Domestic Manuals Research Articles

“The doctors guide to the correct examination of dead human bodies...” by I.V. Buyalsky (1824): the first original Russian guide to forensic medical examination

The year 2024 marks the 235th anniversary of the birth of Ilya Vasilyevich Buyalsky, an outstanding Russian surgeon, anatomist, and forensic physician and Honored Professor of the Imperial Medical and Surgical Academy and academician of the Imperial Academy of Arts. Another anniversary date of this year is associated with Buyalsky’s name: exactly 200 years ago, “The doctors guide to the correct examination of dead human bodies for finding the cause of death, especially in forensic cases,” which was the first original domestic manual on forensic medical examination, was published in the Military Medical Journal. This article comprehensively examined the history of the creation of this work, its main points, and its significance for subsequent generations of Russian forensic medical experts. The article provides information about the activities of Buyalsky in the field of forensic medical examination. An analysis of his work “The doctors guide to the correct examination of dead human bodies...” is presented. The present study shows that Buyalsky was one of the founders of forensic thanatology in our country, and the main provisions of “The doctors guide to the correct examination of dead human bodies...” remain relevant to date.

Historical Real Estate: Market Morality and the Politics of Preservation in the Early United States

Historical Real Estate: Market Morality and the Politics of Preservation in the Early United States

Vicious Infants: Dangerous Childhoods in Antebellum U.S. Literature by Laura Soderberg (review)

Reviewed by: Vicious Infants: Dangerous Childhoods in Antebellum U.S. Literature by Laura Soderberg Ellen Butler Donovan (bio) Vicious Infants: Dangerous Childhoods in Antebellum U.S. Literature, by Laura Soderberg. U of Massachusetts P, 2021. Vicious Infants is not a book that discusses children's literature. However, scholars who take a childhood studies approach will find that this book enriches our understanding of how childhood was viewed and used in the early nineteenth century in the US. In four dense chapters, Soderberg pairs literary and extra-literary texts to examine childhoods that were viewed as threatening to social stability, that is, texts that depict children in ways that reveal social and political anxieties. While this idea is not new or radical, challenging the assumption that all childhoods were White, protected, and pastoral continues to be necessary. In the first chapter, "Bound Children: Sidestepping the Social Contract in Apprenticeship Literature," Soderberg reads William Apess's autobiography, A Son of the Forest (1829), and Harriet Wilson's semi-autobiographical novel, Our Nig (1859), through apprenticeship contracts. Soderberg traces the history of legal minority back to William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England in order to highlight the status of the child as unable to control one's body and therefore unable to enter into contracts, with the exception of indenture, in which the future adult retrospectively agrees to the terms of the contract (a kind of prolepsis). Soderberg suggests that this same prolepsis is characteristic of the bildungsroman, using this similarity to juxtapose the literary texts and the apprenticeship documents. The ostensible goal of both the bildungsroman genre and apprenticeship documents is to move individuals from dependence (public dependence in Soderberg's examples of apprenticeship indenture and in the situations Apess and Wilson depict) to independent, socially assimilable adults. Yet Soderberg highlights the ways in which indenture both in the apprenticeship documents and the narratives by Apess and Wilson prevented independence, forcing the eventual adults to remain dependent on public welfare. In the cases of Apess and Wilson, the indenture that both protagonists experience does not result in the conventional ending of a bildungsroman—an independent self fully integrated into society. Instead, due to their racial identities, both protagonists exist outside the social organization. The second chapter, "The Incorrigible Child: Juvenile Delinquency and the Fearful Rise of the Child Self," examines records from the New York House of Refuge (essentially juvenile prison) and child-rearing [End Page 192] advice from domestic manuals by Amos Bronson Alcott, Lydia Maria Child, Heman Humphrey, and John A. Gere. Soderberg again traces back the use of the phrase "incorrigible child" to Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England and further posits that in antebellum America, the term became an assertion "beyond interrogation by any other parties" (51). She concludes, "Under this model, criminalized children defy scrutiny because their bodies have been marked as unreadable" (51). Soderberg's argument in support of this conclusion illustrates a weakness that pervades the work: though Soderberg references specific sources, her discussion is too cursory to be convincing. More useful, though unsurprising, is her observation that inscrutability was most often ascribed to immigrant children and urban child laborers in factories who were beyond the reach of parental oversight. Of most interest in this discussion is the analysis of the distinction between a child's interiority and exteriority. Drawing on the domestic manuals, Soderberg shows that corporal discipline, when necessary, was designed to shape the child's interiority. However, the profiles of inmates in the House of Refuge repeatedly describe the interiority of "incorrigible" children as "inscrutable," consequently out of reach of any disciplinary influence and therefore dangerous. In the third chapter, "Prodigious Births: Black Infancy, Antebellum Medicine, and the Racialization of Heredity," Soderberg juxtaposes Sir Jonah Barrington's "Skinning a Black Child" (1827) and Henry Clay Lewis's "Stealing a Baby" (1843), comic stories that circulated widely within medical discourse and which sought to separate White paternity from Black bodies, with Susan Paul's The Memoir of James Jackson, the Attentive and Obedient Scholar, Who Died in Boston, October 31, 1833, Aged Six Years and Eleven Months (1835), thought to be the first biography by an African American...

