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Much like consumers today, late-19th-century Londoners lived in a mass culture of commodified abundance and conspicuous consumption. Their consumer fetishism was fully represented by their avid pursuit of health-related services and medicinal goods--the market was rife with brand-name patent medicines such as Dr. Scott's Little Liver Pills and Dr. William's Pink Pills for Pale People, and city-dwellers frequently bought patented medico-electrical appliances such as Pulvermacher's Electric Chains or Harness' Electropathic Belt.In this highly original book Takahiro Ueyama recounts a vivid narrative--populated by long-forgotten entrepreneurs and charlatans--that accounts for the way in which socioeconomic and professional interests came into conflict among medically trained doctors, electrical engineers, manufacturers of patent medicines, and quack physicians.Thoroughly grounded in research into health commodification in the late 19th century, this book demonstrates that Victorians had issues very much like ours today. Like us, they wrestled with ambiguities about drug effectiveness and regulation. Like us, they worried about the uncertain boundaries between science and quackery. They, too, were baffled by the competing claims of orthodox and alternative medicine. They, too, went in for massage therapy and erotic quasi-medical services. Such was reality in late-19th-century Britain, and it was the root of what we observe in our highly capitalized modern world, where profit-driven commercialism ubiquitously intrudes into the medical domain.
Gordon A. Craig (1913-2005), one of America''s most distinguished historians of modern Germany, was an indefatigable essayist. This volume gathers previously uncollected articles from the last quarter of a career that spanned six decades. Placing politics in the perspective of culture, and culture in the perspective of politics, these essays examine the persistent tension between liberalism and militarism in German history, and include the author''s reflections on political leadership, intellectual creativity, and military catastrophe.
During a career that spanned sixty years, Gordon A. Craig (1913ΓÇô2005) was one of AmericaΓÇÖs leading authorities on diplomatic history and international relations. This volume of previously uncollected essays (with one essay published here for the first time) includes several surveys, from different perspectives, of the field of diplomatic history; comparative studies of American and European conceptions of foreign policy and the balance of power; and essays on the theory and practice of diplomacy, focusing especially on the turbulent twentieth century.
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