Christine Hamlin
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 128015 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Christine Hamlin |
| NOMBRES | Christine |
| APELLIDO | Hamlin |
| FIRMA | HAMLIN C |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Notre Dame |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2554-3995 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 64 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 192 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 64 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1978 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 7 |
The Cambridge History of the Papacy
Historically, the papacy has had – and continues to have – significant and sustained influence on society and culture. In the contemporary world, this influence is felt far afield from the traditional geographic and cultural center of papal authority in western Europe, notably in the Global South. Volume 3 frames questions around the papacy's cultural influence, focusing on the influence that successive popes and various vectors of papal authorit…
The “Best of All Breathing”
Politics, ideology, and medical theory
An interview with Christopher Hamlin in November 2020 in which he explains how he became interested in the history of public health. He talks about the outcomes of epidemics, the relationship between trust in science and moral imagination, why historians use previous public health experiences to think about the present, the role of discipline and ideology in problem-solving arrangements to deal with public health issues, and his new article on le…
So Who Cares? Taking Livingston out of Africa
Previous articleNext article FreeSo Who Cares? Taking Livingston out of AfricaChristopher HamlinChristopher HamlinUniversity of Notre Dame Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreHistorians don’t have on-off switches. A studier of epidemics can’t help reading the present as a chronicle, supplement…
A new method for investigating the relationship between diet and mortality
Background: The population of Roman Britain are renowned for having elevated nitrogen (δ 15 ) stable isotope values, which have been interpreted as evidence for the increased consumption of marine products. However, such results are now understood to also reflect episodes of stress and disease, suggesting that new interpretations are warranted. Aim: To test a novel approach which combines hazard mortality analysis and stable isotope data to deter…
The Pedagogical Roots of the History of Science
This essay examines the rise and fall of Harvard president James Bryant Conant's postwar vision for history of science-based general science education. As well as developing the foundations of Conant's vision, it considers the tension between Conant's science pedagogy-centered view of the history of science and the claims of George Sarton and I. B. Cohen that the field was a distinct discipline. It relates these themes to Conant's unease with the…
Eloge
Malaria and the Decline of Ancient Greece
Urban–rural differences in R oman D orset, E ngland
In the Roman period, urban and rural ways of living were differentiated philosophically and legally, and this is the first regional study of these contrasting life‐ways. Focusing on frailty and mortality risk, we investigated how these differed by age, sex, and status, using coffin type as a proxy for social status. We employed skeletal data from 344 individuals: 150 rural and 194 urban (1st–5th centuries A.D.) from Dorset, England. Frailty and m…
The Dawn of Green
Reviewed by: The Dawn of Green: Manchester, Thirlmere, and Modern Environmentalism by Harriet Ritvo Christopher Hamlin (bio) The Dawn of Green: Manchester, Thirlmere, and Modern Environmentalism. By Harriet Ritvo. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Pp. viii+238. $18. The Dawn of Green narrates Manchester’s acquisition of Thirlmere, in the English Lake District, as its primary reservoir at the end of the nineteenth century. Harriet Ritvo …
Roads to Power
Nuisances and community in mid-Victorian England
Forensic cultures in historical perspective
The Cholera Stigma and the Challenge of Interdisciplinary Epistemology
For a century and a half cholera has been a stigmatizing disease. That the entire world was susceptible to it seemed merely to accentuate its association with Asia, and particularly with Bengal and its people. The recent epidemic in Haiti suggests that cholera still carries stigma. That stigma is the product of epistemic practices within an interdisciplinary and orientalist cholera science that took shape in the 1860s and 1870s, which have, witho…
IAN Miller. A Modern History of the Stomach
Ian Miller's brief book traces a series of medical reconceptualizations of the ills of the stomach within British medicine in the century and a half after 1800. While, as Miller recognizes, mysterious aches and upsets of the abdomen have often been a mainstay of general medical practice, they—and sporadic or chronic constitutional conditions in general—have often been overlooked in a history of medicine preoccupied with infectious diseases. Mille…
A regional investigation of subadult dietary patterns and health in late Iron Age and Roman Dorset, England
Bacteriology as a Cultural System
A cultural system in two senses, bacteriology is underrepresented in the history and philosophy of science (significantly, however, it was the home science of the great prophet of underdetermination, Ludwik Fleck).1 Pasteur and Koch garner attention, but more as founders than practitioners.2 A quarter century ago, in 1987, Olga Amsterdamska called attention to the peculiarity of the enterprise, a biomedical praxis tied only loosely to natural his…
Temporal changes in diet
CHOLERA Forcing” The Myth of the Good Epidemic and the Coming of Good Water
