Catherine Mills Research Articles

Race, Reproduction, and Biopolitics: A Review Essay.

This review essay critically examines Catherine Mills's Biopolitics (2018) and Camisha Russell's The Assisted Reproduction of Race (2018). Although distinct works, the centrality of race and reproduction provides a point of connection and an opening into reframing contemporary debates within bioethics and biopolitics. In reviewing these books together I hope to show how biopolitical theory and critical philosophy of race can be useful in looking at bioethical problems from a new perspective that open up different kinds of analyses, especially around historically embedded problems like institutional racism and the legacies of colonialism in healthcare.

BIOPOLITICS AMONG THE DISCIPLINES

ABSTRACTA new wave of publications attempts to bring together theory and history in order to reconsider the past, present, and future in light of a looming catastrophe. Whether in political theory, sociology, anthropology, or intellectual history, scholars are attempting to reflect about the present beyond the old boundaries that separate left and right, inner and outer, civilian and solider, friend and enemy. Three recent publications, by Catherine Mills, Didier Fassin, and an anthology edited by Devin Pendas, Mark Roseman, and Richard Wetzel, do so by considering the growth of biopolitical critique in their respective disciplines.

Clockworks 2

At start, there was Marshall Tymn founding his series Greenwood Press, Contributions to Study of Science and Fantasy, in which first volume was The Mechanical God: Machines in Science (1982). This volume was edited by Thomas P. Dunn and Richard D. Erlich, Introduction by Brian W. Aldiss and collected eighteen essays by eighteen scholars on subtitle's topic. Mechanical God was followed in 1983 by Number 7 in Contributions series, Erlich and Dunn's Clockwork Worlds: Mechanized Environments in SF.Mechanical God and Clockwork Worlds decent reviews and a somewhat surprising number of positive informal comments on Dunn/ Erlich contribution of a of Works Useful for Study of Machines in Science Fiction and a of Works Useful for Study of Mechanized Environments in SF: a biblio-, filmo-, video-, discographical effort to provide a briefly annotated list of basic works for study of each theme. So Dunn and I decided that our most immediately useful project for academic study of sf might be to join scholars putting together basic tools for research. We got professional help in areas outside our expertise, and produced a combined and expanded volume ungainly title Clockworks: A Multimedia of Works Useful for Study of Human/ Machine Interface in SF. The formal credits list Erlich and Dunn as compilers, Assisted by Edward K. Montgomery, Catherine Mills Royer, and D. Scott DeLoach, though others helped project, including Chad Dresbach (who supplemented Dunn's extensive knowledge of pinball machines his own expertise in that area and in developing medium of video games and their early successors), and Jeffrey R. Wilson and Vincent Moore, who compiled core of section on music.Multimedia was a necessary phrase for us to use because appeared in Greenwood series Bibliographies and Indexes in World Literature (Number 37), and word Bibliography had to appear in title. The multimedia part, though, was crucial, or at least our most original contribution.In our Introduction, Dunn and I-I've moved voice here to just Rich Erlich-described as an analytical, selected list, comments, of works useful for study of human/machine interface in SF, stressing English-language works produced 1895-1990, and expanded upon analytical by noting sections into which List had been divided, with works arranged alphabetically within each section:(1) Reference Works(2) Anthologies and Collections(3) Fiction(4) Literary Criticism(5) Stage, Screen, and Television Drama(6) Stage, Screen, and Television Drama Criticism(7) Graphic and Plastic Arts(8) Music(9) Background ReadingClockworks was published in 1993, and Dunn and I mostly moved on to other things, including, in my case, film studies and occasional consulting on movie scripts. Now and then, though, friends would recommend books relevant to the human/machine interface, and I saw on my own a number of relevant movies. As cyberpunk and its successors rolled on, human relationships our machines-in a widening sense of machine-became still more pronounced, intimate, and unavoidable. And, significantly for usefulness of project, those relationships continued to be expressed in a number of different artistic media, which reflected ways of life that, for good and for ill, were becoming increasingly science fictional. Somewhat to my snobbish and/or philistine expectations, even graphic novels and video games evolved into sophisticated art forms that often addressed human/machine interface.So I found myself fitfully preparing a Supplement to List, a Clockworks 2, and eventually had a significant number of entries. For my convenience, and that of my students, I put supplement online. …

