Simon Szreter Research Articles

The Hidden Affliction: Sexually Transmitted Infections and Infertility in History, ed. Simon Szreter

The Hidden Affliction: Sexually Transmitted Infections and Infertility in History, ed. Simon Szreter

The Hidden Affliction: Sexually Transmitted Infections and Infertility in History ed. Simon Szreter

The Hidden Affliction: Sexually Transmitted Infections and Infertility in History ed. Simon Szreter

The Sustainable Development Goals and ‘legal identity for all’: ‘First, do no harm’

• The adoption of SDG target 16.9 has brought belated recognition of the importance of a person’s ‘legal identity’. • New ‘legal identity’ systems are being implemented out without sufficient attention to potential negative impacts. • To achieve the desired positive impacts, detailed attention is needed to the regulation of enrolment processes. • To avoid doing harm, independent oversight and reduced state discretion are critical. The right to legal identity, previously neglected by the development community, has gained recognition by the adoption of a target in the SDGs to ‘provide legal identity for all, including birth registration’. In the initial absence of definition of ‘legal identity’ beyond birth registration, different actors have interpreted the target according to their own priorities, whether they be human rights protection, development, national security – or rent-seeking. Long-standing scholarship recognises both the positive and negative potential impacts of state identification systems; the adoption of new biometric technologies strengthens these potential impacts, for good or ill. The importance of data protection and the risks to privacy created by digital technologies are well-recognised. This article returns to arguments made by Simon Szreter in World Development in 2007, to argue the critical importance of independent oversight of executive decisions relating to legal identity; it adds an emphasis on the detailed regulation of enrolment processes, and the importance of nationality law reforms, as government-backed identity schemes are upgraded or introduced. The article argues that the introduction of new ‘foundational’ national identification systems for adults and more pervasive requirements for proof of identity, without simultaneously addressing gaps in the legal framework governing the determination of legal status, risks making the problems around proof of legal identity worse rather than better.

The Hidden Affliction: Sexually Transmitted Infections and Infertility in History. Edited by Simon Szreter (Rochester, University of Rochester Press, 2019) 442 pp. $95.00

The Hidden Affliction is an interdisciplinary collection that explores the history of sexually transmitted infections (particularly gonorrhea and syphilis); most of its articles also link these diseases to issues of demographics and infertility. The collection is impressive in disciplinary and chronological scope, including work by historians, demographers, archaeobiologists, and virologists. It is divided into four sections—pre-modern sexually transmitted infections (sti), scientific approaches, and demography in the “Global South” and modern Europe. Although each of the articles stands alone, the overall editorial structure makes this collection into a cohesive unit that is worth reading as a whole book. Szerter’s introduction provides valuable insights about the topic and the importance of interdisciplinary work in the history of medicine more broadly. He argues that in order to obtain valuable knowledge about the ways in which venereal diseases led to historical infertility, we need not only to familiarize ourselves with the cultural and medico-social sources but also to “know as much as we can from today’s biological, evolutionary, and epidemiological sciences…. It is crucial not to restrict ourselves only to texts from the past but to embrace all available forms of relevant evidence” (12).Many of the chapters follow this logic, for example, by combining textual history with insights from ancient dna studies or epidemiology. Historians of medicine who want to familiarize themselves with scientific methodologies will find the second section particularly valuable. It offers a series of readable chapters about the virology and bioarchaeology of stis that serves as a useful introduction to these fields, although they may be too basic for experts. The fourth section, which includes Szerter’s own work, demonstrates the value of interdisciplinary scholarship most strongly. It examines attitudes to stis and declining fertility in Western Europe at the turn of the twentieth century. Each of the three contributions focuses on a different country (Germany, France, and Britain) and uses a different research methodology. The result is a thought-provoking examination of the subtle differences between medical views in these countries, as well as of the kind of historical knowledge gained from different scholarly approaches.Given the innovative nature of most of the work in this collection, it was jarring to find within it two chapters that make uncritical use of early twentieth-century anthropological descriptions of Pacific Islanders. These texts are not used as primary sources describing bygone attitudes but as acceptable descriptions of indigenous cultures to be cited by contemporary scholars. Tim Bayliss-Smith and Roy F. R. Scragg both argue that the demographic decline in some Pacific Island societies after colonial encounters was caused by the spread of gonorrhea, which can cause infertility in women while being otherwise asymptomatic. Their argument itself may be sound, but it is obscured by references to “Aphrodisian” and “Non-Aphrodisian” indigenous cultures, and descriptions of the “ritual promiscuity” and “sexual generosity” of indigenous women (206–209), or their reputation for “customary promiscuous behavior” (240). Substantial anthropological scholarship in the past several decades has criticized such descriptions of Pacific Island cultures, demonstrating that it obscures the true nature of colonial encounters.1Moreover, the other essays in the “Global South” section of this collection argue that colonial medical authorities tended to over-diagnose stis among indigenous populations due to false perceptions of promiscuity. The absence of a more critical engagement with these antiquated anthropological views is thus an unfortunate blemish on a collection that otherwise makes an important contribution to the history of medicine.

