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"Beds History."
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What we did in bed : a horizontal history
\"Pulling back the covers on the fascinating, yet often forgotten, history of the bed. Louis XIV ruled France from his bedchamber. Winston Churchill governed Britain from his during World War II. Travelers routinely used to bed down with complete strangers, and whole families shared beds in many preindustrial households. Beds were expensive items--and often for show. Tutankhamun was buried on a golden bed, wealthy Greeks were sent to the afterlife on dining beds, and deceased middle-class Victorians were propped up on beds in their parlor. In this sweeping social history that covers the past seventy thousand years, Brian Fagan and Nadia Durrani look at the endlessly varied role of the bed through time. This was a place for sex, death, childbirth, storytelling, and sociability as well as sleeping. But who did what with whom, why, and how could vary incredibly depending on the time and place. It is only in the modern era that the bed has transformed into a private, hidden zone, and its rich social history has largely been forgotten.\"--Dust jacket.
BOOK
Saved in Time
In the summer of 1969, a federal district court in Denver, Colorado, heard arguments in one of the nation's first explicitly environmental cases, in which the Defenders of Florissant, Inc. opposed real estate interests intent on developing lands containing an extraordinary set of ancient fossils. This book, the first account of the fight to preserve the Florissant fossil beds, tells a story of environmental activism that remains little known more than forty years after the coalition's victory. The principal author, Estella Leopold, was a major participant in the process.
eBook
Together and Apart: Twin Beds, Domestic Hygiene and Modern Marriage, 1890–1945
This article examines the advent of twin beds as a common sleeping arrangement for English couples. Through an analysis of a range of sources from the late nineteenth to mid twentieth centuries—marketing materials, advertisements, domestic, decorative and marital advice books and novels and films—it argues that while twin beds were initially recommended by proponents of the domestic sanitation movement as part of a raft of hygiene measures, by the 1920s they had become a fashionable item of bedroom furniture for modern couples in ‘companionate’ marriages. It was in this context that Marie Stopes, in her popular marital advice books, railed against them as an ‘invention of the devil’, symptomatic of the evils of modernity, and endangering the happiness of the modern married couple. The article concludes that, despite these changing contexts of consumption, the significance of the history of twin beds needs to be understood through the intersecting discourses of domesticity, health and sexuality.
Journal Article
Unravelling the ‘Tangled Web’: Chemotherapy for Tuberculosis in Britain, 1940–70 The William Bynum Prize Essay
The introduction and assimilation of chemotherapy to treat pulmonary tuberculosis (TB) during the mid-twentieth century appears at first sight to be a success story dominated by the use of streptomycin in a series of randomised clinical trials run under the auspices of the Medical Research Council (MRC). However, what this standard rhetoric overlooks is the complexity of TB chemotherapy, and the relationship between this and two other ways of treating the disease, bed rest and thoracic surgery. During the late 1940s and 1950s, these three treatment strands overlapped one another, and determining best practice from a plethora of prescribing choices was a difficult task. This article focuses on the clinical decision-making underpinning the evolution of successful treatment for TB using drugs alone. Fears over the risk of streptomycin-resistant organisms entering the community meant that, initially, the clinical application of streptomycin was limited. Combining it with other drugs lessened this risk, but even so the potential of chemotherapy as a curative option for TB was not immediately apparent. The MRC ran a series of clinical trials in the post-war period but not all of their recommendations were adopted by clinicians in the field. Rather, a range of different determinants, including the timing of trials, the time taken for results to emerge, and whether these results ‘fitted’ with individual experience all influenced the translation of trial results into clinical practice.
Journal Article
Historical Analysis of Siderail Use in American Hospitals
Purpose: To explore the social, economic, and legal influences on siderail use in 20th century American hospitals and how use of siderails became embedded in nursing practice. Design: Social historical research. Methods: Numerous primary and secondary sources were collected and interpreted to illustrate the pattern of siderail use, the value attached to siderails, and attitudes about using siderails. Findings: The persistent use of siderails in American hospitals indicates a gradual consensus between law and medicine rather than an empirically driven nursing intervention. Use of siderails became embedded in nursing practice as nurses assumed increasing responsibility for their actions as institutional employees. Conclusions: New federal guidelines, based on reports of adverse consequences associated with siderails, are limiting siderail use in hospitals and nursing homes across the United States. Lowering siderails and using alternatives will depend on new norms among health care providers, hospital administrators, bed manufacturers, insurers, attorneys, regulators, and patients and their families.
Journal Article
Confined to Bed: Illness, Narrative, and Female Authority in Charlotte Temple
[...]delicate, the fatigue and sickness which she endured rendered her so weak as to be almost entirely confined to her bed. [...]the novel takes its analysis of female authorship to the street, where it represents the \"vile arts\" of narrative mastery as contagion.
Journal Article
\Hospital's Full-Up\: The 1918 Influenza Pandemic
Schoch-Spana describes the Spanish influenza epidemic of 1918, which caused social disruption and massive loss of life on American soil. Despite 80 years of medical advances and expansive growth in the health care industry, there remains great uncertainty about the capacity to respond to an infectious disease emergency.
Journal Article
Silas Weir Mitchell and the “rest cure”
[...]Weir Mitchell was wise enough to anticipate and thereby prevent what we now label illness behaviour: \"...to lie abed half the day and sew a little, and read a little, and be interesting and excite sympathy, is all very well, but when they are bidden to stay in bed a month, and neither to read, write nor sew, and to have one nurse-who is not a relative-then rest becomes for some women a rather bitter medicine and they are glad enough to accept the order to rise and go about when the doctor issues a mandate which has become pleasantly welcome and eagerly looked for.\"
Journal Article
