Yesterday’s Doctors:The human aspects of medical education in Britain, 1957–93

In the wake of the Second World War there was a movement to counterbalance the apparently increasingly technical nature of medical education. These reforms sought a more holistic model of care and to put people – rather than diseases – back at the centre of medical practice and medical education. This article shows that students often drove the early stages of education reform. Their innovations focused on relationships between doctors and their communities, and often took the form of informal discussions about medical ethics and the social dimensions of primary care. Medical schools began to pursue ‘humanistic’ education more formally from the 1980s onwards, particularly within the context of general practice curricula and with a focus on individual doctor–patient relationships. Overall from the 1950s to the 1990s there was a broad shift in discussions of the human aspects of medical education: from interest in patient communities to individuals; from social concerns to personal characteristics; and from the relatively abstract to the measurable and instrumental. There was no clear shift from ‘less’ to ‘more’ humanistic education, but rather a shift in the perceived goals of integrating human aspects of medical education. The human aspects of medicine show the importance of student activism in driving forward community and ethical medicine, and provide an important backdrop to the rise of competencies within general undergraduate education

‘Not an Exact Science’: Medical Approaches to Age and Sexual Offences in England, 1850-1914

This thesis examines medical approaches to sexual offences in England between 1850 and 1914, with particular attention to law-making and judicial processes. It addresses two key research questions. Firstly, what was the place of medicine in shaping the law on sexual consent and in the implementation of laws on sexual crime? Secondly, can the analytical category of age be used to understand such medical roles? In addressing the first research question, the thesis shows that relationships between medicine, the law and wider society can be understood in terms of negotiation and shared pools of knowledge rather than impact. It demonstrates that medical ideas on sexual crime and sexual consent were deemed sufficiently valuable to be drawn upon widely by different groups, but they were not imposed ‘from above’ by a coherent medical profession. Medical roles thus need to be studied and understood rather than either oversimplified as ‘dominant’ or dismissed as non-existent. In addressing the second research question, the thesis argues that age has been unduly overlooked as a category of analysis in historiography. It shows that ideas about sexual crime shifted in relation to victims of different ages and that age can productively be situated in relation to other analytical categories, particularly class and gender. By moving beyond treating ‘children’ and ‘adults’ as homogeneous categories, this study opens up new ways of understanding histories of medico-legal relations and sexual crime.AHR

Contrasting Environments Associated with Storm Prediction Center Tornado Outbreak Forecasts using Synoptic-Scale Composite Analysis

Tornado outbreaks have significant human impact, so it is imperative forecasts of these phenomena are accurate. As a synoptic setup lays the foundation for a forecast, synoptic-scale aspects of Storm Prediction Center (SPC) outbreak forecasts of varying accuracy were assessed. The percentages of the number of tornado outbreaks within SPC 10% tornado probability polygons were calculated. False alarm events were separately considered. The outbreaks were separated into quartiles using a point-in-polygon algorithm. Statistical composite fields were created to represent the synoptic conditions of these groups and facilitate comparison. Overall, temperature advection had the greatest differences between the groups. Additionally, there were significant differences in the jet streak strengths and amounts of vertical wind shear. The events forecasted with low accuracy consisted of the weakest synoptic-scale setups. These results suggest it is possible that events with weak synoptic setups should be regarded as areas of concern by tornado outbreak forecasters

The Child as Risk: Precocious Girls and Sexual Consent in Late Victorian Britain

The figure of the precocious girl pervaded Victorian culture, yet is poorly understood. This article focuses on concerns about sexual precocity and their influence on age-of-consent debates in the 1880s. It shows that even this single form of precocity (sexual) took multiple forms and was a malleable concept, often used selectively in parliamentary debates to suit particular agendas. These different uses of precocity did have in common, however, a tendency to be situated against the normal as ‘ideal’ rather than only statistically ‘typical’. As precocity was generally measured against the ideal sexual development and behaviour of respectable North European girls, it was as much a value judgement as a measurable concept. Medical, legal and social commentators identified undesirable social groups along lines of race and class for whom precocity apparently was the norm rather than the exception. These girls were excluded – mostly implicitly, but at times explicitly – from the protection of the new age of consent law in 1885. Overall, the case study of sexual consent law shows that the idea of precocity operated to include and exclude certain girls from the ‘at risk’ framework. By embedding these social concerns into law, particularly in relation to girls aged between 13 and 16, the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act also had long-term repercussions. It provides an important backdrop to the continued challenges facing so-called ‘precocious’ girls up to the present day