Colin D. Howell

Playing on the border: sport, borderlands and the North Atlantic, 1850–1950

Abstract In this paper, we advance a borderlands perspective to delineate and distinguish the patterns of sporting development across the North Atlantic, with a particular focus on the transmission of lacrosse and basketball from North America to the British Isles in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The borderlands perspective and the understanding of the Atlantic as an oceanic borderland allow for a reconsideration of traditional models of diffusion–modernization, which focus on the export of sporting cultures from the UK to the wider world. The borderlands model, with its consideration of the multidirectional character of cultural transference, enables a reorientation of analysis, from the metropolitan to the peripheral, from traditional framed ‘national sports’ to those that are otherwise ignored in non-native contexts by diffusion modelling, from top to down models that service the national narrative to bottom-up understandings that shed light on the activities of ordinary sportsmen and women and the communities that supported them.

The Changing Face of Modern Medicine

John S. Haller, Jr. American Medicine in Transition, 1840-1910. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981.457 pp. Regina Markell Morantz, Cynthia Stodola Pomerleau, and Carol Hansen Fenichel, eds. In Her Own Words: Oral Histories of Women Physicians. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982. 284 pp. George Rosen. The Structure of American Medical Practice, 1875-1941. Edited by Charles Rosenberg. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983.152 pp. In his seminal study, The Birth of the Clinic, Michel Foucault has outlined the transition in medicine from classical metaphysical explanations of the nature of disease to the kind of empirical investigation that now lies at the heart of modern medical understanding. This epistemological shift, which Foucault locates in the latter half of the eighteenth century, involved an abandonment of systems and untested theory and demanded the creation of a rational and scientifically structured discourse centered upon the individual, the discrete or the specific. I...