Simon Szreter (ed.), The Hidden Affliction: Sexually Transmitted Infections and Infertility in History

Simon Szreter (ed.), <i>The Hidden Affliction: Sexually Transmitted Infections and Infertility in History</i>

SimonSzreter (Ed.) The Hidden Affliction: Sexually Transmitted Infections and Infertility in HistoryRochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2019. 450 p. $125.00.

Infertility is often treated as an afterthought in contemporary policy discussions around sexual and reproductive health (SRH). In the global North, the number of children couples desire is generally low, treatment for sexually transmitted infections (STIs) is readily available, and there are a range of options offered for those who want children but are unable to have them. In the global South, the discourse is principally focused on the provision of family planning services to prevent unwanted or unplanned births. The physical and emotional toll of suffering from STIs (aside from HIV/AIDS) and possible subsequent infertility is largely overlooked. The edited volume The Hidden Affliction: Sexually Transmitted Infections and Infertility in History makes clear that humans have been subject to the consequences of these infections for centuries, even though the causal connections between them and infertility were not well-understood until the late nineteenth century. This collection of papers presented at a 2015 conference in Cambridge is edited by Simon Szreter, Professor of History and Public Policy, University of Cambridge and Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge. It is a contribution to the Rochester Studies in Medical History published by the University of Rochester. The evidence collected by a multidisciplinary group of scholars from the fields of history, biology, demography, archeology, and epidemiology is impressive in both its breadth and depth. Densely written and rich with technical detail, the collection will be of most interest to experts. (The number of notes/references in each of the 10 chapters ranges from 69 to 134.) Even for nonexperts, however, the book is striking for its harrowing descriptions of the misery caused by STIs from ancient history to the present day. Part 1 scrutinizes the historical evidence of STIs, a primary focus being their evolutionary ancestry and attempts to date their first appearance in human populations. The answer is sought by examining historical medical and other texts, including the Bible, and by using techniques that employ the study of skeletal evidence and, more recently, DNA samples. Part 2 takes a biomedical look at the history of STIs. Chapter 3 introduces paleopathology—the examination of archeological human remains to understand the origin and evolution of disease—and applies this methodology to the history of syphilis. Chapters 4 and 5 trace the history and the medical and public health responses to chlamydia. Part 3 examines the relationship between STIs and infertility in several parts of the global South. It includes an evaluation of the role of STIs in explaining geographic variation in the severe depopulation that occurred in the late nineteenth century in a number of Pacific Islands. The historical evidence is patched together using the scholarly accounts of anthropologists, ethnographers, and epidemiologists but also relies on the more informal reports of missionaries, sailors, traders, government officials, and physicians. A chapter on twentieth-century East Africa extends the analysis of variations in the role of STIs in the prevalence of infertility, citing the role of mass disease control programs, health education, the pace of advances in diagnosis and treatment, and fears of depopulation. Somewhat surprising, Chapter 9 is the only contribution that explicitly addresses the role of poverty, sexual violence, and social marginalization in the prevalence and treatment of STIs among women (in colonial Australia). Part 4 tackles the question of how infertility, concerns around low birth rates, and their implications for public policy unfolded in modern Europe with separate contributions on Germany, France, and England and Wales. The final chapter is notable for its reanalysis of historical data to provide an empirical estimate of the (substantial, as it turns out) effect of STIs on childlessness in England and Wales in the early twentieth century. Throughout, the collection illuminates the fact that the moral judgments, shame, and secrecy surrounding STIs (described in gruesome and heartbreaking detail in Chapters 2 and 9) have contributed not only to human suffering, but also to the limited and often inaccurate historical record that the authors have tried to overcome in their work on this topic. —A.B.

Marx on Population: A Bicentenary Celebration

Population and Development ReviewVolume 44, Issue 4 p. 745-769 NOTES AND COMMENTARY Marx on Population: A Bicentenary Celebration Simon Szreter, Simon Szreter srss@cam.ac.uk orcid.org/0000-0001-6903-2447 Search for more papers by this author Simon Szreter, Simon Szreter srss@cam.ac.uk orcid.org/0000-0001-6903-2447 Search for more papers by this author First published: 05 November 2018 https://doi.org/10.1111/padr.12208Citations: 2 Editor's note: Few thinkers have been so invoked, whether to admire or revile, as Karl Marx (1818–1883). On the bicentenary of his birth, Population and Development Review asked Simon Szreter: Knowing what we know about Marx on population when he was alive, what would he have to say about global demography today? How has Marxist thought on population evolved since his death? What does Marx have to teach us about population today? Read 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 Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume44, Issue4December 2018Pages 745-769 RelatedInformation

Rejoinder to Szreter

Simon Szreter's recent article replies to an earlier article we published in this journal, showing that central statistical results in his book Fertility, class and gender are seriously flawed. Szreter's reply asserts that a revised classification scheme and the use of weights provide results that support his original arguments. In this rejoinder we demonstrate that the revised scheme makes little difference. Our article did in fact use weights, and the use of weights with the revised scheme makes little difference. We argue that the weights used by Szreter are inappropriate in any case.