The Making of the American Calorie and the Metabolic Metrics of Empire

In “The Making of the American Calorie and the Metabolic Metrics of Empire,” Athia Choudhury develops a far-reaching critical genealogy of caloric biocitizenship that reframes her personal experiences with calorie counting and fat-phobic discourses that stigmatize the bodies and pleasures of racialized, working-class people, especially female bodied and fem-identifying people. Tracing practices of energy management and bodily discipline from colonial military outposts, nineteenth-century domestic manuals, dietetic discourses in the Philippines, and Native American Boarding Schools to a range of reform projects that framed calories as a tool for inculcating responsible eating through the domestic practices of white, bourgeois women, Choudhury highlights continuities between colonial subjection and modern biocitizenship, as well as the ways in which the putatively objective metric of the calorie positioned the New American Woman as a powerful catalyst for policing race in the intimate domain of the home.

Women in the Kitchen: Twelve Essential Cookbook Writers Who Defined the Way We Eat, from 1661 to Today by Anne Willan

Reviewed by: Women in the Kitchen: Twelve Essential Cookbook Writers Who Defined the Way We Eat, from 1661 to Today by Anne Willan Jennifer Cognard-Black Women in the Kitchen: Twelve Essential Cookbook Writers Who Defined the Way We Eat, from 1661 to Today. By Anne Willan. New York: Scribner, 2020. xv + 305 pp. $28.00 cloth/$17.00 paper/$12.99 ebook. Feminist literary critic Margaret Beetham has argued that "there is a relationship between eating and reading" (15). This relationship is at the heart of Anne Willan's Women in the Kitchen, an overview of twelve "essential" cookbook authors that serves as an introduction to these writers, their recipes, and their influence on the eating habits of Anglo-Americans across 350 years. Structured chronologically, the book begins in 1661 with Hannah Woolley, the first woman to publish a domestic handbook in English, and concludes with the contemporary chef celeb Alice Waters. At one level, Women in the Kitchen mirrors the scope and purpose of other foundational studies that demonstrate the cultural import of women's culinary texts, such as Janet Theophano's Eat My Words: Reading Women's Lives through the Cookbooks They Wrote (2002) and Toni Tipton-Martin's The Jemima Code: Two Centuries of African American Cookbooks (2015). Yet Willan's survey is not as meticulous, expansive, or groundbreaking as these previous histories. Rather, it is written for a popular audience, not a scholarly one, as an invitation to rustle up a little gastronomic history while skimming the biographies of female cooks and chefs who are clearly Willan's favorites and sometimes her friends. The first half of Willan's book covers domestic manuals by three British and three American women writers across two centuries, including Woolley's The Queen-like Closet, or Rich Cabinet (1670); Hannah Glasse's The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (1747); Amelia Simmons's American Cookery (1796); Maria Rundell's A New System of Domestic Cookery (1806); Lydia Child's The Frugal Housewife (1829); and Sarah Rutledge's The Carolina Housewife (1847). Willan explains that these early "domestic kitchen[s], a very different world from the grand establishment of the professional male cooks," demanded a distinct kind of handbook: one that could teach housekeepers, servants, and/or enslaved people the basics of cooking, gardening, raising livestock, concocting home remedies, and managing a household—often with tidbits on economizing, child rearing, or entertaining (11). These books also showcased the home cooks themselves, who established their culinary credibility by being literate, competent, and shrewd. Indeed, these authors were clever saleswomen who knew their audience and shaped their approaches accordingly. In the first published colonial American cookbook, Simmons claims her recipes are "[a]dapted to this country" by incorporating New World ingredients like corn and spruce (56), while Glasse "craftily" changes the titles of other people's recipes to pass them off as her [End Page 120] own (34). In addition to being commercially savvy, though, these texts offered the intimate confidences of a friendly homemaker-guide. Child urges mother-readers to train children in growing and selling food—"they can weed the garden, and pick cranberries from the meadow, to be carried to market" (101)—while Rutledge suggests that a wife should meet any "notoriously thoughtless person" (that is, a husband) who might bring unexpected company to dinner with "a clean table-cloth and a smiling countenance" (116). Rather deliciously, Willan then reveals that Child never had children and that Rutledge was never married, underscoring that these seeming amateurs were in fact canny rhetoricians. The form of Willan's book follows similar functions to these manuals. At least half of Women in the Kitchen is dedicated to reproducing recipes from her selected cookbooks, for dishes such as "English Monkey" or "Mango Salad with Hot Pepper" (140, 273). Willan first tested and then adapted these recipes for modern-day readers, providing a kind of how-to for consuming these texts in both mind and mouth. She writes intimately, providing comparisons between her life and the writers' and making wry asides. Noting that the original cover for Joy of Cooking depicts "the patron saint of cooks and domestic servants . . . seen slaying the brilliant...

