Browse all Reviews
![](https://reviews.history.ac.uk/sites/reviews/files/styles/thumbnail/public/images/Lucey_Crossman.jpg?itok=zTt9NMG7)
This collection of essays by Donnacha Seán Lucey and Virginia Crossman, which emanates from two workshops held in Dublin in 2011 and 2012, is a worthwhile contribution to the history of healthcare and voluntarism in Britain and Ireland, with chapters from a range of well-known scholars in the fields of healthcare and welfare history.
![](https://reviews.history.ac.uk/sites/reviews/files/styles/thumbnail/public/images/plamper.jpg?itok=Oov3O6jw)
In the latest of our occasional Reviews in History podcast series, Dr Jordan Landes talks to Professor Jan Plamper about his new work on the history of emotions, a subject which he has memorably described as a 'rocket taking off'.
Jan Plamper is Professor of History at Goldsmiths, University of London.
![](https://reviews.history.ac.uk/sites/reviews/files/styles/thumbnail/public/images/plamper.jpg?itok=Oov3O6jw)
The history of emotions, a rocket taking off according to Jan Plamper, seems to be screaming ‘know thyself!’ at psychology in all its various forms, but most specifically at neuroscience. The development of a hard science of emotions has involved, with every step ‘forward’, the forgetting of the previous step.
![](https://reviews.history.ac.uk/sites/reviews/files/styles/thumbnail/public/images/doyle.jpg?itok=vMXMtLH8)
Barry Doyle’s new study addresses a subject area that has lately attracted much interest from social, political and medical historians. The reasons why Britain’s inter-war health services have become such a hot topic are not hard to discern.
![](https://reviews.history.ac.uk/sites/reviews/files/styles/thumbnail/public/images/hayward.jpg?itok=UYLto4AK)
The human, the person as a category, may become a historical subject. To take this step, however, is to begin to destabilise the basic terms with which to think about experience and agency. Hence the need for recourse to a portmanteau term, which does not have to be and perhaps could not be clearly defined, like ‘the psyche’.
![](https://reviews.history.ac.uk/sites/reviews/files/styles/thumbnail/public/images/michaels.jpg?itok=JDtxt6fi)
Over the last 100 years, childbirth has become increasingly synonymous with the hospital. Around 1900, hospital births were the exception; within less than three generations, it was almost unheard of for women in most industrialised countries to have their babies anywhere else.
![](https://reviews.history.ac.uk/sites/reviews/files/styles/thumbnail/public/images/the_story_of_pain.jpg?itok=WM0EscXh)
In the blurb to The Story of Pain, Joanna Bourke provocatively asks 'Everyone knows what pain is, surely?' Every sentient person will experience a diverse range of pains throughout their lifetimes.
![](https://reviews.history.ac.uk/sites/reviews/files/styles/thumbnail/public/images/laxton.jpg?itok=kn1JrRDe)
In 1862, Henry Littlejohn was appointed to the newly created position of Medical Officer of Health (MOH) for Edinburgh. Three years later, he published a Report on the Sanitary Condition of Scotland’s capital city, then home to more than 170,000 people.
![](https://reviews.history.ac.uk/sites/reviews/files/styles/thumbnail/public/images/Duncan.jpg?itok=Z162IDaE)
Alcohol policy never ceases to be controversial.
![](https://reviews.history.ac.uk/sites/reviews/files/styles/thumbnail/public/images/linker.jpg?itok=WNdDbbEd)
In 1919, Douglas C. McMurtrie, Director of the Red Cross Institute for Crippled and Disabled Men, remarked that, ‘beyond reaches of history, the disabled man has been a castaway of society’.