In 1975, public health sociologist Gerry Stimson drew attention to the importance of the images produced in the advertising of psychopharmaceutical drugs in medical journals, and claimed that the individuals used in such depictions portrayed ‘the typical person who has the illness’. He then went on to suggest that, not only did women appear in pictures more often than men, but that the images reflected 'a limited view of a woman's role … women are shown as dependent – the victims of circumstances’. This argument has been developed by a number of authors since the 1970s. Ruth Cooperstock, for example, argued that physicians' perceptions of female patients were, at least in part, influenced by pharmaceutical advertising and its ‘pejorative attitudes’ toward women. Ludmilla Jordanova, while making the case for a move away from accounts of women and mental illness that emphasize their subordination and oppression, still maintained that drugs for psychiatric conditions were ‘advertised with a clear sexual association with women'. Writing more recently in the United States, Jonathan Metzl has produced a close analysis of representations of psychotropic medications in sources from American print culture from 1950.

This volume examines the representation of Venice in painting, music and literature since 1800. Byron is rightly placed first in such a volume for he was the harbinger of the cult of Venice as a place of enchantment which naturally belongs to the world of art rather than as an actual polis which belongs to history. But Byron always confounds as well as establishes distinctions; he looks backwards as well as forwards as I will do in this essay. Moreover, Byron engaged with the ‘the far times’ of the thousand-year polis and the recent arrival of Austrian police as much as he did with Venice as some ‘strange dream upon the water’. Yet he is always conscious that he is refashioning previous representations of the city.

Andrea di Robilant argued that ‘Byron gave the city a new life by turning those sinking ruins into an existential landscape – an island of the soul’. Byron called this a ‘more beloved existence’. To make sense of this phrase, we need to read it in its context in the opening stanzas of Canto IV of his Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. Tony Tanner noted that these opening twenty-nine stanzas were ‘crucial and generative for Turner and Ruskin and countless others’.

In 1870 the United States was a collection of island communities, rural places that were relatively isolated from one another and in which populations were stable over generations. These communities were similar to traditional communities in Europe where everyone within a family worked hard, where children were seen as assets (promising work now and in the future) and where neighbours both took care of each other and kept watch over each other. Over the next fifty years, those island communities would be drawn into a larger world as new technologies, a growing national economy and an expanding consumer culture penetrated their isolation. By 1920 more than half the country's population would live in the city and radios, automobiles and the post office would connect all but the most remote areas to the metropolitan world.

This transition would have a profound impact on single women who gave birth outside of marriage. As community isolation eroded so did the community's ability to control and watch over its members. When this happened, women were forced to turn to the state and to the laws developed by those in power. It was there that they met and had to deal with laws that were very different in Maine and Tennessee. This was true even though the two states were both once part of the original thirteen colonies and inherited the same British Common Law tradition.

If the prostitute had become, as the Saturday Review termed it, ‘the most interesting class of womanhood’ in Britain in the Victorian period, what did she look like? How, and by what means, did her contemporaries depict her? Such basic questions raise further issues: What was (and perhaps still is) the significance of representations of prostitution and what role did they play in the production of myths and cultural narratives, the regulation of behaviour and the shaping of social attitudes? Historians (and others) interested in Victorian social and cultural history, and in perceptions of prostitution particularly, cannot avoid such questions and they continue to invite further analysis even after decades of innovative scholarship.

Studying contemporary representations provides a way of reading prostitution: the analysis and study of images and texts as discursive forms sheds light on the process of constructing social meaning.

It is perhaps ironic that the Victorian doctor best known today for his somewhat stereotypical views on female sexual passivity should also be the author of an equally influential text on prostitution. When the venereologist William Acton published his treatise on prostitution in 1857, he was contributing to a debate that had been running for decades. Like his predecessors, Acton reiterated a familiar body of information: the numbers of recorded prostitutes, the causes of prostitution, and the existing measures for its amelioration or prevention. Acton's work differed from earlier efforts, however, in advancing a sustained call for state and medical intervention in recognizing and regulating prostitution. Acton was an influential medical figure in the arguments which preceded the institution of the Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864, 1866 and 1869, and his work offered a different type of engagement with the existing mythologies and representations of prostitution. These Acts entailed the registration and compulsory medical inspection of prostitutes in selected garrison towns in England, which further involved periods of compulsory hospitalization until venereal infections were cured. What makes Acton particularly interesting is that his key work on prostitution offers a dialogic window on the interplay between public debate, legislation and medical opinion.

