators did conceive of themselves as actors on a planetary scale, as creatures adapted to all of the land on Earth, not just their places of origin.

Tourism and the Hispanicization of race in Jim Crow Miami, 1945-1965

This article examines how Miami's significant presence of Anglo Caribbean blacks and Spanish-speaking tourists critically influenced the evolution of race relations before and after the watershed 1959 Cuban Revolution. The convergence of people from the American South and North, the Caribbean, and Latin America created a border culture in a city where the influx of Bahamian blacks and Spanish-speakers, especially tourists, had begun to alter the racial landscape. To be sure, Miami had many parallels with other parts of the South in regard to how blackness was understood and enforced by whites during the first half of the twentieth century. However, I argue that the city's post-WWII meteoric tourist growth, along with its emergence as a burgeoning Pan-American metropolis, complicated the traditional southern black-white dichotomy. The purchasing power of Spanish-speaking visitors during the postwar era transformed a tourist economy that had traditionally catered to primarily wealthy white transplanted Northerners. This significant change to the city's tourist industry significantly influenced white civic leaders' decision to occasionally modify Jim Crow practices for Latin American vacationers. In effect, Miami's early Latinization had a profound impact on the established racial order as speaking Spanish became a form of currency that benefited Spanish-speaking tourists—even those of African descent. Paradoxically, this ostensibly peculiar racial climate aided the local struggle by highlighting the idiosyncrasies of Jim Crow while perpetuating the second-class status of native-born blacks.

[Stories of the scientific travels between Strasbourg and Germany in the 19th century]

Appeared in the 19th century, the vogue of the scientific travellings and of the medical congresses led numerous physicians to discover the medical institutions of European countries. Many Alsatian physicians went to the discovery of the medicine and of the hospitals in Germany and central Europa, and then published their travel stories. The German physicians were numerous to go to Paris, and some of them went through Strasbourg to study the medical institutions. From various accounts, the view of physicians from Strasbourg of the Germanic medicine and the German view of the medicine in Strasbourg are presented: in both cases, these impressions illustrate the role of a bridge between France and Germany traditionally played by the Faculty of Medicine in Strasbourg.

Estimation of the tourism climate in the Hunter Region, Australia, in the early twenty-first century

Existing tourism-related climate information and evaluation are typically based on mean monthly conditions of air temperature and precipitation and do not include thermal perception and other climate parameters relevant for tourists. Here, we quantify climate based on the climate facets relevant to tourism (thermal, physical, aesthetical), and apply the results to the Climate-Tourism-Information-Scheme (CTIS). This paper presents bioclimatic and tourism climatological conditions in the Hunter Region-one of Australia's most popular tourist destinations. In the Hunter Region, generally, temperatures below 15°C occur from April through October, temperatures less than 25°C are expected throughout the whole year, while humidity sits around 50%. As expected, large differences between air temperature and physiologically equivalent temperature (PET) were clearly identified. The widest differences were seen in summer time rather than in the winter period. In addition, cold stress was observed less than 10% of the time in winter while around 40-60% of heat stress was observed in summer time. This correlates with the highest numbers of international visitors, who usually seek a warmer weather, at the beginning of summer time (November and December) and also to the number of domestic visitors, who tend to seek cooler places for recreation and leisure, in late summer (January-March). It was concluded that thermal bioclimate assessment such as PET and CTIS can be applied in the Hunter region, and that local governments and the tourism industry should take an integrated approach to providing more relevant weather and climate information for both domestic and international tourists in the near future.

Linnaeans outdoors: the transformative role of studying nature 'on the move' and outside

Travelling is an activity closely associated with Carolus Linnaeus (1707-1778) and his circle of students. This article discusses the transformative role of studying nature outdoors (turning novices into naturalists) in eighteenth-century Sweden, using the little-known journeys of Carl Bäck (1760-1776), Sven Anders Hedin (1750-1821) and Johan Lindwall (1743-1796) as examples. On these journeys, through different parts of Sweden in the 1770s, the outdoors was used, simultaneously, as both a classroom and a space for exploration. The article argues that this multifunctional use of the landscape (common within the Linnaean tradition) encouraged a democratization of the consumption of scientific knowledge and also, to some degree, of its production. More generally, the study also addresses issues of how and why science and scientists travel by discussing how botanical knowledge was reproduced and extended 'on the move', and what got senior and junior students moving.

[The journal of A.V. Humboldt in Spain]

The Spanish diary can surprisingly not be found in his bounded diaries from his American travels, but in a separate folder of his legacy in Berlin, where Humboldt collected material which he wanted to use for his publication about Spain. So it remained undiscovered until recently. Humboldt's notes contain geognostic descriptions as well as his observations about climate, vegetation, electricity of the atmosphere, etc. The comparison with Humboldt's publication of 1825 facilitates to gain insight into his scientific methods.