Making Fetal Persons: Fetal Homicide, Ultrasound, and the Normative Significance of Birth

Making Fetal PersonsFetal Homicide, Ultrasound, and the Normative Significance of Birth Catherine Mills In early 2012, the then attorney general of Western Australia, Christian Porter, announced plans to introduce fetal homicide laws that would “create a new offence of causing death or grievous bodily harm to an unborn child through an unlawful assault on its mother” (Porter 2012). While well established in the United States, fetal homicide laws are only beginning to take shape in Australia.1 The proposed law would mean that if an offender assaulted a woman and thereby caused the death of the fetus she was gestating, the courts would be required to impose a sentence of life imprisonment in all but exceptional circumstances—equivalent to the penalty for murder. While the proposed fetal homicide law is said to give appropriate recognition to the grief and suffering of the woman involved—and while it may help to do that—this is certainly not all it would do.2 For it would also give existence to a new legal subject in Western Australia, that is, the “unborn child”: currently, under Western Australian law a child is only legally capable of being murdered when already external to the mother’s body. Thus, the woman’s body constitutes a kind of “natural” basis for a legal boundary—one that the proposed law transgresses and perhaps obliterates, at the same time as it purports to recognize the trauma associated with the transgression and obliteration of that boundary by another. Fetal homicide laws thus traverse difficult territory in the maternal-fetal relationship, in which actions against one person come to constitute a crime against another. Significantly, these laws are typically formulated to provide legal protection for pregnant women against the intrusions of a third party against [End Page 88] their person. However, it may be that they can also be interpreted more generally to provide legal protection for the fetus against others. So construed, such laws open up a danger for pregnant women themselves, insofar as their actions threaten the life and well-being of the fetus they carry. One recent example of the exploitation of this ambiguity in fetal homicide laws is the case of Bei Bei Shuai, a young woman of Chinese descent who faced felony charges of murder in Indiana after a failed suicide attempt resulted in the death of the thirty three week old fetus she was gestating (Pilkington 2011, 2012). If a woman’s actions against herself, leading to the death of her fetus, can be legally construed as murder, where does this leave the law on abortion? The Western Australian attorney general insisted that the proposed law would not affect laws on abortion in any way, since it would not encroach on a woman’s right to make decisions about her pregnancy (Porter 2012). But a woman’s decisional rights in regards to her pregnancy are at best an unstable dividing line; at worst, it is precisely her decision to terminate a pregnancy—that is, to intentionally bring about the death of the fetus—that substantiates a murder charge. Indeed, at the crux of the Shuai case was her suicide note, in which she apparently stated her intent to kill her fetus. This ambiguity between abortion and fetal homicide has been the topic of much discussion in legal literature, and it raises significant questions that bear further investigation. For one, it raises in a particularly pointed way questions about the moral and legal significance of birth, and the bearing it has on the status of the fetus. Birth has historically been significant in establishing personhood, but this reliance on birth is challenged by the shift to treating the fetus as a person for the purposes of some areas of the law. The further question then arises of whether that status must remain consistent across domains of the law, such as those addressed to the death of a fetus at the hands of a third party, and those on abortion. While these questions have been well canvassed in legal discussions, we might also consider the impact that technologies such as obstetric ultrasound have on notions of fetal life and personhood. Advances in medical technologies appear...

Regulating Health and Safety in the British Mining Industries, 1800-1914, by Catherine Mills

Regulating Health and Safety in the British Mining Industries, 1800-1914, by Catherine Mills

Catherine Mills, Regulation Health and Safety in the British Mining Industries, 1800–1914 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), pp. xxv + 284, £60.00, hardback, ISBN: 978-0-7546-6087-3.

