Postwar Research Research Articles

The visualization of autism: Filming children at the Maudsley Hospital, London, 1957-8.

This article examines three films made during the 1950s by Elwyn James Anthony at the psychotic clinic for children at the Maudsley Hospital that marked an important transition in the purpose and practice of visual documentation in a clinical setting: film as a research tool was transitioning from the recording of external signs as indicators of internal subjective states, to the capture of the visual flow of communication between subjects. It is a shift that had a particular impact on the emergent classification of autism, a modality not yet properly separated from the broader term of psychosis, as a non-relational condition whose visual capture demonstrated a void of inter-human communicational exchange. Film was significant not only as a recording apparatus, but as a method of cutting and crafting sequences of movements into brief repetitive motifs. The filmed behaviour of children remained opaque to interpretation, a 'finding' that facilitated the modelling of an emergent autism as subjects who were isolated, alienated and automaton-like, inhabiting a separate temporality. The article situates this 'second', affectless autism, within a broader context of post-war research into gestures as a language of the body, developed largely through an intellectual network of German émigré psychoanalysts who had fled to the US and UK in the 1930s.

Politicizing Family in Post-War Research on Family Planning: The Institute for Mother and Child in Warsaw1

ABSTRACT After the massive losses experienced during World War II, political post-war narratives created the image of the Polish nation as one family to which every man and woman should contribute. The state, in turn, took care of ‘its family’ by implementing social welfare measures. The present article will focus on individual actors and the extent to which socialist paternalistic attitudes influenced visions of the family at both the institutional and personal level. Mikołaj Łącki (1888–1969) was the head of the statistics department at the Institute of Mother and Child in Warsaw between 1951 and 1961. By examining materials held in the State Archive in Warsaw, the article scrutinizes Łącki’s legacy and his belief in building a health care system that would form the basis of a new Polish nation. His documents contain surveys about abortion, contraception methods and miscarriages. These sources are of particular interest as they reveal the extent of biased data collection and the impact of the political agenda on official data. In order to contextualize his work and the meaning of the surveys, the article begins with an analysis of the changing notion of ‘family’ and how the state reflected this in its social welfare policies.

Fluidization centennial and the decades of research and development in Japan

This paper gives an overview of the last 100 years of fluidization in the Japanese context. Japan was a relatively early adopter of the Winkler coal gasification technology in industry and an early participator in the formation of chemical engineering initiated in the United Kingdom and the United States. However, it was left far behind in the rapid development of fluidized catalytic cracking (FCC) technology in the worsening international relations of the 1930s. Academic research on fluidization and its applications, which had started with the development of FCC, did not start substantially in Japan until 1951, when The San Francisco Peace Treaty came into effect. In this paper, first reviewed is the global progress of chemical engineering and fluidization research, and further discussed is the three-stage scheme in the development of the knowledge of fluidization. Taking these as the background, we review first the pre-war and early post-war research situations, then, the formation of the fluidization community in Japan. Finally, the fully-fledged post-war research and technological developments with a brief look at the Japanese contribution to the above-mentioned global progress are reviewed regarding the three fields: energy-environment applications, catalytic reactors and numerical simulation. • A review of 100 years' footsteps of Japanese chemical engineers. • Three-stage epistemological development of knowledge on fluidization. • Post war development of fluidization engineering both in academia and industry. • Fluidized-bed energy/environment and catalyst processes in Japan. • DEM-CFD model developments for fluidized bed simulation.

Elite philanthropy and applied economics: the Rockefeller Foundation’s role in post-war research direction

Abstract This essay investigates how, why and with what results the Rockefeller Foundation (RF) influenced the development of UK economics between 1930 and 1950. It shows the extent to which the RF, as the major sponsor of the newly emerging ‘applied economics’ research in the US and Europe, shaped the conversion of newly emerging macroeconomic theory into policy and research, and steered the fast expanding ‘applied’ economics in an econometric direction based on newly available national accounts data. The RF played a decisive role in selecting the economists retained for applied research when World War 2 ended, and with it the type of work funded. We argue that the RF’s preference for financing stand-alone institutes restrained the initial expansion of England’s applied economics research despite a head-start on national income accounting and business-focused research. Drawing on unpublished correspondence between John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) and senior RF officers, we show how the difficulty in obtaining start-up funding conditioned the turn towards econometrics in the early choice of leadership and research plans at the University of Cambridge’s Department of Applied Economics, narrowing its earlier vision for a ‘realistic approach’ consonant with that of Keynes. Covering the path-dependent nature of applied economics in its formative phase, the essay demonstrates the role of philanthropic elite organisations in knowledge formation that led to the making of microeconomics and macroeconomics.