Professor I.P. Skvortsov the author of the first domestic manual of military hygiene for officers and army doctors

In 2021, it was 100 years since the death of a prominent domestic hygienist, Professor Irinarch Polikhronievich Skvortsov (18471921), son of a clergyman, after getting medical education at the Kazan Imperial University and the title of a physician in 1871 he worked for a short time in the position of zemstvo doctor in the Samara Governorate. In 1872 he was admitted to the Kazan Imperial University Department of Hygiene and till the end of his life devoted his scientific and pedagogical activity to hygiene. Irinarkh Polikhrontovich improved his knowledges in hygiene in the years 18731874 under the guidance of Professor A.P. Dobroslavin at the Imperial Medical and Surgical Academy Department of General, Land and Naval Forces Hygiene where defended his Doctor of Medicine degree thesis in 1874. In 1877, I.P. Skvortsov, associate professor of hygiene at the Imperial Kazan University, published the first in Russia "A short course of military field hygiene for officers and military doctors". Of particular interest is one of the annexes of this course, entitled "Instructions for protecting the health of military ranks of the army" ("Highly approved" on December 2, 1876), which is certainly an important element in the history of hygiene of military personnel. Later Professor I.P. Skvortsov headed the Department of Hygiene of the Warsaw and Kharkov Universities, and finished his career at the Kiev University. The creative heritage of this prominent Russian hygienist professor I.P. Skvortsov is comprehensive and multifaceted but is not fully known by modern specialists.

Local Recipes in the National Kitchen: The Life and Legacies of Ada Boni’s Il talismano della felicità

Ada Boni’s 1925 Il talismano della felicità has for almost 100 years been the Italian domestic manual par excellence. Whether actively used or simply preserved as a family keepsake, Boni’s cookbook has been a fixture in generations of Italian kitchens. This article argues that Il talismano is a major work of Italian national literature. Boni rejects the model established by Pellegrino Artusi’s La scienza in cucina e l’arte di mangiar bene, offering instead a female-focused domestic manual by a woman and for women. Over its long publication history, Il talismano transforms from an instructional guide for bourgeois housewives into an artifact of Fascist nationalism, and then into a comprehensive compendium of all the foods eaten in Italy. Ongoing revisions and adaptations – including an important 1950 American edition – reflect Il talismano’s desire to provide a model of Italian identity rooted in the hyperlocal variety of Italian culinary traditions and practices.

