In the nineteenth century legislation concerning health care in Greece did not differ from that in the Netherlands, derived as it was from the French example in both cases. This article contains a comparison of the organisation and the effects of (public) health care in the Dutch city of Groningen and the Greek city of Piraeus, cities which in the course of the nineteenth century reached about ...

Although Dickens is still known as having been a highly visible supporter of England's well-known nineteenth-century sanitary movement, he became, in fact, deeply troubled by many of this movement's fundamental tenets, as evidenced by journal narratives on fever that he edited and wrote in the mid-nineteenth century. Rather than water and sewer engineering works and a sanitary regime policed by...

This paper investigates the Becker-Woessmann (2009) argument that Protestants were more prosperous in nineteenth-century Prussia because they were more literate, a version of the Weber thesis, and shows that it cannot be sustained. The econometric analysis on which Becker and Woessman based their argument is fundamentally flawed, because their instrumental variable does not satisfy the exclusio...

Recent surveys have estimated that the prevalence of hay fever among modem populations is between 2 and 15 per cent.1 Yet there are few references to the condition in any literature before the nineteenth century. Despite this fact, by 1900 hay fever was described as a common and fashionable disease. In this paper I outline the first descriptions of hay fever and how ideas about it developed thr...

Data from the 1803–1806 Lewis and Clark expedition and nineteenth century stage records are used to quantitatively benchmark natural, premanagement hydrology of the lower Missouri River and assess the magnitude and timing of hydrologic change over nearly two centuries. Data show doubling in daily stage variability from the nineteenth century to 2005. Annual maximum stages have, at some sites, b...

What makes the sun shine? How does the sun produce the vast amount of energy necessary to support life on earth? These questions challenged scientists for a hundred and fifty years, beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century. Theoretical physicists battled geologists and evolutionary biologists in a heated controversy over who had the correct answer. Why was there so much fuss about this...

Ergotism, the disease caused by consuming Claviceps purpurea, a highly poisonous, grain-infecting fungus, occurred at various places scattered throughout Norway during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By focusing on these cases we chart the changing interpretations of the peculiar disease, frequently understood within a religious context or considered as a supernatural (e.g. ghostly) ex...

Late nineteenth century intergenerational occupational mobility was higher in the US than in Britain. Differences between them in this type of mobility are absent today. Using data on 10,000 US and British father and son pairs followed over two intervals (the 1860s and 1870s, and the 1880s and 1890s), we examine how this convergence occurred. The US remained more mobile then Britain through 190...

Emma Goldman was a traveling public speaker and writer known for her anarchist political views as well as her opinions on contraception [3] and birth limiting in the late nineteenth century in the United States. Goldman identified as an anarchist, which she explained as being part of an ideology in which people use violence to provoke or demand social and political change. Goldman was involved ...

Throughout the history of psychopathology, several meanings have been assigned to the term melancholia. The main ones were related to affective disorders (fear and sadness) and abnormal beliefs. At the time of Hippocrates melancholia was regarded mainly in its affective component. Since that time, and until the eighteenth century, authors and opinions have been divided, with both aspects (affec...