By the late 1960s, countercultural ideas greatly influenced sections of the New Left, as the Berkeley Liberation Program testifies. ‘Free territories’, ‘liberated zones’ were conceived of as political and cultural entities but, increasingly, it was the cultural dimension which gave them form and substance. Cultural radicalism had fed into political dissent from early in the decade but, in the first instance, hippies and political radicals mostly kept a safe distance from each other except when brought together at the rock dances. Towards the end of 1966, this was beginning to change in the Bay Area. And despite the rapid decline of Haight-Ashbury in the following years, the experiment with ‘youth ghettos’, free spaces or counter-spaces defined culturally as well as geographically, lived on in the minds of some radicals. The Berkeley south campus community, in particular, was seen to embody the values of a new society, to point in the direction of profound social transformation. New ways of living, influenced more and more by counter-cultural perspectives, supposedly prefigured the good society. No one reflected this type of thinking more than Tom Hayden. One of the Movement's leading figures, he was swept along by Berkeley radicalism in 1969 and 1970. He quickly succumbed to provincialist revolutionary mythology and projected half-baked goals of liberation which were fashioned out of hippie experience as much as New Left ideals. Sixties radicalism was running out of steam and so were many of its prominent theorists and activists.

There has been a sea-change in the United States in society's attitude toward unwed mothers. First of all, they are more likely now to be called single mothers because the vast majority raise their children. Ann Fessler estimates that in 1960 40 per cent of white single women gave up their children to adoption; today that percentage has dropped to only 1.5 per cent. When they do choose to surrender their children, single women often do so in open adoptions that enable birth mothers to stay in touch with their children.

There has been a corresponding recognition that the middle-class consensus of the past half-century was damaging to young single women. As early as 1964 a Canadian conference on out of wedlock pregnancy noted in its final report that there was a general feeling that ‘these Homes for Unmarried Mothers should not be so cut off from the community and so isolated that no one knows about them.’ Dr May Taylor urged her colleagues to fact facts. ‘For generations social workers have been strongly encouraging girls who were pregnant out of wedlock to place their children for adoption and we have done this with the very best intentions [but] we are faced at this moment with the need to re-evaluate this advice…’ In 1997 the Australian Association of Social Workers Ltd issued a statement of apology for the lifelong pain they inadvertently had caused many women who had relinquished their children.

Among the most basic tools of elementary statistics, percentages, averages and statistical tables readily come to mind. Taught nowadays very early on in the academic curriculum, all three entail only an elementary degree of formalization. Percentages and averages suggest comparison among phenomena or across time, while tables, by classifying and summarizing data, allow for the formulation of hypotheses. The history of these heuristic tools is scarcely known, at least from the mathematical point of view, and the history of their practical use remains for its part embryonic. French demographer Hervé Le Bras, the author of a historical monograph on mortality as an intellectual construct and an object of statistical inquiry, gives 1662 as a birth year for ‘the first statistical tables’, while historian Jean-Claude Perrot traces the invention of two-way tables to ‘bookkeeping techniques already in use during the sixteenth century’. As regards the average, seventeenth-century political arithmeticians made large use of it, often under the simple guise of the ‘medium’ (that is, the ‘centre’ of a distribution). It has also been documented that mathematical thinking about means and averages had taken shape by the end of the seventeenth century with the work of Jacques Bernoulli and developed throughout the eighteenth century. Yet, only during the nineteenth century did means and averages become a central feature of statistics, up to a point where statistics of that era has been described as ‘amounting somehow to a theory of means’.

As Stephanie Coontz has argued, the immediate post-war period was a unique moment in the history of marriage. In Western Europe and the United States, the cultural consensus that everyone should marry and form a male breadwinner family was like a steamroller that crushed every alternative view. In Britain, although the Second World War had inevitably disrupted the normal pattern of married life, it had done nothing to diminish the popularity of marriage, and the marriage rate quickly rose to above the pre-war level. Following a brief rise in divorce petitions filed immediately after the war, the numbers sank rapidly from 60,000 in 1947 to 31,000 in 1950, and dropped again to a low of 23,000 in 1958. During the ten-year period beginning around 1950, Roderick Phillips notes that virtually all the countries of the West experienced an almost stationary divorce rate.

Since the 1970s historians have been critical of progressive, teleological accounts of marriage and the family. They have uncovered contrasting pictures of ‘families past’, and suggest that it is misleading to assume that there ever was a time when home and family were ‘all they were meant to be’.

The idea of statistics as the ‘science of government’ has been, from the mid-nineteenth century on, a formative, recurrent and rallying theme of the discourse held by statisticians in many countries. International encounters such as the nine statistical congresses held between 1853 and 1876 or the biennial meetings of the International Statistical Institute (ISI) from 1887 on, were among the privileged occasions during which statisticians upheld this vision and propounded various projects ranging from agreement on international classifications (of diseases, of causes of death, of occupations, etc.) to the creation of an International Statistical Office and the organization of a World Census. Besides these, statisticians were significantly present in a number of international gatherings, among which congresses on hygiene and demography (sixteen were held from 1851 to 1912), on medicine (which had a statistical section, seventeen were held from 1867 to 1913), on anthropology and prehistoric archeology (where anthropometry, that Queteletian creation, was abundantly discussed, fourteen from 1866 to 1912), criminal anthropology (seven from 1885 to 1911), geography (ten from 1871 to 1910), sociology (eight from 1894 to 1912), actuarial science (seven from 1895 to 1912), social insurance (thirteen from 1889 to 1915), industry and commerce (four from 1900 to 1911), agriculture (eight from 1889 and 1913), the Universal Races Congress (1911) and the First International Congress on Eugenics (1912).