Science, professionalism and the development of medical education in England : a historical sociology.

Education lies at the very epicentre of professional formation, professional behaviour, and professional values. Far-reaching institutional and curricular changes occurred in the education of doctors in the nineteenth century. These changes were related, I argue, to two long-term historical processes - the 'professionalisation' and the 'scientification' of medicine. England is the main geographical focus, but the thesis also encompasses a brief comparative historical sociology of the emergence of 'hospital' and 'laboratory' medical education in France and Germany respectively. Doctors were the first occupational community to claim that their 'professional' status rested on the sure foundation of 'scientific' knowledge and expertise; but the thesis adopts an attitude of anthropological scepticism towards both the alleged cognitive supremacy of 'scientific' medicine and its assumed role in conferring 'professional' privileges. Nevertheless, the rhetorical appeal of scientific culture proved strategically useful to doctors in their collective pursuit of upward social mobility in three particular contexts: the efforts of rank-and-file practitioners to usurp the professional privileges of elite consultants; regular doctors' attempts to eliminate professionally damaging competition from a variety of alternative and irregular healers conventionally labelled as Oquacks'; and the emergent relationship being forged between the medical profession and the modern state. A finely-textured analysis of intra-professional conflict is necessary to account for the politics of medical reform and for prolonged disputation over the future direction of medical education. There were two principal axes of internal conflict between medical interest-groups: the first between general practitioners and consultants; the second between traditional clinicians, many of whom actively opposed the introduction of experimental procedures into medical education, and those who vigorously promoted progressive scientific reform. The latter conflict, which has often been underestimated, is characterised in terms of a structural opposition between the scientific 'word' and the clinical I ward'. Such an explanatory framework offers the historian a more valuable resource than the simple antithesis between 'empiricism' and 'rationalism'. At the end of the Victorian period, apprenticeship had been eliminated and all aspiring doctors were educated in a university. It was through education that doctors were imbued with a set of professional value-orientations, and forged feelings of common identity and solidarity. The instance of Victorian doctors suggests that the historic role of the professions in English society is far less marginal and peripheral than has often been supposed

The Issue Of Teleology In Spinoza: A Defence Of The Standard Interpretation

Current scholarship offers two competing accounts of Spinoza’s views on the issue of teleology, which I label Standard Interpretation and Modest Interpretation respectively. Several texts, including Ethics 1 Appendix, support the Standard Interpretation: they make the point that Spinoza rejects all forms of teleology and teleological explanations. A second group of remarks, most of which occur in Part 3 of the Ethics, suggests that the chief claim of the Modest Interpretation is correct: Spinoza seems to accept some meaningful forms of teleology and teleological explanations. In this thesis, I build a new case for the Standard Interpretation. I assess divine causality and human causality in Spinoza and show that, given other Spinozistic assumptions, one and the same activity underlies all of causation. In particular, two metaphysical commitments preclude Spinoza’s endorsement of divine teleology: causal determinism and necessitarianism. These commitments amount to a failure to meet two conditions that Spinoza places on final causation: (i) that an agent has the ability to choose freely, and (ii) that an agent chooses among a range of possible states. I show that Spinoza’s reasons for rejecting teleology in God also apply mutatis mutandis to the activity of singular things. By providing such an account I hope to debunk one of the main assumptions of the Modest Interpretation: namely, that Spinoza’s fundamental distinction between substance and mode gives him the flexibility to deny teleological activity to God but to attribute it to finite beings

Sports column writing : a comparison of ten 1957 and five 1927 columnists

"It is the purpose of this study to: (1) Compare the sports column style of the 'Golden Era of Sports'(1927) with our modern (1957) columnists and (2) To analyze the content of the modern sports columns as exemplified in the ten writers selected."--Page

Conceptual Foundations for Cost-Benefit Analyses in Homes for the Aging--Quantifying Resident Satisfaction

The purpose of this research project is to develop concepts for doing cost-benefit analyses for governmental and nonprofit homes. Such concepts should facilitate a differential diagnosis which recognizes the wide individual differences among those served. Developing relevant concepts is a first step in measurement. An aim is to develop appropriate concepts and instruments that will make an ordinal measurement of resident satisfaction possible. This study makes no effort to develop monetary measures of either costs or benefits. These measures and the related cost-benefit analyses must await further developments. Of the home's employees, the nurses and nurses' assistants usually have the most prolonged and intimate contact with the residents. The nurses and nurses' assistants often are the home personified in that they provide the bulk of a home's services to the less able residents. This explains why the environment of the home, which includes the values, needs, and attitudes of nurses and nurses' assistants, is believed to influence resident satisfaction

