Audre Lorde: Inspirations Series
Audre Lorde changed the way generations of feminists throughout the world think about intersectional identities, social justice, and the...
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JOANNA BOURKE
Blogs
Here are my latest blogs! Enjoy.
Feb 117 min read
The Strange Case of George Dedlow: Mutilation, Military Surgery, and Weir Mitchell
On the 29 June 1864, a military surgeon in the 21st Kentucky Infantry wrote to his wife. ‘It has been almost one continued stream of...
110
Feb 1018 min read
‘Rachel Comforted’: Spiritualism and the Reconstruction of the Body after Death
Tragedy struck Edith Cecil-Porch Maturin four times between 1900 and 1917. First, her twelve-year-old son died in 1900, followed five...
140
Feb 108 min read
Sleep: A History
Sleep is necessary to life. However, it remains shrouded in mystery, despite the fact that most people spend one third of their lives...
140
Feb 67 min read
Mastectomy, Fear, the Body: A History
In August 1812, eminent novelist Frances Burney described with alarming precision her mounting sense of terror as she prepared to undergo...
60
Feb 523 min read
A (Very Short) History of Pain
Pain is a phantom, a spectre that haunts clinical encounters. Physical suffering is the chief symptom impelling people to seek medical...
60
Feb 517 min read
The Eye: A History
Cicero (106-43 B.C.): ‘Nature has given us eyes to declare our internal emotions’. Paulo Coelho (1947-): ‘The eyes are the mirror of the...
70
Feb 516 min read
The Stomach: A History
Punch divided the stomach into four ‘Faculties’. It called the first the ‘Sustaining Faculty’, which dealt with foods that were essential...
120
Feb 515 min read
Hair: A History
In June 2015, Rachel Dolezal was exposed for having lied about being of African American heritage. Dolezal was head of her local branch...
120
Feb 517 min read
Feet (and Feetishism!)
The foot. Where will feet take us today? In the middle of a pandemic [I first wrote this blog during lock-down!], most of us will be...
20
Feb 516 min read
Clitoris and Penis: A History
This blog comes with a warning: it is not for those delicate of hearing or squeamish of stomach because today I am writing about two sex...
60
Feb 517 min read
Breasts: Free the Nipple!
On 21 June 1986, nine American women removed their shirts in a park in Rochester, New York. They were protesting against a law which...
60
Feb 524 min read
Breast Cancer: Stories and Activism
In September 1971, Ebony magazine published an article that broke a major taboo: a survivor of breast cancer wrote candidly about her...
380
Feb 531 min read
AIDS: A History
Between 25 and 40 million people worldwide have died as a result of opportunistic infections arising from AIDS or Acquired...
30
Feb 528 min read
Tuberculosis: A History
What does tuberculosis look like? If we are thinking about the early-nineteenth century, we might imagine an emaciated, white, male...
70
Feb 523 min read
Sickle Cell Disease: A History
In April 1973, cinemas throughout America began screening a tearjerking love story, the plot of which revolved around sickle cell...
40
Feb 523 min read
Polio: A History (The Great Cat Massacre of 1916!)
The Great Cat Massacre in New York City began in July 1916. By the end of that month, 72,000 cats and around 8,000 dogs had been...
40
Feb 525 min read
Dementia: A History
A few weeks before writing this blog, I was launching a book that I had recently published. A former PhD student of mine and someone I...
20
Feb 524 min read
Sex Work: A History
To whom does a woman’s body belong? In mid-nineteenth century Britain, this question provoked impassioned debates between moralists,...
40
Feb 520 min read
Abstinence: A History
Is sex a ‘good thing’? Is celibacy dangerous? How can we understand the explosive violence of Incels, those young men (primarily) whose...
10
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