Birkas svarta jord 1969–2021

Birkas black earth 1969–2021 - the development of a stratigraphic method. Birka’s role is a main reference point in discussions on land upheaval chronology, which is important in understanding prehistoric settlement in Scandinavia. Birka was also the central point of a wide-reaching hinterland throughout the Lake Mälaren region on the eastern coast of central Sweden. This was apparent at the restart of investigations into the settlement history of this area during the 1960s, and it was easy to incorporate in the post-war research into the history of West European towns. The complexity of the cultural layers of this settlement together with numerous small finds was a challenge already from the beginning of the Black Earth investigations in 1969–1971. It quickly became evident that new, more effective and rational excavation techniques and methods of documentation were needed. These were further developed at the beginning of the project, Excavations in the Black Earth 1990–1995, which was generously financed by Tetra Pak AB along with several companies and foundations. A concise account of how these problems were solved is described in this paper. The stratigraphic analysis of this extensive material is especially interesting. Thanks to these techniques and methods of documentation, it has been possible to construct a new relative chronology based on short intervals of only 5–10 years for the greater part of the Viking Age, although dendrochronological material is not preserved in these dry cultural layers.

René Spitz’s Empty Frames: ‘Hospitalism’, Screen Analysis and the Birth of Infant Psychiatry

This article casts light on the origins of infant psychiatry by taking a new, interdisciplinary approach to the work of psychoanalyst and film-maker René Spitz. Focusing on his observations of babies living in orphanages, it argues that by undertaking the difficult, and sometimes paradoxical, task of capturing emotional absence and psychological fragmentation on film, Spitz created a new and influential theory of the infant psyche. It considers how this vision of an indeterminate and potentially ‘empty’ infant subject was generated by the institutional care which he sought to undermine. The particular ways in which the institution emerges as a problem and opportunity for child analysts after World War II propelled Spitz into a surprising range of post-war debates on cultural politics. He is revealed as embedded in a complex, interdisciplinary web of discourse, practices and observational strategies, and at the centre of post-war visual research into the environmental origins of mental illness.

The problematic legacy of victim specimens from the Nazi era: Identifying the persons behind the specimens at the Max Planck Institutes for Brain Research and of Psychiatry

ABSTRACT Although 75 years have passed since the end of World War II, the Max Planck Society (Max-Planck Gesellschaft, MPG), successor to the Kaiser Wilhelm Society (Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft, KWG), still must grapple with how two of its foremost institutes—the KWI of Psychiatry in Munich and the KWI for Brain Research in Berlin-Buch—amassed collections of brains from victims of Nazi crimes, and how these human remains were retained for postwar research. Initial efforts to deal with victim specimens during the 1980s met with denial and, subsequently, rapid disposal in 1989/1990. Despite the decision of the MPG’s president to retain documentation for historical purposes, there are gaps in the available sources. This article provides preliminary results of a research program initiated in 2017 (to be completed by October 2023) to provide victim identifications and the circumstances of deaths.

The risk of unexploded ordnance on construction sites in London, UK

Greater London, UK, among many large cities, was subject to bombing by the German military in both the First World War and Second World War (WW2) and was the target of many air raids during WW2. This was particularly the case during the Blitz, September 1940–May 1941, when over 28 000 high-explosive bombs and parachute mines were dropped on London. Post-war research conducted in 1949 estimated that approximately 12 750 t of bombs, including V1 and V2 rockets, were dropped on London. The night of 16–17 April 1941 was one of the worst bombing raids, when 446 t of bombs were dropped on London and over 58 t did not detonate. Unexploded bombs remain buried underground today, as they were unidentified at the time or abandoned owing to difficulties in recovering them. Uncharted bombs continue to pose a potentially significant hazard for developments around London. This paper considers the probability of discovering unexploded ordnance (UXO), particularly WW2 ordnance, during intrusive groundworks in London. The prevalence of UXO has been assessed using data obtained from governmental organisations to estimate the likelihood of discovery in London.