Economic disruption and childhood obesity: distraction, disconnection, displacement of children's health, and a need for social change.

Using and adopting Simon Szreter's framework on how economic growth had a deleterious effect on children's health during the Industrial Revolution, this article presents a parallel argument that economic growth, in modern times, also has disrupted the lives of our children expressed by increasing rates of childhood obesity. A comprehensive perspective is presented that describes how economic growth in postindustrial United States has distracted our nation's attention away from a public health's concern for the health of children and social justice. The new normal of childhood obesity represents a disconnection from the harmful reality of childhood obesity and displaces the value of childhood health too far behind adult's pursuits of utility. To provide children a fair opportunity to health, and to help children secure their own future liberty and utility, children need to be able to achieve "just levels" of health that would ordinarily exist if remediable injustices that threaten health were reasonably addressed and eliminated.

Accidental Pregnancy

Accidental Pregnancy Aeron Hunt (bio) On 13 March 1852, Edward Bulwer Lytton Dickens “arrived at Tavistock House,” the tenth child of Charles Dickens and his wife Catherine (Dickens 625). While the birth occasioned paternal effusions—Plorn, as he came to be called, is deemed “a golden baby,” “a brilliant boy of unheard-of dimensions” in letters to Elizabeth Gaskell and W.H. Wills (Dickens 625, 624)—a sour note is also struck. One hopes that Plorn was spared the reading of Dickens’s announcement to Angela Burdett Coutts: “I am happy to say that Mrs. Dickens and the seventh son—whom I cannot afford to receive with perfect cordiality, as on the whole I could have dispensed with him—are as well as possible” (627). And to William Howitt: “Mrs. Dickens and her boy are in a most blooming condition. I am not quite clear that I particularly wanted the latter, but I have no doubt that he is good for me in some point of view or other” (Dickens 629). Though Plorn came to be a favourite, the novelist’s account of his origins makes it easy to read the child as an accident (a word Dickens does not use), the last in a series of later pregnancies and births that he felt “superfluous” (Bodenheimer 152). It tells us nothing about Catherine Dickens’s perspective on the pregnancy; her biographer Lillian Nayder has suggested that Catherine “never voiced regret at giving birth ten times” (160). Without proof that Charles and Catherine were mutually and deliberately trying to limit their fertility by this point in their marriage, it is impossible to be certain that Plorn was the result of a slip. Even if it were possible, a married, financially comfortable couple is not the most dramatic context for an emblematic image of accidental pregnancy in an era in which literary fallen women such as Gaskell’s Ruth or George Eliot’s Hetty Sorrel captured the public imagination. And the hunt for a single representative instance of an experience that varies so greatly might be misguided in any case. Still, in its ordinariness as well as its specific features, the example of Charles, Catherine, and Plorn highlights aspects of the concept of accident that suggest its particular relevance to the gendered terrain of Victorian reproduction and risk. [End Page 43] Charles and Catherine’s ten children were born toward the end of a long period, starting around 1750, in which fertility in Britain had been on the rise—a rise that resulted from both an increased frequency of marriage and increased fertility within marriage (Szreter 418). For the decades from 1860 to 1940, demographers describe a “dramatic” fertility decline, with the average number of births per woman falling to a little over two from approximately six (Szreter 1). While historians debate the mechanisms behind this decrease, they suggest that efforts to space or stop births played a key role. Periodic abstinence and coitus interruptus are credited for much of the decline; in fact, Simon Szreter suggests that these practices formed part of a larger cultural shift emphasizing the values of self-restraint and continence (chap. 8). For those with the knowledge and the money to employ them—not a large number, according to Szreter—and then the ability to negotiate their use, devices such as pessaries, sponges, douches, and condoms existed as tools to prevent pregnancy, and abortion also played a role in limiting births (McLaren; Szreter 424–31). Insofar as accident implies a failure of intention and agency, this context is significant; one has to be able to imagine the possibility of control in order for the concept to make sense, whether describing a pregnancy that results from an imperfect method of birth control or simply a pregnancy that is unwanted or unintentional, and whether or not specific efforts had gone into prevention. To be sure, such efforts—and the need to name their failures—did not first occur to people in 1860. Accident was used to describe unwanted or unintentional pregnancy well before the start date assigned to this demographic shift: the oed gives 1850 as the first appearance of the usage, but the text that it cites...