‘Les douceurs de l’intimité’: Men and the Making of Domesticity in Belgian Architecture Magazines (1890-1914)

ABSTRACT This article uses intimacy and architecture as a way to tell the lesser-known story of men and the domestic in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Belgium. Drawing upon little-known interior design and architecture magazines, domestic manuals and photographs, I highlight how male architects and critics of architecture contributed to the making of domesticity. I show how ‘intimacy’ was used as a deceptive concept to frame the home as a restful refuge, as well as a catalyst for creative experimentation.

“What do you mean by that? You must have been drinking!”: Victorian Femininity, Dickensian Cooking Disasters, and Nineteenth-Century Domestic Manuals

Abstract Most Dickensian scholars have interpreted David Copperfield's Dora Spenlow and Our Mutual Friend's Bella Wilfer as domestic failures (in terms of the novels' logic) who must either be disciplined into learning the art of cooking and housekeeping (Bella) or killed off because they refuse to do so (Dora). In both cases, the women's reaction to a cookbook or domestic advice manual plays an important role in the way the stories construct their femininity. However, Bella's and Dora's interactions with these manuals have not been examined in depth. Focusing on two of the most popular domestic guides, this article argues that Modern Cookery by Eliza Acton and Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management by Isabella Beeton present femininity as a series of roles that did not fit traditional gender and class boundaries but rather could be adopted, adapted, or set aside. This concept of flexible femininity troubles two dominant middle-class Victorian assumptions: first, that women were natural-born housekeepers and second, that the domestic labor they performed should be effortless. When more attention is paid to the way nineteenth-century cookery books and domestic advice manuals addressed female readers, Dickens's domestic scenes emerge as moments of resistance that challenge Victorian standards of femininity.

Development of Activity Diagrams for Mitigating Large-Scale Disaster Damage During Construction of Underground Urban Utility Tunnels

In recent years, demand for utility tunnels in urban underground areas, which accommodate various lifelines such as electric power, communication, water supply, heating, gas, and so on, is increasing. However, unlike domestic manuals that are focused on utility tunnelmaintenance, disaster prevention measures implemented during the construction stage have been institutionalized overseas. In view of this, in order to secure safety related to the construction of utility tunnels in Korea, it is necessary to mitigate large-scale construction disasters that reflect the characteristics of underground urban utility tunnels. In this study, activity diagrams based on crisis warning phases of fire, inundation, and earthquake disasters were created to reduce the damage caused by each disaster. The activity diagrams are expected to contribute to the safety assurance in the event of a large-scale construction disaster during the construction of utility tunnels by effectively and promptly responding to each phase of the disaster.

