The Impact of , 300–2000. John Henderson, Peregrine Horden and Ales- sandro Pastore (eds). Oxford [etc.], Peter Lang, 2007. 426 p. Ill. Fr. 115.–. ISBN 978-3-03911-001-8.

Hospitals have generated much historical interest in recent decades as social and medical historians explored institutional archives questioning e.g. the social utility of the poor, medical practices in institutions, the genesis of healing professionals and the confessional nature of culture. Addressing the question of the hospitals as agents of political power, Michel Foucault played an important role in attracting attention from both medical and social historians. There is now a wide range of books on local hospitals and even a synthesis on the . So why then pub- lish sixteen contributions on very heterogeneous issues covering the entire life span ofWestern hospitals, from the first Byzantine institutions to 20th-century institutions? The reader, at first sceptical, is rapidly convinced by the quality of the contributions that due to the very different cultural and social contexts in which hospitals evolved, accumulating case studies on different places enables to envisage over a long time period the hospital as a variety of possibilities. The chapters are short, interesting and easy to read.Although it is doubtful that most readers will read the book from cover to cover, rare are those interested in medical history who will not find a stimulating chapter to read. The volume is closed by an index which allows quick referencing to people, places and selected themes. The editors divide hospital history into two moments, before and after the clinic, a distinction which leads them to offer an overview of the institution’s history both before and after the last decades of the 18th century. This is a useful input as it gives a clear map on which to place the contributions which follow. As is inevitably the case in a collective effort, the quality of chapters varies. Given the space here and the density of the book, I can only offer a short overview in order to give an idea of the topics addressed. A first series of contributions assess the agency of founders, the administrative hardships of hospital managers and illustrate the difficulty of con- sidering the history of such institutions over a long period.Peregrine Horden discusses the numerous possible aims of founders in Middle-Age Byzantium, stressing both traditional spiritual motivations, preservation of family wealth and of the memory of the founder. The risk of the physical reinvestment of a hospital (or more precisely its building) by the founder’s family is explored by Kevin C. Robbins in a very interest- ing discussion of the counterstrategy evolved by lay sisters of Beaune’s Hôtel Dieu in the 17th century. Matthew Thomas Sneider offers a very concrete survey of hos- pital finances in early modern Bologna, discussing the financial arrangements and danger of misuse of assets which belonged, in theory, to the poor. Administrative problems in dealing with the income and belongings of hospital resources in Verona are broached by Marina Garbellotti over the rather long period from the 16th to the 17th century. The author shows clearly how charitable institutions worked hand in hand with the city council, generating a double movement rationalising and cen- tralising welfare policies in the city. Moving towards the contemporary world,Andrea Tanner analyses roles played by women in and about a London children’s hospital during the Victorian era. A focus on actual practices and administrative records enables her to reconstruct the roles of three groups of women: visiting ladies, nurses and mothers. The roles of each group are discussed intelligently, although the implicit

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Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 11:51:24AM via free access criticism that the values were not up to today’s standards disserves the author’s pur- poses in the eyes of her reader who is really interested in how these values help to explain hospital life and wider social considerations. A second section of the book introduces the use of images into hospital history. Carole Rawcliffe offers an interesting investigation into the physical presence of images of hospital patrons or their family arms in medieval hospitals, as a means to understand patrons’ will to ensure spiritual support after their death. Using explicitly representations of buildings, Christine Stevenson argues that the tradition to depict hospitals became a promotional necessity for boards of governors desiring to build or rebuild a hospital as from the end of the seventeenth century. She demonstrates that images were used to communicate notions of the nature of the care the poor were to receive. Annmarie Adams makes a very clear argument of the dissociation of contemporary hospital architecture (her main examples are Canadian) with medical notions. She convincingly demonstrates that hospital architecture evolves following external architectural fashions and more often than not is based on positivistic dis- course rather than on an historical appraisal of earlier possible models. Rarely studied as such, rural hospitals occupy a third section of the book.Working on sketchy traces, Max Satchell engages in a very brave survey of rural hospitals in England between 1100 and 1300, concentrating his interest on small institutions (at least 3 miles beyond the closest town), scattered around the country. Accumulating geographical and contextual information, the author does manage to give an idea of the physical reality of rural hospitals, their function as places of hospitality, refuges for those who were permanently sick, etc. Sergio Onger reconstructs the genesis of the in the region of Brescia between the 18th and the 20th centuries, identifying the inputs of a series of actors leading to a densification of hospital ser- vices, namely the inputs of ruling classes in the 19th centuries when municipalities strove to avoid heavy financial undertakings. Focusing on 20th-century cottage hos- pitals in a vast British rural area (East Anglia), Steve Cherry argues convincingly for their local role and their important function both for ’ lives and GP’s careers. In a fourth section the authors focus on issues. Louis Gray explores a series of patients’ petitions for access to rural hospitals in Hess during the early modern period. The author reports patients consistently arguing that they were no longer capable of working enough to earn their living, suggesting that they could still work and that work was important for their identity. Eric Gruber von Arni retraces British military hospitals in the 17th century, assessing location and services offered, essen- tially for the Parliamentary troops during the Civil war. Rules, staff, material envi- ronment and even supplies are carefully analysed, suggesting that well-administered hospitals rendered high-quality services in a clean environment, providing a healthy diet and even prosthetic limbs. Starting his story at the end of the 19th century, Flurin Condrau’s offers an extremely dense appraisal of TB patients and institutions before the outbreak of the Second World, revealing very different public health agendas in Britain and in . A second part of this chapter reconstructs the role both general and particular institutions played in patients’ careers, while suggesting insights into patients’ role. The last section devoted to demography is short.Alysa Levene compares practices and policies of foundling hospitals in Florence and in London in the 17th century. Reviewing survival rates for a succession of cohorts as from the 1740s, she notes great