Scholars seeking a pathway through the complexities of safety legislation in the British mining industries in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have long been in debt to extraordinarily conscientious contemporary and near-contemporary chroniclers of that labyrinthine body of law, no less tortuously convoluted than that governing the railways. There has long been a need for a modern synthesis and interpretation and those have now been provided by Catherine Mills in a study that casts its net wide. Mills engages with the much-overlooked growth of government debate, inspectorates, the actions and inaction of the Home Office, the demographic specifics of occupational health and, by implication, the deep origins of a mid- and later twentieth-century risk society. She deftly simplifies the impenetrably complex or, where she needs to, creatively complicates a bewilderingly complex cache of parliamentary and administrative evidence. Mills locates her study in a now thriving interdisciplinary literature which has its deep origins in Oliver MacDonagh’s work on the growth of government and the early Victorian state, but which has been extended and deepened by political and socio–medical scholars concerned with the history of occupational health and the roles played by the philanthropists, parliamentarians, civil servants and civil scientists, employees and trade unions in the quest for reform. However, this is a clear-eyed, determinedly non-Whiggish, and at times downbeat account. The author touches on the ways in which nineteenth-century print media sensationalised major mining disasters in an effort to hasten reform. Some of these catastrophes are much less well known than others. Thus, in Northumberland and Durham between 1805 and 1819, no fewer than seven major flooding episodes led to the deaths of approximately two hundred and sixty colliers (p. xv). Only one of these accidents killed fewer than thirty men. Mills also gives due attention to collapsing roofs and faulty ladders, and shows how explosions attributable to coal dust and methane contributed to the dismal register of death. But the most compelling part of her argument revolves around ‘invisible’ occupational mortality, most of it attributable to long undifferentiated variants of lung disease. In the earlier nineteenth century, afflicted colliers and workers in the metalliferous sector had a life expectancy at birth comparable to slum-dwellers in Liverpool and Manchester. Half-a-century later, J.S. Haldane concluded that conditions in the Cornish mining industry had deteriorated rather than improved: approximately eight years’ exposure as a machinist in a still, in many respects, pre-industrial working environment would be likely to lead to a premature and horrifically painful death from lung disease (p. 205). Over time, and intensively so between the 1840s and the early 1870s, the public visibility of large-scale disaster and the ‘immorality’ of near-naked workers labouring deep in the bowels of the earth, increased public and parliamentary concern. Owners, radicals believed, must be held either compulsorily, or – classic Victorian legislative evasion – ‘permissively’, to account. In telling pages, Mills describes how helter-skelter mid-century developments – between 1852 and 1854 no fewer than four select committees pondered the operation of the seminal government-backed inspectorial act of 1850 – began to turn the tide in favour of more effective regulation (pp. 99–126). But the metalliferous sector, which employed approximately fifty thousand workers as compared to nearly a quarter-of-a-million labourers in coal mines, lagged badly behind. Small-scale non-ferrous enterprises remained geographically isolated and failed to expand their scale of production. During the final thirty years of the nineteenth century, the sector stagnated in the face of foreign competition, and clung to anciently embedded payment systems based on sub-contracting. A form of pre-industrial individualism and localism proved inimical to the introduction of tougher regulation. In one sense, Mills’s monograph comprises two studies in one (note the plural in the title). Coal mining in Yorkshire and tin mining in Cornwall had about as much in common as chalk and cheese. Nevertheless, the two were repeatedly yoked together in later nineteenth-century administrative discourse and parliamentary debate, and numerous select committees, many of them packed with owners and share-holders deeply opposed to any erosion of permissiveness, sought to extend regulations from one sector to another. Mills’s principal achievement is to have worked her way through a maze of technical, legal, legislative and administrative source material and bring order to chaos. Eschewing explanatory short-cuts, she has made sense of a forbiddingly complicated topic. Discussion of the now half-forgotten growth of government debate, and the role that MacDonagh ascribed – or failed to ascribe – to agency in his original schema becomes repetitious. Nevertheless, this is an impressive synthesis and it is likely to remain essential reading for specialists in the field for a long time to come. One final point: either there has been a printing error or the author deliberately opted to omit any kind of acknowledgement to fellow historians and scholarly labourers at the coalface.