The Dickens Checklist

The Dickens Checklist Kim Edwards Keates Secondary Sources Andrianova, Irina. "Stenography and Literature: What did Western European and Russian Writers Master the Art of Shorthand Writing For?" Studia Slavica Hung, vol. 64, no. 1, 2019, pp. 1–11, doi:10.1556/060.2019.64101. Accessed 18 Apr. 2020. Barut, Evren, and Mehmet Cem Odacıoğlu. "Charles Dickens' ın İki Şehrin Hikayesi adlı eserinin iki farklı Türkçe çevirisinin karşılaştirmalı çözümlemesi ve eleştirisi." Uluslararası Eğitim Bilimleri Ve Sosyal Bilimler Sempozyumu, pp. 1069–79, hdl.handle.net/11772/2605. Accessed 18 Apr. 2020. [TTC] Bassett, Troy J. The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Three-Volume Novel. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. Burton, Maxine. "Reading Aloud in 19th Century England: Some Evidence from Victorian Fiction." Changing English: Studies in Culture and Education, vol. 27, no. 1, 2020, pp. 83–90, doi:10.1080/135868-4X.2019.1660621. Accessed 18 Apr. 2020. [BH, HT, OMF] Castaño, Emilio José Álvarez. "La figura del guía en 'A Christmas Carol' de Dickens y 'Fantasía' de Pardo Bazán." Tropelías, vol. 33, 2020, pp. 123–41, doi:10.26754/ojs_tropelias/tropelias.2020333907. Accessed 18 Apr. 2020. Covelo, Roxanne. "'One Wave in a Total Atlantic': The Crowd and the Mob in De Quincey's London." European Romantic Review, vol. 31, no. 1, 2020, pp. 1–19, doi:10.1080/10509585.2019.1698422. Accessed 18 Apr. 2020. [OCS] Dickens Studies Annual, vol. 51, no. 1, 2020. [Mizuki Tsutsui, "Disguise and Deception in Barnaby Rudge," pp. 1–19; Joseph Clayton McReynolds, "From Humbug to Humility: Learning How to Know with Ebenezer Scrooge," pp. 20–39; Emily M. Baldys, "Disabling the Madman: Dickens and the Moral Management of Barnaby Rudge and David Copperfield," pp. 40–72; Colette Ramuz, "'Shall I bite it?': Sexuality and the Biting Male in Dickens," pp. 73–94; Jennifer MacLure, "Undiagnosing Esther: The Productive Ambiguity of Disease in Bleak House," pp. 95–122; Christina Henderson Harner, "'What do you mean by that? You must have been drinking!': Victorian Femininity, Dickensian Cooking Disasters, and Nineteenth-Century Domestic Manuals," pp. 123–48; Robert C. Hanna, "Recent Dickens Studies: 2018," pp. 149–219.] Dickens Quarterly, vol. 37, no. 1, 2020. [Dominic Rainsford, "From the Editor," pp. 5–6; William F. Long, "The Two Versions of Sketches of Young Gentlemen," pp. 7–28; Sean Grass, "Revising Codes: Education, Empathy and the Case for Bradley Headstone," pp. 29–46; Joshua Brorby, "Our Mutable Inheritance: Testing Victorian Philology in Our Mutual Friend," pp. 47–66; Benjamin Westwood (Rev. The One, Other, and Only Dickens), pp. 67–69; Efraim Sicher (Rev. Dickens and the Virtual City: Urban Perception and the Production of Social Space), pp. 70–72; Chris Louttit (Rev. The Plot Thickens: Illustrated Serial Fiction from Dickens to Du Maurier), pp. 72–75; Dominic Rainsford (Rev. Luminaries: Twenty Lives that Illuminate the Christian Way), pp. 75–78; Leon Litvack (Rev. General Critical Studies of Dickens's Works and Dickens and Aspects of Fiction; General Specialized Studies of Dickens's Works, Collected and Selected Editions of Dickens's Works, and Supplementary Studies), pp. 79–82; Joel J. Brattin, "The Daniel and Alice Ryan Collection," pp. 83–89; "Dickens Society 25th Annual Symposium: 16th–18th July 2020, Bloomsbury, London," pp. 90–1; Kim Edwards Keates, "Dickens Quarterly Checklist," pp. 92–95.] Dickson, Melissa. "Dickens's Nightmare: Dreams, Memory and Trauma." Interface Focus, vol. 10, no. 3, 2020, doi:10.1098/rsfs.2019.0076. Accessed 18 Apr. 2020. [CC, BH, OT, TC] Egbert, Jesse, and Michaela Mahlberg. "Fiction – One Register or Two? Speech and Narration in Novels." Register Studies, vol. 2, no. 1, 2020, pp. 72–101, doi:10.1075/rs.19006.egb. Accessed 18 Apr. 2020. [OT, BR, OMF] Griffith, Jody. Victorian Structures: Architecture, Society, and Narrative. State U of New York P, 2020. [LD] Lanigan, Richard L. "Crossing Out Normative Boundaries in Psychosis: The Communicology of a Social Semiotic Passage in Dickens' Bleak House." American Journal of Semiotics, vol. 35, no. 3–4, 2019, pp. 335–64. doi:10.5840/ajs202021260. Accessed 22 Apr. 2020. Little Doric, vol. 6, no. 2, 2019. [Beryl Gray, "George Eliot & Charles Dickens," pp. 2–5; Sarah Hudspith, "War and...