It has been frequently claimed that cholera epidemics, both in the 19th century and today, were and can be the key stimulus for procurement of safe water and sanitation, an idea that I call “cholera forcing.” “Technology forcing” refers to imposition of exogenous factors that suddenly make possible achievements that had not seemed so; cholera has been seen in this light. I argue that this view oversimplifies and underrepresents the importance of …
Is All Justice Environmental
This article uses the case of the call for egalitarian land distribution in nineteenth century England as the basis to conceive an expanded and broadened conception of environmental justice
Just Don’t Call It Science
Public Health and Politics in the Age of Reform
Reviewed by: Public Health and Politics in the Age of Reform: Cholera, the State and the Royal Navy in Victorian Britain Christopher Hamlin David McLean . Public Health and Politics in the Age of Reform: Cholera, the State and the Royal Navy in Victorian Britain. London: Tauris, 2006. xii + 239 pp. $74.95 (1-84511-069-2). The scope of this volume is narrower than its title suggests: it deals with Plymouth and its environs in the years leading up …
STS
The City as a Chemical System? The Chemist as Urban Environmental Professional in France and Britain, 1780—1880
Drawing on recent interest in the environmental impacts of cities, and in the urban metabolism, this article examines efforts in late-eighteenth-century France and mid-nineteenth-century Britain to understand cities primarily as chemical systems, and accordingly, to see urban management as properly the province of the chemist. Drawing on historical-sociological studies of professionalization, the article also contrasts the failure of chemists to …
William Pulteney Alison, the Scottish Philosophy, and the Making of a Political Medicine
This article considers the public health and social-reform agitations of Dr. William Pulteney Alison (1790-1858), professor of medicine at Edinburgh University and leader of the Scottish medical profession, in the context of Scottish moral philosophy. Throughout his career, Alison reflected on what has come to be recognized as a central problem of social medicine: where did its domain end? At what point did the medical mission of identifying and …
Temporal changes in diet
The Balance of Trade in Southwestern Asia in the Mid-Third Millennium B.C. [and Comments and Reply]
Trade frequently is considered an important and distinct subsystem that is integrated within a prehistoric cultural system. This paper rejects this interpretation and attempts a structural analysis of a specific trading network that existed in southwestern Asia in the mid-3d millennium B.C. in order to uncover the motivational factors and contradictions operative in trading relationships. An ideal dichotomy between sparsely populated, resource-ri…
A regional investigation of subadult dietary patterns and health in late Iron Age and Roman Dorset, England
Predisposing Causes and Public Health in Early Nineteenth-Century Medical Thought
The key aetiological issue of the early British public health movement is often seen to be the controversy between contagionism and anticontagionism. More fundamental, however, was a legacy from older constitutional conceptions of disease, of a distinction between exciting and predisposing causes. The centrality of predisposition was a theme in a wide range of medical writings; often predisposing causes were seen as sufficient causes for outbreak…
Scientific Method and Expert Witnessing
The disagreement of scientists serving as expert witnesses in courts of law or forums for public policymaking is well known, and has raised philosophical questions about the applicability of general knowledge to particular instances, philosophical and sociological questions about the place of dissent in science, sociological questions about the investment of credibility, and, most importantly, pragmatic questions about how societies are to utiliz…
Urban–rural differences in R oman D orset, E ngland
In the Roman period, urban and rural ways of living were differentiated philosophically and legally, and this is the first regional study of these contrasting life‐ways. Focusing on frailty and mortality risk, we investigated how these differed by age, sex, and status, using coffin type as a proxy for social status. We employed skeletal data from 344 individuals: 150 rural and 194 urban (1st–5th centuries A.D.) from Dorset, England. Frailty and m…
The Pedagogical Roots of the History of Science
This essay examines the rise and fall of Harvard president James Bryant Conant's postwar vision for history of science-based general science education. As well as developing the foundations of Conant's vision, it considers the tension between Conant's science pedagogy-centered view of the history of science and the claims of George Sarton and I. B. Cohen that the field was a distinct discipline. It relates these themes to Conant's unease with the…
Nuisances and community in mid-Victorian England
The City as a Chemical System? The Chemist as Urban Environmental Professional in France and Britain, 1780—1880
Drawing on recent interest in the environmental impacts of cities, and in the urban metabolism, this article examines efforts in late-eighteenth-century France and mid-nineteenth-century Britain to understand cities primarily as chemical systems, and accordingly, to see urban management as properly the province of the chemist. Drawing on historical-sociological studies of professionalization, the article also contrasts the failure of chemists to …
Sanitary Policing and the Local State, 1873-1874
This article examines local sanitary policing in extra-metropolitan English and Welsh towns and cities in the period 1873-4. It combines two parliamentary returns, one focusing on the appointments by towns of sanitary officers (inspectors of nuisances and medical officers), the other listing the number of nuisance cases and modes of resolutions. The article uses these databases to examine the identification of nuisances in terms of region, town t…