Catherine Mills, Regulating Health and Safety in the British Mining Industries, 1800-1914

A review of Regulating health and safety in the British mining industries, 1800–1914 by Catherine Mills

Regulating health and safety in the British mining industries, 1800-1914 - By Catherine Mills

The Economic History ReviewVolume 64, Issue 2 p. 684-685 Regulating health and safety in the British mining industries, 1800–1914 – By Catherine Mills JAMIE L. BRONSTEIN, JAMIE L. BRONSTEIN New Mexico State UniversitySearch for more papers by this author JAMIE L. BRONSTEIN, JAMIE L. BRONSTEIN New Mexico State UniversitySearch for more papers by this author First published: 12 April 2011 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0289.2010.00578_13.xRead the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Volume64, Issue2May 2011Pages 684-685 RelatedInformation

<em>Regulating Health and Safety in the British Mining Industries, 1800––1914</em>, by Catherine Mills

Reviewed by: Regulating Health and Safety in the British Mining Industries, 1800–1914 Marjorie Levine-Clark (bio) Regulating Health and Safety in the British Mining Industries, 1800–1914, by Catherine Mills; pp. xxv + 284. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2010, £70.00, $134.95. After the recent mining disasters in Chile and West Virginia, mine safety and the occupational health of miners are clearly issues of great urgency. Catherine Mills explores these issues in the context of nineteenth-century Britain, when industrial legislation was in its infancy. By comparing the development of legislative regulations concerning the mining of coal and of metals such as iron, lead, tin, and copper, Mills demonstrates very different trajectories regarding the histories of occupational protections in these industries. Mills relies on parliamentary papers and debates, mining inspectors’ reports, newspapers, and mining journals to chart the path of reform. She argues that the economic significance of coal mining to the British economy, the visibility of the dangers to coal miners, and the demands of colliers themselves drew reformers and [End Page 138] politicians to the cause of coal mine safety much more readily than did the more internal ailments and self-sufficiency rhetoric of metal miners. The “marked differences in visibility of hazard” put coal mining on the occupational safety agenda (38), while leaving metal mining behind. There is much that is valuable in this study. Mills carefully explores the ways in which changing technologies not only created greater industrial productivity but also increased the dangers for mine workers. The very success of coal mining, due to the rate of production demanded by industrialization, brought more laborers into mining, thus increasing the numbers of workers affected by dangerous conditions such as falling shafts and ventilation problems. It was the impact of explosions in coal mines and the numbers of colliers who died at one time, however, that created an active humanitarian interest calling for reform in coal. Even more importantly, coal miners organized themselves to demand change in the 1840s and forced government conversion to at least the principle of regulation. Colliers and inspectors continued to push for improvements in both safety provisions and their oversight. Increasing scientific knowledge concerning the dangers of mining over the course of the last quarter of the century also contributed to an environment in favor of more regulation. By examining both coal and metal mining, Mills deftly illustrates that attitudes toward state intervention among workers were diverse and contradictory. Paralleling the arguments of Jamie Bronstein on workers’ compensation in Caught in the Machinery: Workplace Accidents and Injured Workers in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2008), Mills shows that while colliers saw a positive role for the state in protecting their health, metal miners stressed their independence and self-sufficiency to the point that they eschewed state assistance. Traditions of bargaining and control over labor practices by metal miners—particularly those in Cornwall—created a workforce that was actually hostile to reform and reluctant to organize formally. Indeed, metal miners accepted the dangers of their work as part of the job, for which their own skill was the best protection. Without workforce buy-in, regulation could not get very far. Additionally, metal mining by the second half of the century was generally suffering industrial decline, and less attention was paid to the health of metal miners. When the first act regulating the metalliferous mining industry came on the books in 1872, it was largely derivative of legislation protecting coal miners and failed to address the problems unique to mining metals, particularly the causes of miners’ pthisis. While safety regulations led to a decrease in mortality for colliers, this was not the case for metal miners, whose occupational mortality actually went up significantly at the end of the century. Unfortunately, these valuable observations are marred by a rather clunky theoretical framework, lack of chronological clarity, and editorial errors. As is the case with many studies of the development of Victorian state intervention, Mills aims to place herself within the historiographical debates regarding the nature of government growth. Yet instead of staking her own territory, Mills remains in constant conversation with Oliver MacDonagh’s model of government intervention, continually checking her evidence against MacDonagh’s framework...