Beyond Sight: Engaging the Senses in Iberian Literatures and Cultures, 1200–1750

Beyond Sight: Engaging the Senses in Iberian Literatures and Cultures, 1200–1750

Basic Study for Improving the Fire Safety of Postpartum Care Centers

본 연구는 산후조리원의 화재안전성 향상을 위한 기초연구이다. 산후조리원 시설의 경우 신생아 및 산모가 24시간 상주하고 있으며, 시설의 고층화 및 다중이용시설 내에 위치하고 있어 다양한 화재상황에 따른 대책이 필요하지만, 국내 매뉴얼 상에는 화재안전에 관한 대책은 매우 부족한 실정이다. 이에 본 연구에서는 산후조리원 시설 화재사례 분석과 관련 규정조사를 통해 화재안전상의 문제점을 파악하고, 산후조리원 안전관리에 관한 직원 및 산모의 화재안전 의식에 대해 설문을 통한 실태조사를 실시하고, 직원과 산모의 화재안전 의식에 대하여 분석하였다.The present article reports the results of a basic study for improving the fire safety of postpartum care centers. In the case of postnatal care center facilities, newborn babies and mothers reside 24 hours a day, and as they are located in high-rise and multi-use facilities, measures for fire safety are necessary, but there are no domestic manuals. This study examined the problems of fire safety through an analysis of fire cases of postpartum care facilities and related regulations, and conducted surveys on the fire safety consciousness of employees and mothers regarding postpartum care management. The fire safety consciousness of the mother was analyzed.

Homeopathy 'for Mexicans': Medical Popularisation, Commercial Endeavours, and Patients' Choice in the Mexican Medical Marketplace, 1853-1872.

This paper focuses on homeopaths’ strategies to popularise homeopathy from 1850 to 1870. I argue that homeopaths created a space for homeopathy in Mexico City in the mid-nineteenth century by facilitating patients’ access to medical knowledge, consultation and practice. In this period, when national and international armed conflicts limited the diffusion and regulation of academic medicine, homeopaths popularised homeopathy by framing it as a life-enhancing therapy with tools that responded to patients’ needs. Patients’ preference for homeopathy evolved into commercial endeavours that promoted the practice of homeopathy through the use of domestic manuals. Using rare publications and archival records, I analyse the popularisation of homeopathy in Ramón Comellas’s homeopathic manual, the commercialisation of Julián González’s family guides, and patients’ and doctors’ reception of homeopathy. I show that narratives of conversion to homeopathy relied on the different experiences of patients and trained doctors, and that patients’ positive experience with homeopathy weighed more than the doctors’ efforts to explain to the public how academic medicine worked. The fact that homeopaths and patients used a shared language to describe disease experiences framed the possibility of a horizontal transmission of medical knowledge, opening up the possibility for patients to become practitioners. By relying on the long tradition of domestic medicine in Mexico, the popularisation of homeopathy disrupted the professional boundaries that academic physicians had begun to build, making homeopaths the largest group that challenged the emergent medical academic culture and its diffusion in Mexico in the nineteenth century.

Andrew Hadfield The Oxford Handbook of English Prose, 1500–1640The Oxford Handbook of English Prose, 1500–1640. Edited by Andrew Hadfield. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Pp. viii+744.

<i>Andrew Hadfield</i> The Oxford Handbook of English Prose, 1500–1640<i>The Oxford Handbook of English Prose, 1500–1640</i>. Edited by Andrew Hadfield. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Pp. viii+744.

The Future of Critical Eating Studies

The Future of Critical Eating Studies Kyla Wazana Tompkins's Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the Nineteenth Century, New York: New York University Press, 2012Kyla Wazana Tompkins's study on in nineteenth-century America is mesmerizing. From the playful literary history of children's tales in the antebellum period to the tightly woven cultural analysis of chromolithographed trade cards for food products in the Gilded Age, Tompkins convincingly makes the case that as a social practice was inextricably tangled with the construction and performance of nineteenth-century American identities.Tompkins begins in the first chapter around the fireplace of the colonial northeastern home, as it is from here that she argues that the complex public cultures of the United States have descended. Tracing the transition from hearth to stove and kitchen, Tompkins suggests that a charged culture, one in which cooking and were increasingly linked to class and ethnic difference as well as bodily inversion, emerged as domestic space and cooking labor was reorganized in the early decades of the century. From chapbooks to domestic manuals, the kitchen and the mouth emerge in this chapter as sites of food and language, and speaking, connections that Tompkins theorizes through the trope of orality. Dietetic reforms of the 1830s, examined in the second chapter, sought to manage this potentially subversive orality: the speaking, and, now within the politics of Sylvester Graham's writings, eroticized mouth. These reforms are situated by Tompkins within Foucault's notion of biopower as she carefully extricates the racial logic of nationalist and imperialist dietetics through an analysis of Graham's Treatise on Bread and Breadmaking (1837) and William Alcott's The House I Live In (1834).Eating as a racially performative act is developed further in chapter 3 with Tompkins's account of edibility across three antebellum novels: Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables (1851), Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Toms Cabin (1852), and Harriet Wilson's Our Nig (1859). Tompkins argues that images of the black edible body were, much like Grahamite dietetics, connected to the formation of whiteness. If the reformers of the 1830s managed difference through articulating improper eating, by the 1850s, Tompkins argues, whiteness was to be constituted through eating the other, through the internalization of racial difference. …