Could you starve to death in England in 1839? The Chadwick-Farr controversy and the loss of the "social" in public health
The public health field has long been pulled in two directions, either toward a narrower biomedical mission to control infectious disease or toward a broader mission to address the social and economic factors that adversely affect health and wellbeing. This paper explores as an instance of this tension an 1839 controversy between the statistician William Farr and the pioneering sanitary reformer Edwin Chadwick on the role of starvation as a cause…
STS
William Pulteney Alison, the Scottish Philosophy, and the Making of a Political Medicine
This article considers the public health and social-reform agitations of Dr. William Pulteney Alison (1790-1858), professor of medicine at Edinburgh University and leader of the Scottish medical profession, in the context of Scottish moral philosophy. Throughout his career, Alison reflected on what has come to be recognized as a central problem of social medicine: where did its domain end? At what point did the medical mission of identifying and …
The Greening of America, Catholic Style, 1930-1950
This article examines the rise and fall of the "green revolution" philosophy developed by the National Catholic Rural Life Conference in the 1930s as a distinct strain of American environmentalism. After reviewing the evolution of the approach, its maturation around 1940, and its postwar marginalization, the article focuses on three aspects of the NCRLC. First is its ideology, as a "third way," a distributist alternative to socialism and capitali…
William Dibdin and the Idea of Biological Sewage Treatment
During the second half of the 19th century cities and towns in industrialized nations began to accept responsibility for the technical problems of urban life, and especially the problems of supplying the public with good water and removing refuse and sewage. The English lawyer Edwin Chadwick is commonly credited with launching a sanitary movement in the 1840s that brought cities to accept these responsibilities. So familiar are Chadwick's solutio…
Roads to Power
The Cholera Stigma and the Challenge of Interdisciplinary Epistemology
For a century and a half cholera has been a stigmatizing disease. That the entire world was susceptible to it seemed merely to accentuate its association with Asia, and particularly with Bengal and its people. The recent epidemic in Haiti suggests that cholera still carries stigma. That stigma is the product of epistemic practices within an interdisciplinary and orientalist cholera science that took shape in the 1860s and 1870s, which have, witho…
CHOLERA Forcing” The Myth of the Good Epidemic and the Coming of Good Water
It has been frequently claimed that cholera epidemics, both in the 19th century and today, were and can be the key stimulus for procurement of safe water and sanitation, an idea that I call “cholera forcing.” “Technology forcing” refers to imposition of exogenous factors that suddenly make possible achievements that had not seemed so; cholera has been seen in this light. I argue that this view oversimplifies and underrepresents the importance of …
Environmental Sensibility in Edinburgh, 1839-1840
Reflexivity in Technology Studies
In recent years scholars have begun to apply perspectives of the sociology of scientific knowledge to technology. At the same time, there has been much concern about how to deal, methodologically, with the issue of reflexivity in sociological (and historical) studies of science. This paper considers implications of the reflexivity issue for sociological and historical accounts of technology. Drawing on characterizations of technology (mainly by i…
Edwin Chadwick and the Engineers, 1842-1854
To the English sanitary reformer Edwin Chadwick, author of the famous Report of an Inquiry into the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain (1842), goes credit for recognizing the central importance of public works-waterworks, sewers, betterventilated streets and houses-to public health. Chadwick's career as a public health official lasted only from 1848 to 1854, yet his influence was great. In a broad sense, the administr…
So Who Cares? Taking Livingston out of Africa
Previous articleNext article FreeSo Who Cares? Taking Livingston out of AfricaChristopher HamlinChristopher HamlinUniversity of Notre Dame Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreHistorians don’t have on-off switches. A studier of epidemics can’t help reading the present as a chronicle, supplement…
Forensic cultures in historical perspective
Bacteriology as a Cultural System
A cultural system in two senses, bacteriology is underrepresented in the history and philosophy of science (significantly, however, it was the home science of the great prophet of underdetermination, Ludwik Fleck).1 Pasteur and Koch garner attention, but more as founders than practitioners.2 A quarter century ago, in 1987, Olga Amsterdamska called attention to the peculiarity of the enterprise, a biomedical praxis tied only loosely to natural his…
A Virtue-Free Science for Public Policy
The Balance of Trade in Southwestern Asia in the Mid-Third Millennium B.C. [and Comments and Reply]
Trade frequently is considered an important and distinct subsystem that is integrated within a prehistoric cultural system. This paper rejects this interpretation and attempts a structural analysis of a specific trading network that existed in southwestern Asia in the mid-3d millennium B.C. in order to uncover the motivational factors and contradictions operative in trading relationships. An ideal dichotomy between sparsely populated, resource-ri…