Regulating Health and Safety in the British Mining Industries, 1800-1914 (review)

Reviewed by: Regulating Health and Safety in the British Mining Industries, 1800-1914 P. W. J. Bartrip Catherine Mills . Regulating Health and Safety in the British Mining Industries, 1800-1914. Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2010. xxv + 284 pp. Ill. $114.95 (978-0-7546-6087-3). The history of occupational health and safety, for years a neglected research area, has received much attention of late, especially in the United States and United Kingdom. Mills's book, based on a Ph.D. thesis and heralded by several journal articles since 2004, adds to the flow of recent work on Britain. The history of dust disease among coal miners, long overlooked despite its ubiquity, was addressed in Johnston and McIvor's "bottom-up" Miners' Lung, which appeared in Ashgate's "Studies in Labour History" series in 2007. Mills has little to say about the miner's experience. In fact, the first half of her book barely touches on miners' health as opposed to mines safety. Her first four chapters examine in detail the development of regulation in coal mining, with emphasis on the various acts of parliament (1842, 1850, 1855, and 1860), and the introduction and operation of mines inspectors. She makes some attempt to place these regulatory developments within the theoretical context of the "Macdonagh model" of government growth, first posited more than fifty years ago. The effort, however, is half-hearted. She ignores much of the voluminous literature on the "nineteenth-century revolution in government," along with the evolving state of debate on the issue. Miners' health looms somewhat larger in the second half of the book, where metalliferous mining is discussed, but this volume is mainly a history of safety rather than health. The first legislation covering metalliferous mines dates from 1872. But with industries in terminal decline and the relationship between dust [End Page 683] and disease badly misunderstood, the problem of respiratory disease was not addressed effectively. As the author acknowledges, she traverses some well-worn ground in addressing the history of health, safety, and welfare in coal mines. Many historians have explored the origins and passage of the 1842 Mines and Collieries Act in particular. Mills justifies her study partly in terms of her use of a wide range of rich source material, some of it previously underused, which allows her to provide a comprehensive account of legal developments. It is surprising, therefore, that she has relied almost entirely on printed sources and made no use of the National Archives. There are other omissions too. Notwithstanding that J. S. Haldane is described as an expert on mine gases and a key player in the reform process, Mills ignores Martin Goodman's biography of him: Suffer & Survive (2007). One of Mills's objectives is to explain why safety regulation for coal mines substantially predated the introduction of similar measures for metalliferous mines. She emphasizes visibility: "[C]ontemporaries looked to the most visible hazards, which were not necessarily the most frequent or dangerous" (p. 243). She draws an analogy with the strong public response to the Ladbroke Grove rail crash of 1999, in which thirty-one people died, and the relative lack of public concern about the thousands killed each year on the roads. This explanation is unconvincing, however, given that many mining accidents, whether arising from coal or metal extraction, occurred below ground and hence out of sight, while most transport accidents, whether involving trains or automobiles, occur in plain sight. The real lesson appears to be that large-scale disasters stimulate immediate public responses, whereas disaster "by installment" arouses much less interest. Regulating Health is not easy reading, for Mills is no literary stylist. Tautologies, oxymorons, and other solecisms abound. The book also carries far too many typographical errors. Among the more grievous: Lord Ashley, the central figure in early mines regulation, appears at various points as Lord Ashleigh or Lord Shaftsbury (not Shaftesbury), and the names of several authors, including that doyen of occupational medicine Ludwig Teleky, are misspelled. P. W. J. Bartrip University of Oxford Copyright © 2010 The Johns Hopkins University Press

Mark Jackson (ed.), Health and the modern home, Routledge Studies in the Social History of Medicine, No. 31, New York and Abingdon, Routledge, 2007, pp. ix, 339, £60.00 (hardback 978-0-415-95610-9).

Mark Jackson (ed.), Health and the modern home, Routledge Studies in the Social History of Medicine, No. 31, New York and Abingdon, Routledge, 2007, pp. ix, 339, £60.00 (hardback 978-0-415-95610-9).

Normative Violence, Vulnerability, and Responsibility

Research Article| September 01 2007 Normative Violence, Vulnerability, and Responsibility Catherine Mills Catherine Mills Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google differences (2007) 18 (2): 133–156. https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391-2007-005 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Catherine Mills; Normative Violence, Vulnerability, and Responsibility. differences 1 September 2007; 18 (2): 133–156. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391-2007-005 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll Journalsdifferences Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Brown University and differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies2007 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Critical Exchange You do not currently have access to this content.

