Patrick Wallis

Disease metaphors in new epidemics: the UK media framing of the 2003 SARS epidemic

Abstract Since the emergence of HIV/AIDS in the 1980s, social scientists and sociologists of health and illness have been exploring the metaphorical framing of this infectious disease in its social context. Many have focused on the militaristic language used to report and explain this illness, a type of language that has permeated discourses of immunology, bacteriology and infection for at least a century. In this article, we examine how language and metaphor were used in the UK medias coverage of another previously unknown and severe infectious disease: Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS). SARS offers an opportunity to explore the cultural framing of a less extraordinary epidemic disease. It therefore provides an analytical counter-weight to the very extensive body of interpretation that has developed around HIV/AIDS. By analysing the total reporting on SARS of five major national newspapers during the epidemic of spring 2003, we investigate how the reporting of SARS in the UK press was framed, and how this related to media, public and governmental responses to the disease. We found that, surprisingly, militaristic language was largely absent, as was the judgemental discourse of plague. Rather, the main conceptual metaphor used was SARS as a killer. SARS as a killer was a single unified entity, not an army or force. We provide some tentative explanations for this shift in linguistic framing by relating it to local political concerns, media cultures, and spatial factors.

Metaphors and Biorisks The War on Infectious Diseases and Invasive Species

This article seeks to construct a comparative investigation of the role and application of militaristic metaphors in three contested areas of science-society discourse (invasive species, foot-and-mouth disease, and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome). It examines differences in the uses of metaphors and the role played by the emergence or neglect of critical linguistic engagement in these areas of public concern. It contributes to debates about the relationship between language use, policy, and the public understanding of science and technology. It demonstrates that militaristic metaphors are still part of a pervasive, but by no means inevitable, mode of science and policy communication.

Apprenticeship and training in premodern England

This paper re-examines the economics of premodern apprenticeship in England. I present new data showing that a high proportion of apprenticeships in seventeenth century London ended before the term of service was finished. I then propose a new account of how training costs and repayments were distributed over the apprenticeship contract such that neither master or apprentice risked significant loss from early termination. This new account fits with the characteristics of premodern apprenticeship, as well as with what is known about the acquisition of skills in modern and premodern societies.

Rules and reality: quantifying the practice of apprenticeship in early modern England

This paper uses recently digitised samples of apprentices and masters in London and Bristol to quantify the practice of apprenticeship in the late seventeenth century. Apprenticeship appears much more fluid than is traditionally understood. Many apprentices did not complete their terms of indenture; late arrival and early departure from the master’s household were widespread. Other apprentices appear to have been absent temporarily, returning to the master shortly before the end of their indenture. Regression analysis indicates that the patterns of presence and absence broadly reflect the resources and external opportunities available to apprentices.

Leaving home and entering service: the age of apprenticeship in early modern London

Leaving home and entering service was a key transition in early modern England. This paper presents evidence on the age of apprenticeship in London. Using a new sample of 22,156 apprentices bound between 1575 and 1810, we find that apprentices became younger (from 17.4 to 14.7 years) and more homogenous, irrespective of background. We examine the effect of region of origin, parental occupation, company entered, and paternal mortality on age of entry. The fall in apprentices’ age has significant implications for our understanding of labour supply, training structures, the experience of apprenticeship, and the family economy in this period.

Labour, law and training in early modern London: apprenticeship and the city’s institutions

Successful apprenticeship is often explained by effective contract enforcement. But what happened when enforcement was weak? This paper reveals that within early modern London, England’s dominant centre for training, the city’s court provided apprentices with near automatic exits from their indentures, and allowed them to recover a share of their premium, reflecting faults and time served. Between 3 and 8 percent of apprentices received court discharges. Easy dissolution was a response to unstable contracts. By supplying a straightforward mechanism to cut legal ties, the city reduced the risks surrounding apprenticeship and facilitated London’s rapid expansion.

The education and training of gentry sons in early-modern England

This paper explores the education and training received by the sons of the English gentry in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Using information from the herald’s visitations of four counties, it offers quantitative evidence of the proportion of gentry children who entered university, spent time at one of the inns of court or became apprentices in London. We show that over the period there was little change in the educational destinations of gentry sons: university and apprenticeship absorbed roughly equal proportions; the inns of court slightly less. We also show that a son’s position in the birth order had a very strong influence on the kind of education he received. Eldest sons were much more likely to go to university or one of the inns of court. Younger sons were much more likely to become apprentices in London – as we show, trade clearly was an acceptable career for the gentry. There is little sign of a change in the status of different educational choices in this period. Our findings confirm some traditional assumptions about the importance of birth order and normative expectations in determining the life-courses of gentry children in the seventeenth century: historians should not over-state the autonomy of elite children in deciding their futures.

The Medical Marketplace

In the mid-1980s, a number of Anglophone historians began to describe health care in early modern England as a ‘medical marketplace’ or ‘medical market’. These terms were foregrounded by several scholars more or less simultaneously. The opening chapter of Lucinda Beier’s 1984 Ph.D. thesis (published in 1987) was entitled ‘The Medical Marketplace’.1 In 1985, Roy Porter wrote of the premodern ‘medical market place’ ‘where physicians, surgeons, and apothecaries … melted into each other along a spectrum that included thousands who dispensed medicine full- or parttime’,2 and Irvine Loudon observed that one of the most important unresolved areas of eighteenth-century medicine was ‘the extent of the market for medical care and how that market was satisfied’.3 The following year Harold Cook’s Decline of the Old Medical Regime began with a chapter entitled ‘The Medical Marketplace’.4 This terminology was not confined to scholars working on the United Kingdom. Katherine Park’s Doctors and Medicine in Early Modern Florence (1985) contained an identically entitled chapter.5

Competition and cooperation in the early modern medical economy

What was it like to work in the ‘medical marketplace’ of early modern London? How did medical practitioners interact with each other? How did they obtain, treat and cure patients? Studies of early modern medical marketplaces over the last three decades have shattered old accounts that emphasized the small scale of the medical sector, its dominance by an elite of learned physicians, and the importance of institutional, professional and theoretical boundaries between groups of medical practitioners. In their place, historians of English medicine have described a situation in which professional controls were either absent or contested, and where ‘occupational diversity’ was the norm. Above all, they have shown medical practitioners competing with each other in a‘market-place’ that was influenced but not defined by institutions, patronage and law.1 Arguably, it is competition that most clearly distinguishes the medical marketplace from other systems of health care, such as domestic provision, socialized medicine, and, particularly, professionalized medicine — in which competition is normally constrained by entry controls and prohibitions on advertising, poaching patients and discounting. Where competition was limited, as in those parts of early modern Europe where occupational and regulatory institutions were stronger, historians have developed alternatives to the medical marketplace that reflect the more constrained form of practice they observe.2

Failure or Flexibility?: Apprenticeship Training in Premodern Europe

Pre-industrial apprenticeship is often considered more stable than its nineteenth- and twentieth-century counterparts, apparently because of the more durable relationships between masters and apprentices. Nevertheless, recent studies have suggested that many of those who started apprenticeships did not finish them. New evidence about more than 7,000 contracts across several cities in three countries finds that, for a number of reasons, a substantial minority of youths entering apprenticeship contracts failed to complete them. By allowing premature exits, cities and guilds sustained labor markets by lowering the risks of entering long training contracts. Training flexibility was a pragmatic response to labor-market tensions.