Milk Markets: Technology, the Lactating Body, and New Forms of Consumption

In early chapters of Charles Dickens s 1848 novel; Dombey and Son, Mr. Dombey, a thriving industrialist, is forced to hire a lower-class wet nurse to sustain his family name and the Dombey commercial empire. After the death of his wife, the wet nurse, Polly is the primary source of nourishment and comfort for his only son; to her he states: It is not at all in this bargain that you need become attached to my child, or that my need become attached to you. I don't expect or desire anything of the kind. Quite the reverse. When you go away from here, you will have concluded what is a mere matter of bargain and sale, hiring and letting: and will stay away. The will cease to remember you; and you will cease, if you please to remember the child (14). In the context of this Victorian novel, breast milk is a valuable commodity exchanged for income and for a place within the household. Dickens represents what was a common reality; wet nurses were often women of the lower classes whose own children were relegated to baby farms or hand feeding, while nursing became the means of survival for poor women and for the infants of the more privileged classes. Emphasizing the economic nature of this exchange and the need to keep the wet nurse under his watchful eye, Dombey renames Polly Richards (implying a shift from poor to rich) and views her intimate interactions with the baby in a little glass conservatory adjacent to his dark, masculine study. The novels emphasis upon the regulation and observation of the intimate act of breastfeeding exemplifies how the female breast, and breastfeeding, became increasingly charged and contested in the nineteenth century. Here, the lower-class female body is disciplined as it exchanges breast milk as a commodity for entry into the middle-class household. In this literary depiction, the wet nurse creates anxiety and unease through her class position and her closeness to the infant, and yet she is a necessary inclusion to the household and crucial to the success of the Dombey family future. By the twentieth century the work of wet nursing began to steadily decline as discourses of maternity encouraged breastfeeding as a maternal duty and as scientific and technological innovations produced new artificial formulas and a range of improved bottle-feeding devices. Consequently breastfeeding was imagined either as the natural process of infant feeding and attachment shared between mother and - or as bottle feedings alternative or companion. Either way it was a process more deeply embedded in the science of domestic management that emerged in this period. Left not just in the hands of mothers, the act of breastfeeding was increasingly managed and shaped by a broader reading culture and became a subject of discussion and debate among doctors, scientists, and writers of domestic manuals. A model of efficiency that established how to feed infants, when to do it, and how to perform as an effective nursing mother all became scientifically addressed and managed at this time and continue to be today.1 The issues of boundary crossing and circulation that the nineteenthcentury wet nurse embodied continue in representations of breastfeeding and milk-sharing in early-twenty-first-century culture, but they take on new forms and are shaped by a broad range of forces. In this essay I begin to trace the multiple and shifting representations of breast milk and its disembodiment in contemporary culture, examining how its circulation as a product of the larger economy reveals the contradictory ways that motherhood and maternal care is imagined, managed, and, in some contexts, exploited. Tracing the transformation of breast milk as a commodity in the marketplace, I consider how medical technologies produce new corporate and global models of milk sharing based not upon the intimate relationship of maternal and infant bodies, but instead on scientifically transforming milk into a product to be shared on a much wider scale. …

Prevention of venous thromboembolism according to the guidelines of a domestic manual

Prevention of venous thromboembolism according to the guidelines of a domestic manual

(MIS) Representing the Dalit Woman: Reification of Caste and Gender Stereotypes in the Hindi Didactic Literature of Colonial India

