‘Blood made White’: the relationship between blood and breastmilk in Early Modern England

This article explores the idea that breastmilk was considered to be a form of blood in the humoral system

“Before Midnight she had Miscarried” : Women, Men and Miscarriage in Early Modern England

Reproduction and Childbirth in the early modern era have sometimes been represented as a uniquely feminine experience. Similarly, studies of domestic medicine have in the past overlooked the role that men played in domestic health care practices. This article builds on recent work that resituates men within both of these discourses by considering the ways in which men understood, discussed and responded to the threat and occurrence of miscarriage in the women they knew. It considers a range of medical literature, spiritual diaries and letters to illustrate that men were a central feature of many women’s experiences of miscarriage.Peer reviewedSubmitted Versio

Is gender a learned performance or a performance based on previous sporting experiences? A comparative case study of female university football and rugby athletes in the east midlands

Gender inequality still exists and participation rates within different sports which are adjudged to be masculine or feminine. Previous studies have outlined how gender in sport is contested. However, few studies have attempted to draw a comparison between two sports. Using a Bourdieusian framework, the principal aim of the present study was to explore how playing a masculine sport informs an agent’s construction of femininity in University level football and rugby. An understanding of how participants negotiated the gendered sporting practices and gendering of their bodies was sought. Participants were recruited based on a purposive sampling method where in total, 30 athletes (15 footballers and 15 rugby players) completed a questionnaire. Of this initial sample, 5 participants from each group took part in an unstructured group interview. Both questionnaires and interviews were analysed using the three stage qualitative analysis procedure: data reduction, data display and conclusion drawing; interviews were transcribed and coded using axial thematic analysis. Both rugby and football players faced similar gendered discriminatory experiences from schools, peers and in some cases strong sexist ideologies from teachers. However, due to the hyper masculinity associated within rugby, players faced considerable resistance from external sources - particularly from peers. The development of a specific embodied and gendered habitus within the field of rugby, in particular, and football was described. The findings increases current knowledge regarding female participation within the sports and offers insight into why participation differs between the two sports thus highlight ways to engage more females in these sports

In Synch but Not in Step: Circadian Clock Circuits Regulating Plasticity in Daily Rhythms

The suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) is a network of neural oscillators that program daily rhythms in mammalian behavior and physiology. Over the last decade much has been learned about how SCN clock neurons coordinate together in time and space to form a cohesive population. Despite this insight, much remains unknown about how SCN neurons communicate with one another to produce emergent properties of the network. Here we review the current understanding of communication among SCN clock cells and highlight a collection of formal assays where changes in SCN interactions provide for plasticity in the waveform of circadian rhythms in behavior. Future studies that pair analytical behavioral assays with modern neuroscience techniques have the potential to provide deeper insight into SCN circuit mechanisms

Hospital admissions in older people with visual impairment in Britain.

BACKGROUND: We aimed to assess the risk of hospital admission associated with visual impairment in a representative sample of older people living in the community in Britain. METHODS: DESIGN: Prospective study of hospital admission in a population-based sample of community dwelling people aged 75 years and above in Britain. SETTING: 53 general practices. PARTICIPANTS: 14,394 participants in the MRC Trial of Assessment and Management of Older people in the Community. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE: Hospital admission. RESULTS: Visually impaired older people had 238.7 admissions/1000 person-years compared to 169.7 admissions/1000 person-years in people with good vision: age and sex adjusted rate ratio (RR) 1.32 (95% CI 1.19 to 1.47). Adjusting for a wide range of potential explanatory factors largely eliminated this association: RR 1.06 (95% CI 0.94 to 1.20). However, adjusting for a more limited range of confounding factors, excluding those factors possibly a consequence of reduced vision, left a modest increased risk: RR 1.19 (95% CI 1.06 to 1.34). CONCLUSION: The association between visual impairment and rate of hospital admission can be attributed to higher levels of co-morbidity and reduced functional ability among people with reduced vision. Visual impairment is likely to be an important contributor to reduced functional ability, but other factors may also be involved

Primary prevention of age related macular degeneration.

Current evidence does not support a protective role for dietary antioxidant vitamin

‘They are called Imperfect men’: Male infertility and sexual health in early modern England.

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial reproduction and distribution of the work, in any medium, provided the original work is not altered or transformed in any way, and that the work is properly cited. For commercial re-use, please contact [email protected] of early modern gender and medicine have tended to focus on the female infertility. Discussions that have included male reproductive failure have considered sexual ability and impotence, rather than infertility. Nonetheless, fathering children was important to male social standing and the fulfilment of their patriarchal roles. This article will demonstrate that male infertility was not absent from medical literature, but appeared in a variety of settings including tests for infertility, seventeenth-century handbills for treatments and surgical treatises. It will show that medical and surgical writers accepted that men could be rendered infertile, but still sexually capable, in a variety of ways. Moreover, the article will demonstrate that seventeenth-century surgeons expected male readers to be concerned about their reproductive potential and constructed a framework of efficacy based upon their ability to secure on-going fertility.Peer reviewe

“A Toste wett in Muskadine”: Preventing Miscarriage in Early Modern English Recipe Books c.1600–1780

© 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND licence, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Discussions about early modern miscarriage have considered in detail how women rationalised miscarriage framing the emotional burden of loss within the context of providence and sin. This valuable interpretation considers women from the moment at which the miscarriage had occurred. The experience of miscarriage, though, did not start at the moment of loss, it began with the first concerns that a foetus was at risk. By the time women were considering their sins women had already read the signs of their bodies and, perhaps, consumed remedies to prevent the miscarriage from occurring. This article investigates remedies designed to prevent miscarriage that were shared in manuscript recipe collections. These reveal a female-centred community of knowledge that favoured recipes attested by women’s experiences. The medicines circulating in early modern recipe collections emphasise the central position of women’s sensations and emotions to antenatal care.Peer reviewe