Toward a Nonviolent Ethics: Response to Catherine Mills

Toward a Nonviolent Ethics: Response to Catherine Mills

Contesting the Political: Butler and Foucault on Power and Resistance

Journal of Political PhilosophyVolume 11, Issue 3 p. 253-272 Contesting the Political: Butler and Foucault on Power and Resistance Catherine Mills, Catherine Mills Australian National UniversitySearch for more papers by this author Catherine Mills, Catherine Mills Australian National UniversitySearch for more papers by this author First published: 04 August 2003 https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9760.00177Citations: 28AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume11, Issue3September 2003Pages 253-272 RelatedInformation

Magnetic resonance imaging: Atlas of the head, neck, and spine. Edited by Catherine Mills, Jack deGroot, Jonathan Posin Lea & Febiger, Philadelphia, 1988, 295 pp. $98.50

Head & NeckVolume 11, Issue 5 p. 478-478 Book Reviews Magnetic resonance imaging: Atlas of the head, neck, and spine. Edited by Catherine Mills, Jack deGroot, Jonathan Posin Lea & Febiger, Philadelphia, 1988, 295 pp. $98.50 Phillip Stratemeier MD, Phillip Stratemeier MD Oklahoma City, OklahomaSearch for more papers by this author Phillip Stratemeier MD, Phillip Stratemeier MD Oklahoma City, OklahomaSearch for more papers by this author First published: September/October 1989 https://doi.org/10.1002/hed.2880110517AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume11, Issue5September/October 1989Pages 478-478 RelatedInformation

Harry Raymond Ing, 31 July 1899--23 September 1974.

Raymond Ing was a pioneer in establishing the subject of pharmacological chemistry, or as he preferred to call it chemical pharmacology, in Great Britain. Harry Raymond Ing was born at Alford, Lincolnshire, on 31 July 1899. His father and mother were both of Herefordshire stock. His father was orphaned at an early age and became a solicitor’s clerk, which he remained all his life. Raymond remembers him as an easy-going friendly person without ambition. His mother, in spite of much ill health, was an intensely active and ambitious person who dominated her husband and three sons and in spite of her husband’s limited situation always encouraged her children to think that they could make their mark in the world. Ing married in 1941 Catherine Mills Francis, an English scholar who subsequently became a university lecturer in English at Oxford. He and his wife had in common a profound interest in the meaning of words and structure of language. Ing’s education and career were closely bound up with Oxford. At 12 years old he won a scholarship to Oxford High School, a small grammar school which had as its main objective the training of boys for admission to Oxford University. The main subjects taught were Latin, English grammar and mathematics; Ing was especially grateful for the thorough training he received in Latin. He also owed a great deal to his science master who first aroused his interest in natural science and taught him to enjoy experimental work. During the last year at school a Fellow of New College, A. F. Walden, took three of the boys and gave them, at no charge, regular tutorials in physical chemistry. Walden later became Ing’s tutor at New College. Ing had tremendous admiration for Walden, recalling how he went away from his tutorials so excited about chemistry that frequently he did not get to bed until long after midnight.

Mammy Water: folk beliefs and psychotic elaborations in Liberia.

Beliefs in a spirit called ‘Mammy Water’ are widely shared by the population of the West African Republic of Liberia. Mammy Water is usually described as a beautiful, light-skinned female (spirit), who is particularly vain about her long, flowing hair and her golden comb. It is believed that Mammy Water is attracted by certain men to whom she often appears in the context of dreams, promising to make these individuals rich and famous if they agree to observe complete sexual abstinence with all other women, as well as fulfill other demands she may make of them, such as the offering of sacrifices and the avoidance of alcohol. But while it is believed that contact with Mammy Water can indeed engender material success, failure to comply with her demands can result in financial ruin and serious physical and mental illness. Research conducted during the author's two years as Director of Liberia's only psychiatric facility, the Catherine Mills Rehabilitation Center, confirmed that some ten per cent of male patients requiring in-patient treatment for psychotic disorders, revealed a system of delusions relating to possession by Mammy Water. In this paper folk beliefs concerning Mammy Water provide the background for a presentation of two cases histories of possession states characterized by psychotic elaborations of Mammy Water beliefs. Hypotheses are advanced to explain the origin, status symbolism, and psychodynamic significance of Mammy Water beliefs for the normal Liberian, as well as for the patient population under study.