This paper explores the complex social and literary narratives that functioned in the name of the Dalit woman in late colonial north India. It does so by scrutinizing a literary genre of the period, namely didactic literature and domestic manuals in Hindi, which principally addressed themselves to middle class, high caste Hindu women. However, this paper examines ways in which Dalit women got represented in this literature, as that became a potent ground for identity formation and social positioning for upper caste Hindus. The Dalit woman here was not just a footnote, but a constitutive footnote, perceived in a binary opposition to the upper caste woman. In different ways this literature and the material culture around it was involved with a gendered casteist discourse committed to constructing, and in fact institutionalizing, stable categories of pativratas (ideal wives) and kutnis (vamps). Through the lens of representation, this paper attempts to highlight the grave mismatch between rhetoric and reality. Further, an exploration of this genre reveals that the representation of women was sharply divided along caste and class lines, reinforcing not just a caste hierarchy but a female hierarchy among upper caste and Dalit women.

Renovating &lt;i&gt;The American Woman’s Home&lt;/i&gt;: American Domesticity in &lt;i&gt;Extreme Makeover: Home Edition&lt;/i&gt;

While the popular ABC reality television program Extreme Makeover: Home Edition may initially strike us as thoroughly modern in its execution and technology, its rhetoric and ideology actually hold much in common with nineteenth-century domestic texts. For example, Extreme Makeover is unabashedly sentimental, focusing on destitute but virtuous protagonists in search of stable, safe homes. The familiar scenes of a search for home and acts of Christian charity echo those found in novels such as The Wide, Wide World and Little Women. Throughout the program, tears flow freely among the family members, the design crew, the volunteers, and the show's viewers. One viewer admits, cry every (qtd. in Oldenburg E1). Extreme Makeover is reminiscent of not only nineteenth-century didactic sentimental fictions, but also the domestic manuals of the era. The revamped, twenty-first-century version of model domesticity enacted on Extreme Makeover shares many of the ideals and practices expressed in Catharine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe's popular 1869 treatise, The American Woman's Home; or, Principles of Domestic Science, arguably the domestic manual of the nineteenth century. (1) In this essay, I read The American Woman's Home and Extreme Makeover as manuals of ideal American domesticity. Both texts function as technologies of the American Dream, or as material, moral, and political guides. Technology, as defined in the glossary of terms in The American Woman's Home, is [a] description of the arts, considered generally in their theory and practice as connected with moral, political, and physical (488). The Oxford English Dictionary reminds us that technology denotes the [practical collectively (def. lb) and [a] discourse or treatise on an art or arts; the scientific study of the practical or industrial arts (def.1a). The American Woman's Home is itself an explicit technology, or a treatise on the domestic arts. I place Extreme Makeover in the same category, although Extreme Makeover is more covertly didactic. Various scholars, including Henry A. Giroux and Lawrence Grossberg, recognize that pedagogy occurs across a variety of terrains, popular culture being one of them. (2) The public pedagogical features of television include conveying information and constructing individual and national identities. As a hybrid television show that combines aspects of do-it-yourself and reality programming, Extreme Makeover teaches its audience what the American Dream and dream home should look like. Both The American Woman's Home and Extreme Makeover rely on material technology--appliances, design features--to achieve their ideal homes. When selected, the deserving family of Extreme Makeover goes on vacation for a week while a team of designers and volunteers works against the clock to give the family a newly landscaped, remodeled, and fully furnished home. In most episodes, the team demolishes the residents' old house and builds a completely new one. At the heart of the show's popularity lies its presentation of the American Dream. The same could be said for The American Woman's Home. Beecher and Stowe offer advice on everything: building the home itself; providing proper ventilation; choosing from among the different kinds of stoves, furnaces, and chimneys; even properly maintaining earth-closets. Their book's comprehensive and state-of-the-art domestic science offered nineteenth-century readers, most of whom could not afford the home the book described, a domestic guide and wish list. However, where Beecher and Stowe emphasize thrift, Extreme Makeover promotes technology--in excess--as the means of realizing the American Dream. This difference highlights the twentieth century's increasing commercialization. In this essay, I build on Joseph S. Van Why's suggestion that The American Woman's Home provides an invaluable source for analysis of and comparison with modern ideas and theories on domestic economy and the role of women in our society. …