Editorial: Biographical Memoirs, Volume 69

Editorial: Biographical Memoirs, Volume 69

Walter Heinrich Munk. 19 October 1917—8 February 2019

Born in Vienna, Austria, shortly before the Austro-Hungarian Empire lost its access to the sea, Walter Munk became a leading geophysicist and physical oceanographer after being sent to school in New York State and later moving west to California. He and Harald Sverdrup developed wave prediction schemes that were used by the Allies in World War II to evaluate whether amphibious landings would be feasible. His post-war research included further major contributions to the understanding of ocean waves, as well as ocean circulation, tides, internal waves, mixing processes and many other phenomena. He showed how variations in the Earth's rotation contained a wealth of valuable geophysical information and was an instigator of the ‘Mohole’ project that failed for political reasons but paved the way for the Deep Sea Drilling Project. Although primarily a theoretician, throughout his career he was an enthusiastic adopter of new technologies and data analysis techniques. He showed how acoustic transmissions could be used to map ocean eddies and currents as well as to monitor temperature changes of whole ocean basins. He was a key adviser to the US Navy and a dedicated member of the science advisory group, JASON, that focuses on national security. As well as his scientific contributions, his legacy includes the La Jolla Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics. He was liberal in his political outlook, gregarious, hospitable and treated everyone, from undergraduate to admiral, with the same interest and respect.

Universal health coverage as a global public health goal: the work of the International Labour Organisation, c.1925-2018.

We examine the efforts of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) to extend medical care under social security, through international conventions, advocacy and technical assistance. We consider the challenges faced by the ILO in advancing global health coverage through its labourist, social security model. The narrative begins in the interwar period, with the early conventions on sickness insurance, then discusses the rights-based universalistic vision expressed in the Philadelphia Declaration (1944). We characterize the ILO's postwar research and technical assistance as "progressive gradualism" then show how from the late-1970s the ILO became increasingly marginalized, though it retained an advisory role within the now dominant "co-operative pluralistic" model.

Walking Instead of Working: Space Allocation, Automatic Architecture, and the Abstraction of Hospital Labor

“Space allocation” was a central pursuit in postwar research on computing and architecture. Researchers sought an algorithm that could automatically design the most efficient floor plan for a set of activities. In this article, we connect an early algorithm for computing architectural floor plans to the postwar British hospital. We examine how researchers adapted algorithmic methods for floor layout design developed in industrial capitalist settings to the promotion of the British welfare state. Finally, we pay special attention to the agency that certain graphic inscriptions borrowed from mathematics had in validating these particular algorithmic methods as promising avenues for the algorithmic automation of all architectural work. This article situates the automation of hospital design in postwar U.K. at the intersection of building science and healthcare management, with the aim to contribute critical perspectives on algorithmic reifications of work in early computer-aided architectural design systems.

Convergence in Cold War Physics: Coinventing the Maser in the Postwar Soviet Union.

At the height of the Cold War, in the 1950s, the process of parallel invention of masers and lasers took place on the opposing sides of the Iron Curtain. While the American part of the story has been investigated by historians in much penetrating detail, comparable Soviet developments were described more superficially. This study aims at, to some extent, repairing this discrepancy by analyzing the Soviet path towards the maser from a comparative angle. It identifies, on the one hand, significant differences between the two projects regarding their heuristics, the relationship between theory and experiment, grounding in different academic cultures, and the resulting conceptualization of the maser principle. At the same time, the case also illustrates more fundamental transformations in the practices of postwar research that can be characterized as a convergence between the Soviet and the American science of the period.

