Sylvia Beach and women's scholarly communities under occupation : the diary of Madeleine Blaess

In 1939 Madeleine Blaess, a languages graduate, left her home in England for Paris to begin doctoral research at the Sorbonne. Unable to escape Paris before the German invasion in spring 1940, she was trapped in France for the duration of the war. The letters she wrote to her parents during the Phoney War, and the diary she began in October 1940 and continued until after the Liberation, are a fascinating account of her life as a postgraduate scholar in wartime. Through these written traces we glimpse women-run social and intellectual communities and businesses to which many women students turned for scholarly and moral support and, occasionally, practical and financial succour. This article draws on Madeleine’s letters and diary to describe and evaluate the importance of these extra-curricular networks in supporting women students during wartime with a particular focus on the bookshop and library Shakespeare and Company, run by Sylvia Beach

Mental Distress Under Occupation: The Journal of Madeleine Blaess

Madeleine Blaess a British doctoral student studying at the Sorbonne was trapped in Paris unable to return home to York for the duration of the Occupation. In October 1940 she began a diary which she kept diligently until September 1944. This unique testimony written from the perspective of a British student at liberty to roam wartime Paris, focuses more on the civilian struggle through the everyday than on the political and military situation which Blaess, vulnerable to arrest, thinks wise to mention as little as possible. This exhaustively documented, voluminous record of the minutiae of a daily struggle with material hardship discloses a struggle with mental illness articulated and managed through the writing of the diary. That diaries can have a therapeutic purpose for writers under mental strain is axiomatic and this article examines a variety of palliative strategies both deliberate and involuntary invoked through the writing process. In so doing, the article will survey the incidence and causes of civilian mental distress on the home front over the period; an area of inquiry which, other than recent work into the psychological impact of Allied bombing of civilians, has been largely neglected in recent work foregrounding and valorising the historical importance of life-writing sources in the field of Occupation studies

Peritoneal dialysis prescription in children: bedside principles for optimal practice

There is no unique optimal peritoneal dialysis prescription for all children, although the goals of ultrafiltration and blood purification are universal. In turn, a better understanding of the physiology of the peritoneal membrane, as a dynamic dialysis membrane with an exchange surface area recruitment capacity and unique permeability characteristics, results in the transition from an empirical prescription process based on clinical experience alone to the potential for a personalized prescription with individually adapted fill volumes and dwell times. In all cases, the prescribed exchange fill volume should be scaled for body surface area (ml/m2), and volume enhancement should be conducted based on clinical tolerance and intraperitoneal pressure measurements (IPP; cmH2O). The exchange dwell times should be determined individually and adapted to the needs of the patient, with particular attention to phosphate clearance and ultrafiltration capacity. The evolution of residual kidney function and the availability of new, more physiologic, peritoneal dialysis fluids (PDFs) also influence the prescription process. An understanding of all of these principles is integral to the provision of clinically optimal PD

Writing a scholarly occupation: student women diarists (1940-1944)

Through the examination of diaries written by four women students in occupied Paris, this article aims to show how each of them struggled through adversity with great courage and resilience to pursue their scholarly ambitions. In placing their stories within the broader social and political context of the Occupation, supposedly inimical to the women’s pursuit of self-fulfilment, the article echoes more recent histories of women’s lives during the period which show that women were not necessarily cowed by reactionary legislation and ideology. These young women, raised and educated in the inter-war period when first-wave feminism was at its height, were resourceful and creative and they were determined to carry on with their studies in the face of considerable practical and material difficulties

Pilote 'hebdomadaire' and the evolution of French bande dessinee from 1959 to 1974

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre- DSC:DXN054008 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo