Despite facing manifold social and educational barriers, British asylum nurses across the long nineteenth century articulated distinctive professional identities as a means of leveraging their position in the medical hierarchy. This article draws upon a corpus of previously unattributed contributions to the Asylum News (1897–1919) – one of the first journals produced for the edification of asylum workers – to illustrate the diversity of medical personae developed and disseminated by these employees in the Edwardian era. Through scientific and creative works, nurses engaged with the pressing social and medical debates of the day, in the process exposing a heterogeneous intellectual culture. Moreover, as their writings attest, for some ambitious nurses these pretensions to intellectual authority prompted claims for medical autonomy, driving agitation on the hospital wards. The article thus strengthens claims for the ‘cultural agency’ of asylum workers and offers new insights into the cultural antecedents of professionalisation and trade unionism.

The article provides the first description and analysis of the recently rediscovered manuscript titled Methodus anatomica by Girolamo Fabrici da Acquapendente (1533–1619). Acquapendente was one of the most important anatomists in late sixteenth-century Europe and played an instrumental role as Harvey’s teacher in Padua towards the latter’s discovery of the circulation of the blood. The manuscript provides first-hand testimony as to how anatomy was administered in Padua in the post-Vesalian era and sheds light on a number of otherwise unknown aspects of the development of the anatomical method. Chiefly among these is the attention devoted by Acquapendente to historia, as a way to order sensory data in a consistent way, which draws widely from the geometrical method and from the contemporary debate on the discretisation of continuous quantities.

In recent years there has been growing acknowledgement of the place of workhouses within the range of institutional provision for mentally disordered people in nineteenth-century England. This article explores the situation in Bristol, where an entrenched workhouse-based model was retained for an extended period in the face of mounting external ideological and political pressures to provide a proper lunatic asylum. It signified a contest between the modernising, reformist inclinations of central state agencies and local bodies seeking to retain their freedom of action. The conflict exposed contrasting conceptions regarding the nature of services to which the insane poor were entitled.

Bristol pioneered establishment of a central workhouse under the old Poor Law; ‘St Peter’s Hospital’ was opened in 1698. As a multi-purpose welfare institution its clientele included ‘lunatics’ and ‘idiots’, for whom there was specific accommodation from before the 1760s. Despite an unhealthy city centre location and crowded, dilapidated buildings, the enterprising Bristol authorities secured St Peter’s Hospital’s designation as a county lunatic asylum in 1823. Its many deficiencies brought condemnation in the national survey of provision for the insane in 1844. In the period following the key lunacy legislation of 1845, the Home Office and Commissioners in Lunacy demanded the replacement of the putative lunatic asylum within Bristol’s workhouse by a new borough asylum outside the city. The Bristol authorities resisted stoutly for several years, but were eventually forced to succumb and adopt the prescribed model of institutional care for the pauper insane.

The historiography of western medicine in colonial India has predominantly been analysed from the perspectives of the elite services – the Indian Medical Service (IMS) and their recruits. Unfortunately, perceiving colonial medical practices through the lens of the IMS has remained inadequate to provide a nuanced understanding of the role played by Indians in the semi-urban and rural areas of colonial India. This article examines the contributions of local administration and the role played by the recruits of the Subordinate Medical Service. This article uses the Madras Presidency as its case study and focusses on the medical subordinates who were pivotal in establishing a western medical tradition in the region. This will shift the urban-centric focus and examine mostly the rural parts of the presidency, in particular, the district hospitals and dispensaries located in the districts, taluks and villages. The article analyses the transformation in the Madras medical administration from the late nineteenth century until 1935 to argue how subordinates were the ones controlling the local medical services, and thus pulling the strings of health administration in the presidency. This will also demonstrate the uniqueness of Madras and how it disseminated western medical care with an active participation and involvement of the local residents.

The theory that the people of the early modern period slept in well-defined segments of ‘first’ and ‘second’ sleeps has been highly influential in both scholarly literature and mainstream media over the past twenty years. Based on a combination of scientific, anthropological and textual evidence, the segmented sleep theory has been used to illuminate discussions regarding important aspects of early modern nocturnal culture; mainstream media reports, meanwhile, have proposed segmented sleep as a potentially ‘natural’ and healthier alternative to consolidated blocks of sleep. In this article, I re-examine the scientific, anthropological and early modern literary sources behind the segmented sleep theory and ask if the evidence might support other models of early modern sleep that are not characterised by segmentation, while acknowledging that construction of such models is by nature limited and uncertain. I propose a more diverse range of interpretations of early modern texts related to sleep, with important implications for medical and social history and literary scholarship.