Pandora's box closed: The Royal Air Force Institute of Aviation Medicine and Nazi medical experiments on human beings during World War II

In the months before and after the final surrender of Nazi Germany on 8 May 1945, British aviation medicine specialists were sent to the European continent to learn the progress that German aviation medicine had made since September 1939. For the medical officers at the Royal Air Force Institute of Aviation Medicine at Farnborough in Hampshire, the dilemma over whether the medical data from the Nazi aviation medicine experiments at Dachau concentration camp should be exploited presented profound moral and ethical problems. Their deliberations paralleled those of the 1945-46 Nuremberg Trial, which revealed the crimes that were committed under the Nazi regime. At the same time, the British medical establishment debated the morality of publishing the Nazi medical research to serve humanity. This article shows that on the basis of British wartime and post-war research, and determinations that were made by the British Advisory Committee for the Investigation of German Medical War Crimes, by 1948 the RAF IAM had essentially rejected the results of the Nazi aviation medicine experiments on scientific and ethical grounds.

Critique and post-critique in contemporary art history: Excessive attachment to suspicion in academia and beyond

This essay offers a broad look at the way critique as a mode, method, and attitude in post-war art history research and teaching intersects with occurrences of critique in humanities scholarship and teaching generally, but also how distorted forms of critique occur in contexts outside the academic field. The essay outlines concerns raised by humanities scholars with what they consider to be an over-reliance on critique as a negative skill, resulting in scholarship that tears down without building up, and self-satisfied debunking of anything that does not stand up to the current era’s identity politics. The essay argues that the question of critique is of particular urgency to the field of contemporary art. Here critique is embedded in the material studied—artworks, artistic practices, and discourses—and therefore in dire need of being understood, challenged, and decentered as a method.

Wspomnienie roli, jaką odegrał profesor Władysław Kuraszkiewicz w początkowym okresie białorutenistycznych badań gwaroznawczych w Polsce

Post-war research on Belarusian dialects in Poland using linguistic geography methods was launched in the 1950s by Prof. Antonina Obrębska-Jabłońska and her associates at the Polish-Soviet Institute in Warsaw. Before long, the institute’s Eastern Slavic sections were transferred to the Slavic Studies Unit of the Polish Academy of Sciences, where this work was continued. The main source of information on Eastern Slavic dialects between the Bug and Narew rivers, i.e. in the southern part of the area planned to be included in field studies, was Władysław Kuraszkiewicz’s article from 1939. In this work the Professor discussed the accentually determined development of Belarusian and Ukrainian diphthongs and the position-dependent depalatalization of consonants as well as mentioning preserved relics of infinitive forms of the it’`ie and peč`ye type, which in a subsequent work he explained as being a relic of the Jatzvingian (Yotvingian) language. The present paper highlights the merits of the distinguished Polish Slavic studies scholar, Professor Władysław Kuraszkiewicz, as a person, researcher and teacher.

The locality of Trapa natans L. within the region of Międzyodrze – dangers and protection perspective (the Lower Oder Valley, West Pomerania)

Abstract Research on a critically endangered and protected population of Trapa natans was carried out during growing season in 2016 at the site located on the Obnica channel within the region of Międzyodrze. It is a location that is close to the one indicated in historical sources by Winkelmann over 120 years ago. The post-war research did not confirm presence of this species within the region of Międzyodrze despite favourable biological conditions. The sites were declared relict and documented only in stratigraphy of peat deposits, detritus gyttja and bottom mineral sediments. Recently, an assessment of the population and habitat status were carried out. The appropriate indicators of the species status were examined according to the methodology of Chief Inspectorate of Environmental Protection. The floristic composition of Trapetum natantis association patches found within the researched site were analysed, reed bed associations belonging to the class of Phragmitetea and plant communities of pleustophytes, nymphaeids and elodeids belonging to the class Potametea and Lemnetea were recognised in the contact zone. On the basis of the collected data, particular attention was paid to the relevance of Trapa natans monitoring­ at the site located on the Obnica channel within the Międzyodrze region due to its indicative character. The conservation status of the population could be influenced by the change of water trophy within Międzyodrze channels caused by different forms of anthropopressure, including commercial use of this water body, hydromeliorative works, changes that are due to the progressive succession of water plants and reeds, which slow down the water flow rate within the area of Międzyodrze, favour accumulation of organic matter and increase of water trophy as well as fluctuations of surface water thermal activity caused by changing weather conditions.