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Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 11:51:24AM via free access variations for different years and equates medical and administrative strategies with success, arguing convincingly that artificial feeding was never useful and the success of such institutions was related to their policy of wet nurse recruitment. The take of Diego Ramiro Farinas on hospital is indirect as he uses data on migrant patients in institutions in order to reassess the reputedly higher mortality in urban settings in the second half of the 16th century and in the early 20th century. His research on two Spanish towns (Salamanca and Toledo) reveals a high percentage of deaths due to migrant patients, suggesting in short that passing migrants could negatively have af- fected contemporary appraisals of the history of urban mortality.

Philip Rieder, Geneva

Weber, Philippe: Der Trieb zum Erzählen, Sexualpathologie und Homosexualität, 1852–1914. Bielefeld, transcript, 2008. 382 S. I 29.80. ISBN 978-3-8376-1019-2.

Cet ouvrage révèle de façon convaincante comment s’est développée, dès les années 1880, une pluralité de théories sur l’homosexualité dans la psychiatrie allemande ayant pour effets d’œuvrer à la construction du concept plus vaste de la «sexualité», autant que de participer à la décriminalisation du comportement homosexuel. Au fil des chapitres, l’auteur montre la genèse, puis les étapes de la construction d’une «biopolitique», au sens de Foucault, par l’analyse des publications des pathologistes des sexualités dont les positions narratrices mutent au cours du demi-siècle étudié. Ces médecins relatent des cas individuels, mais aussi déterminent progressivement par leurs diagnostics un groupe social spécifique à placer en marge de la reproduc- tion et du corps social. L’article fondateur du médecin pour les tribunaux Johann Ludwig Casper, Ueber Notzucht und Päderastie, en 1852, met en correspondance l’article 143 du code pénal prussien qui punit les relations sexuelles entre hommes et ses observations médicales. Il y fait connaître des formes de contacts «sodomites», au sens du coït anal, et l’exis- tence d’une sous-culture à Berlin. Sa technique d’investigation des verges est reprise par le médecin parisien Ambroise Tardieu qui critique, toutefois, ses résultats pour ne s’être intéressé qu’aux partenaires actifs. Tous deux s’accordent pour dire que les sodomites sont des individus de la plus basse espèce morale, et impriment le credo de la préservation du mariage et du coït reproducteur dans le jugement médical. Casper est sensible aux conséquences pénales et met en doute la pleine responsabilité des commettants. La psychiatrisation de l’homosexualité s’opère par son élève, Carl Westphal, médecin à l’Asile de la Charité à Berlin. Dans son article de 1869, Die conträre Sexualempfindung, ce dernier fait émerger une nouvelle conception posant le comportement homosexuel comme le symptôme d’une maladie psychique. Se basant sur les cas d’un travesti et d’une lesbienne hospitalisés, Westphal inaugure la technique d’une narration posant des jugements diagnostiques sur les pratiques de ses patients et leurs conséquences pénales. Ce procédé est repris par le titulaire de la chaire de psychiatrie de l’Université de Graz en Autriche, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, qui, depuis la première version de sa Psychopathia Sexualis en 1886, fait entrer la sexualité en son entier comme objet psychiatrique. L’homosexualité est inscrite dans un évolutionnisme biologique dont la finalité est la reproduction,et devient le contre-

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