"Unspoken sermons": Christian preaching in British fiction, 1979-2004

Declining church attendance in pluralist Britain indicates that the Christian sermon, once a vibrant literary genre, has become an increasingly unfamiliar form to most readers and writers of fiction. Yet, as this thesis will argue, fictional sermons are still successfully used by novelists. The thesis examines sermons in three genres, and representing three Christian traditions, the Roman Catholic, Anglican and Free Church. The genres discussed are chronicles, as represented by Antonia Byatt and David Lodge, historical novels written by Geraldine Brooks and Jane Rogers and fiction by John Murray and Michael Arditti sited in specific religious, spiritual or ecclesiastical environments. The thesis develops an analytical toolkit, based mainly on rhetorical narratology and cognitive poetics, to examine the current status of fictional sermons. Five case studies follow. The first discusses issues of authority and inspiration in texts, preachers and preaching. The second considers how novelists communicate religious experience, particularly experiences of epiphany and conversion. The third describes contemporary novels' portraits of the troubled preacher. The fourth analyses the language used by novelists in their sermons and the fifth studies how sermons construct discourse communities and religious community. The thesis concludes with a discussion of the significance of memory, imagination and embodiment as agents by which readers - and hearers of actual sermons - are enabled to respond to suasory speech and engage with its proposed alternative world. The thesis is intended as a contribution to the study of religion and literature, to discourse analysis, to homiletical theory and practice and to criticism of contemporary literature

Modernist Poetics and New Age Political Philosophy: A. R. Orage, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot

PhDThis dissertation argues that the political, philosophical, and aesthetic theories developed in The New Age, edited by A. R. Orage, provided a crucial foundation for modernist poetry. By situating the modernist aesthetics of Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and T. S. Eliot in tenris of the complex scene of 19 10s and early 1920s London radicalism, this study develops historically local theoretical terms to read modernist poetry and also suggests the continued relevance of modernist political questions when viewed frorri this perspective. The first chapter analyzes Orage's early political and theosophical writings, demonstrating how these sources informed the journal's interconnected concerns with print culture, radical politics and literature. The second chapter analyzes Ezra Pound's entr6e into the NeIv Age scene in late 1911, situating the criticism and poetry of I Gather the Limbs of Osiris as an important ideological contribution to The New Age's Guild Socialism movement. The third chapter argues that Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound's Vorticist movement was organized as a radical mode of production along New Age lines and that Vorticism's aesthetic products are politically positioned against capitalist production. The fourth and fifth chapters trace The New Age's engagement with orthodox economic theory and Pound and Eliot's interest in radical economics, particularly as they connected to epistemology, money and representation, value, corporate organization, consumption and scarcity. In the final chapter, this analysis of Social Credit is used to arguet.h at the developmento f The Cawos and The WasteL aiid are fundamentally connected to the New Age's radical economic epistemology. As a whole, this dissertationa rguest hat the idiosyncratic political theory of T11eN ew Age shaped the production and consumption of crucial modernist poetic strategies

Social foundations of the mathematics curriculum: a rationale for change

The nature of educational aims as criteria for worthwhile curriculum\ud practice is explored and a cross-section of aims for mathematics education\ud is discussed. An aim for mathematics education which emphasises\ud the social aspect of the subject in its being, its conduct and its\ud applications is identified and epistemological foundations for such a\ud view of the nature of the subject are explored. It is argued that such\ud an epistemological perspective of mathematics would be reflected in the\ud social context of the mathematics classroom, arising from a methodology\ud in which the subject would become more problematic and open to change,\ud investigation and hypothesis.\ud The aims of two major mathematics curriculum development projects\ud (the Nuffield Mathematics Project and the School Mathematics Project)\ud are examined to determine the extent to which their aims may take the\ud 'social' nature of mathematics into account. The probable social\ud context of mathematics classrooms using their materials is postulated in\ud an attempt to characterise the nature of the subject as it is reflected\ud in these materials. A view of the nature of mathematics held by\ud practising teachers and by pupils is then established by drawing upon,\ud and extrapolating from, evidence relating to the social context of\ud mathematics classrooms at primary and secondary level.\ud Conclusions follow, which suggest that fundamental change in mathematics\ud education requires, as a first step, the adoption of a new epistemological\ud perspective of the subject in order that the pursuit of the\ud aim which emphasises the social nature of mathematics is achieved. It\ud is suggested that this, in turn, ultimately could lead to the desired\ud balance in the mathematics curriculum which hitherto has been lacking