Powojenne polskie badania nad historią ruchu wydawniczego w Polsce: dorobek i postulaty badawcze

POLISH POST-WAR RESEARCH INTO THE HISTORY OF PUBLISHING IN POLAND: ACHIEVEMENTS AND RESEARCH PROPOSALSThe history of publishing in Poland encompasses many issues associated with the emergence and dissemination of printed books. Of fundamental significance to the study of these issues are the records of the publishing output: while we have nearly complete — though requiring further exploration — records of this output for 15th–18th centuries, documented in bibliographies and catalogues, the situation is worse when it comes to the 19th and 20th centuries, until the outbreak of the Second World War. In this respect what we need is not only a continuation, but a radical intensification of bibliographic work. This concerns works published in the Latin, Cyrillic, Hebrew and Greek scripts as well as musical notation. Polish book scholars devoted a lot of attention to the beginnings of printing in Poland; the historiography concerning various typographic workshops located in the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth is rich, though it still requires further extensive studies. The scholars were also interested in phenomena influencing the content structure of printed publications, like publishing privileges in the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, censorship as well as restrictions imposed by the partitioning powers and later by Poland’s communist authorities, as a result of which Polish publications had to be printed abroad and an independent publishing movement emerged. The scholars’ research interests also focused on books as products of the work of printers and publishers, on the publication of written works. They focused both on the various components of the book title page, printer’s signet, stemmata etc. and on its editorial composition as a whole.The scholars’ undoubted achievements in their studies of the history of publishing in Poland are significant, yet in many areas they need to be continued and expanded an important task is an edition of sources for the study of the history of Polish publishing, and concentrated on the phenomena that stem from developmental tendencies in modern book studies.

The uses of isospin in early nuclear and particle physics

This paper reconstructs the early history of isospin up to and including its employment in 195152 to conceptualize high-energy pion-proton scattering. Studying the history of isospin serves as an entry point for investigating the interplay of theoretical and experimental practices in early nuclear and particle physics, showing the complexity of processes of knowledge construction which have often been presented as straightforward both in physicists׳ recollections and in the historiography of science. The story of isospin has often been told in terms of the discovery of the first “intrinsic property” of elementary particles, but I will argue that the isospin formalism emerged and was further developed because it proved to be a useful tool to match theory and experiment within the steadily broadening field of high-energy (nuclear) physics. Isospin was variously appropriated and adapted in the course of two decades, before eventually the physical-mathematical implications of its uses started being spelled out. The case study also highlights some interesting features of high-energy physics around 1950: the contribution to post-war research of theoretical methods developed before and during the war, the role of young theoretical post-docs in mediating between theorists and experimenters, and the importance of traditional formalisms such as those of spin and angular momentum as a template both for formalizing and conceptualizing experimental results.

Serbian grammar today

The paper surveys research on Serbian grammar over the past fifty-odd years, approximately from the 1970s up to the present day. The paper aims at demonstrating the most relevant results of the study of Serbian grammar and at emphasising the novelties in this period. The 1970s are a time in which the study of Serbian was seen as a continuation of postwar research, and at the same time results of more recent research were being introduced to academic work, results of newer theories were being accepted, phenomena that previously did not appear in the focus of attention in Serbian scholarship were also being studied, and the research was founded on stylistically diverse corpus of the Serbian language. That was also a time of the inclusion of young academics who are still active today. New insights were given into a number of phenomena that had been topics of earlier grammatical research, but many linguistic items were also described that had been studied little or not at all. Numerous blank spots in the grammatical description of Serbian were filled in. It can be said that Serbian grammatical research in this period is on a par with the achievement of global linguistic and Slavic scholarship. All the above-mentioned leads to the conclusion that the past fifty years is a period in which great results were achieved in the grammatical research of Serbian. That facilitated the modernisation of instruments of the Standard Serbian language.