Michael A. Osborne

Medical Climatology in France: The Persistence of Neo-Hippocratic Ideas in the First Half of the Twentieth Century

In interwar France the Lyonnais physician Marius Piéry undertook an ambitious Neo-Hippocratic research program to study how atmospheric and terrestrial environments influenced health. Lyon had a number of institutions linked to the colonies and was a center for the training of military physicians. Colonial physicians had a long tradition of contending with the diseases of tropical environments, and their ideas and many returned colonials circulated in Lyon and its region. Piéry was a physician during World War I and published on military medical topics. He also included colonial and military health concerns in his more mature works from the 1930s. An advocate of the close study of the physical sciences, he investigated the radioactive gases of health spas and the effects of altitude on pulmonary tuberculosis, and he directed a meteorological observatory.

views from the periphery: Discourses of race and place in French military medicine

Numerous authors have interpreted the history of anthropological and medical conceptions of race in nineteenth century France as following a path mapped out by phrenology, anthropometry, and Paul Brocas version of physical anthropology. On balance, this has resulted in an historical narrative centered on Parisian intellectual life and one leaving the impression that by the 1890s anthropological theories had moved away from ethnological and cultural explanations toward more biological views of race. This article, by contrast, examines the world beyond Paris and the literatures of naval and army medicine from about 1830 to 1920. It describes the contours of a medical and anthropological pluralism in matters of race and ethnicity and argues that cultural and ethnological perspectives remained important to theorists of race through World War I.

Networks in Tropical Medicine: Internationalism, Colonialism, and the Rise of a Medical Specialty, 1890–1930

region in this critical period. However, the author might have approached these sources more critically, reflecting on the limits and optics of diplomatic documents. A discussion on the British and French diplomatic missions in the eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire would have enhanced the methodological strength of the book. The Margins of Empire is a major and very timely contribution on several levels, beyond the limits of Ottoman history. Anyone interested in the history of modern empires, nationalism, tribalism, ethnic violence and agrarian questions will learn much from this book.

Nature, technology and the human condition

The publication of the journalist Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature (1989) sounded an alarm of global proportions and brought focus to numerous issues faced by this generation of scholars and activists. Generations of humanity, acting carelessly but largely without intentional malice, had polluted and altered our planet and its atmosphere.