Geology at MIT 1865-1965
The Road to Jaramillo
Scientific Method and Expert Witnessing
The disagreement of scientists serving as expert witnesses in courts of law or forums for public policymaking is well known, and has raised philosophical questions about the applicability of general knowledge to particular instances, philosophical and sociological questions about the place of dissent in science, sociological questions about the investment of credibility, and, most importantly, pragmatic questions about how societies are to utiliz…
How Not to Presume
Pollution and Control
William Dibdin and the Idea of Biological Sewage Treatment
During the second half of the 19th century cities and towns in industrialized nations began to accept responsibility for the technical problems of urban life, and especially the problems of supplying the public with good water and removing refuse and sewage. The English lawyer Edwin Chadwick is commonly credited with launching a sanitary movement in the 1840s that brought cities to accept these responsibilities. So familiar are Chadwick's solutio…
Green meanings
(1991). Green meanings: What might ‘sustainable agriculture’ sustain? Science as Culture: Vol. 2, No. 4, pp. 507-537
"Underground Manchester" at the Greater Manchester Museum of Science and Industry
Underground is a new permanent exhibition in rapidly expanding Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester. Its subject is water and sewerage of Manchester and, more broadly, history and culture of modern public health engineering. Developed by a team led by Alan Wilson, with designers Deborah Conibear and Nadine Bell and model maker Colin Buckman, exhibit opened in spring 1988, financed by museum and North West Water, regional water utility. Un…
Short Notices
Short Notices Get access LaVerne Kuhnke, Lives at Risk: Public Health in Nineteenth Century Egypt, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Pp. x + 233. $40. ISBN o-520-06364-3. CHRISTOPHER HAMLIN CHRISTOPHER HAMLIN University of Notre Dame Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Social History of Medicine, Volume 5, Issue 2, August 1992, Pages 364–365, https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/5.2.364 Published: …
Predisposing Causes and Public Health in Early Nineteenth-Century Medical Thought
The key aetiological issue of the early British public health movement is often seen to be the controversy between contagionism and anticontagionism. More fundamental, however, was a legacy from older constitutional conceptions of disease, of a distinction between exciting and predisposing causes. The centrality of predisposition was a theme in a wide range of medical writings; often predisposing causes were seen as sufficient causes for outbreak…
Reflexivity in Technology Studies
In recent years scholars have begun to apply perspectives of the sociology of scientific knowledge to technology. At the same time, there has been much concern about how to deal, methodologically, with the issue of reflexivity in sociological (and historical) studies of science. This paper considers implications of the reflexivity issue for sociological and historical accounts of technology. Drawing on characterizations of technology (mainly by i…
The Sanitarians
826 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE ropeans and Japanese took over this market, and with the imported cars came imported tires. The heavy debt incurred by the OE firms to finance the switch to radials was intensified by poor sales years during the stagflation of the 1980s and caused them to restructure to raise funds. Strengthened by the actions of raiding financiers, firms sold off parts of the tire industry. The buyers were often foreign ti…
The Sanitarians
Edwin Chadwick and the Engineers, 1842-1854
To the English sanitary reformer Edwin Chadwick, author of the famous Report of an Inquiry into the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain (1842), goes credit for recognizing the central importance of public works-waterworks, sewers, betterventilated streets and houses-to public health. Chadwick's career as a public health official lasted only from 1848 to 1854, yet his influence was great. In a broad sense, the administr…
A Science of Impurity
The British Experience with River Pollution, 1865-1876 . Lawrence E. Breeze
Environmental Sensibility in Edinburgh, 1839-1840
Future Imperfect
Could you starve to death in England in 1839? The Chadwick-Farr controversy and the loss of the "social" in public health
The public health field has long been pulled in two directions, either toward a narrower biomedical mission to control infectious disease or toward a broader mission to address the social and economic factors that adversely affect health and wellbeing. This paper explores as an instance of this tension an 1839 controversy between the statistician William Farr and the pioneering sanitary reformer Edwin Chadwick on the role of starvation as a cause…
Mixing the Waters
technology and culture Book Reviews 687 minding us that there would be no machines in the garden had not the garden been there first. Martin Reuss Dr. Reuss is a senior historian in the Office of History, Headquarters, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. He is working on several projects dealing with the politics and technology of water-resources development and anticipates that some of these projects will actually be completed. Mixing the Waters: Envi…
Mixing the Waters
Death and the Metropolis
Edwin Chadwick, "Mutton Medicine," and the Fever Question
Bulletin of the History of Medicine - Volume 70, Number 2, Summer 1996
Prisoners of the Crystal Palace
Political science (43 obras) · Law (30 obras) · History (29 obras) · Sociology (28 obras) · Medicine (20 obras) · Philosophy (17 obras) · Economics (12 obras) · History (12 obras) · Computer Science (11 obras) · Law (11 obras)