Archibald Menzies on Albemarle Island, Galápagos archipelago, 7 February 1795

Menzies made the earliest extant botanical collections in the Galápagos; five sheets, representing three endemic species, are known. Menzies's own account of the visit is also extant and is transcribed here from his manuscript journal.

Visualizing "race" in the eighteenth century

This paper looks at the conditions of the emergence of "race" as a new scientific category during the eighteenth century, arguing that two modes of discourse and visualization played a significant role: that on society, civility, and civilization -- as found principally in the travel literature -- and that on nature, as found in natural history writings, especially in botanical classifications. The European colonizing enterprise had resulted in an extensive flow of new objects at every level. Visual representations of these new objects circulated in the European cultural world and were transferred and transformed within travelogue and natural history writings. The nature, boundaries, and potentialities of humankind were discussed in this exchange within the conceptual grid of classifications and their visual representations. Over the course of the century the discourse on society, civility, and civilization collapsed into the discourse on nature. Humans became classified and visually represented along the same lines as flora, according to similar assumptions about visible features. Concurrently, these visible features were related necessarily to bundles of social, civilized, and cognitive characteristics taken from the discourse on society, civility, civilization, as found in the contemporaneous travelogue.

Inventing Caribbean climates: how science, medicine, and tourism changed tropical weather from deadly to healthy

This article examines how four major historical factors--geographical features, social conditions, medicine, and tourism--affected European and North American views of the tropical Caribbean climate from approximately 1750 to 1950. It focuses on the British West Indies, a region barely examined in the historiography of climate, and examines the views of physicians, residents, government officials, travelers, and missionaries. International perceptions of the tropical Caribbean climate shifted markedly over time, from the deadly, disease-ridden environment of colonial depictions in the eighteenth century to one of the world's most iconic climatic paradises, where tourists sought sun-drenched beaches and healing breezes, in the twentieth. This analysis of how environmental conditions, knowledge systems, social relations, politics, and economics shaped scientific and popular understandings of climate contributes to recent studies on the cultural construction of climate. The approach also offers important lessons for present-day discussions of climate change, which often depict climate too narrowly as simply temperature.

Making mobile knowledges. The educational cruises of the Revue Générale des Sciences Pures et Appliquées, 1897-1914

Over the past few years there has been an increasing acknowledgment that all knowledge is "sited knowledge." While place, mobility, and travel have become central issues in the history (and geography) of science, much of the discussion has nevertheless revolved around "formal scientific knowledge." This essay focuses on a specific type of popular "mobile" scientific knowledge making that emerged in the last decades of the nineteenth century: the educational cruise. In particular, it considers a series of voyages d'etude organized by the French scientific periodical Revue Générale des Sciences Pures et Appliquées between 1897 and 1914 that were open to the general public. It examines both the ways and the spaces in which knowledge was produced and the type of knowledge that was produced.

Charles Langmaid (1913-97): the travels of a young ship's surgeon

Charles Langmaid graduated in medicine from the University of Wales in the summer of 1935. Eighteen months later, with the encouragement of Professor Lambert Rogers, Charles decided to embark on a shorter version of what today would be regarded as a 'gap year' by securing a short-term commission as a ship's surgeon, a not uncommon venture for those on the threshold of a medical career. Charles' three-month journey on MV Glengarry to the Far East was recorded meticulously in the form of a diary. While it is clear that Charles's clinical skills were not fully tested during the voyage, he considered the trip 'a most interesting and relaxing experience' that undoubtedly got his distinguished surgical career off to an invigorating start.

Robinson Crusoe: the fate of the British Ulysses

If travel has been one of the leitmotifs of Western imagination, Robinson Crusoe has certainly been one of its foremost incarnations. This British Ulysses foretold the global village, but also its problems. He predicted the end of distance, but also the triumph of isolation and anaesthetized loneliness. This paper provides an overview of the connections between Defoe's narrative and the new science and explores two versions of the story by two contemporary writers, Julio Cortazar and John Maxwell Coetzee.

Sex and sentiment in Cuban tourism

Helen Safa has been a leading program builder and pioneer in research that examines the complex intersections of gender, race, class, and nation in Latin America and the Caribbean. Her comparative research culminated in her influential book, The Myth of the Male Breadwinner: Women and Industrialization in the Caribbean (1995), which examined gender, family, and employment across three Caribbean societies. Over several decades Safa has inspired scholarship throughout the Caribbean and the Americas and her work is exemplary of engaged anthropology in the region. Here I present work I conducted in Cuba that was guided, like my work in Peru, Nicaragua, and southern Mexico by the writings of Safa and others who saw the critical need to bring gender into meaningful discussion in the field of Latin American and Caribbean studies. In what follows, drawn from my broader research on tourism in four nations, I explore and reflect on the contemporary dynamics of sex and romance tourism in Cuba. I suggest that the allure of this domain of tourism may be enhanced by Cuba's global political identity, and that Cuban women participating in commodified and intimate exchanges reveal an ability to get along in a market economy that generally excludes them.