Registration and Recognition: Documenting the Person in World History, ed. Keith Breckenridge and Simon Szreter

Registration and Recognition: Documenting the Person in World History, ed. Keith Breckenridge and Simon Szreter

Registration and Recognition. Documenting the Person in World History. Ed. by Keith Breckenridge and Simon Szreter. [Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. 182.] Oxford University Press, Oxford2012. xx, 532 pp. £100.00; $185.00.

Registration and Recognition. Documenting the Person in World History. Ed. by Keith Breckenridge and Simon Szreter. [Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. 182.] Oxford University Press, Oxford2012. xx, 532 pp. £100.00; $185.00. - Volume 58 Issue 3

Keith Breckenridge and Simon Szreter (eds), Registration and Recognition: Documenting the Person in World History

Keith Breckenridge and Simon Szreter (eds), Registration and Recognition: Documenting the Person in World History

Armine Ishkanian and Simon Szreter (eds): The Big Society Debate: A New Agenda for Social Welfare?

‘Big Society’ is the latest slogan used by a British government to encourage citizens to volunteer in their localities and communities. It follows and is closely related to New Labour’s idea of the ‘Third Way’, which dominated the political landscape for 10 years. Like the Third Way, ‘Big Society’ is a concept with a long history but, unlike the Third Way, it has yet to gain a significant foothold in international discourse on social welfare and active citizenship. This edited book by Armine Ishkanian and Simon Szreter of the London School of Economics and the University of Cambridge interrogates the genesis of and influences on ‘Big Society’ and seeks to establish if there is any substance to the idea beyond the purposes of sloganeering. The book contains a substantial introduction and conclusion and 14 wide-ranging chapters which are divided into sections on history and policy. The introduction establishes the historical embeddedness of ‘Big Society’ and the calculated nature of its conception. The ‘‘deliberate vagueness’’ (p. 2) of the idea allows David Cameron and other actors to apply it to a range of very different circumstances and occurrences. Acknowledging the ambiguity surrounding the concept, the editors refrain from defining ‘Big Society’ and instead pose a set of five key questions concerning the nature, purpose and outcomes of the idea. They point out that the focus of Big Society is the encouragement of empowered ‘‘citizen-volunteers’’ (p. 4) to organise to do good and meet the needs of their local areas, but that the simplicity of the idea belies the complexity of achieving this aim. Szreter and Ishkanian challenge some of the assumptions and biases that underpin Big Society, including the ‘sister’ slogan of ‘Broken Britain’, the idea that ‘big government’ has rendered citizens unable to act on their own volition, and the championing of some forms of

Sexual Nostalgia

Sexual intercourse began in 1963, famously too late for Philip Larkin. His timing was precise, ‘Between the end of the Chatterley ban/ And the Beatles’ first LP …’ , Up till then there’d only been A sort of bargaining, A wrangle for a ring, A shame that started at sixteen And spread to everything. Larkin’s ‘wrangle’ and ‘shame’ cling tenaciously in popular memory. Recent historiography likewise reads sexual experience before the pill through the lens of 1960s liberation and modernization, finding it narrow, inhibited and wanting. By contrast, Simon Szreter and Kate Fisher, in this fascinating and engaging study of pre-1963 love, sex and marriage, mine oral testimony to unsettle both Larkin’s gloom and modern historians’ condescension or ‘whiggism’ – their term for the historical narrative from repression to tolerance in twentieth-century sexuality. Advances in medical knowledge and pressure from feminist organizations introduced safer and fewer births; liberal law reform (and sexology) rethought perversions and broadened sexual experience. English society did gradually become more tolerant and enlightened so that more people – women and homosexuals especially – could enjoy more and better sex by the 1960s.

Sex before the Sexual Revolution: Intimate Life in England, 1918–1963. By Simon Szreter and Kate Fisher. Cambridge Social and Cultural Histories, number 16. Edited by Margot C. Finn and Colin Jones. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pp. viii+458. $95.00 (cloth); $32.99 (paper); $26.00 (Adobe eBook Reader); $26.00 (Mobipocket eBook).

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsSex before the Sexual Revolution: Intimate Life in England, 1918–1963. By Simon Szreter and Kate Fisher. Cambridge Social and Cultural Histories, number 16. Edited by Margot C. Finn and Colin Jones. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pp. viii+458. $95.00 (cloth); $32.99 (paper); $26.00 (Adobe eBook Reader); $26.00 (Mobipocket eBook).Matt HoulbrookMatt HoulbrookMagdalen College, University of Oxford Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 84, Number 4December 2012Europe in the 1950s: The Anxieties of Beginning Again Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/667646 Views: 48Total views on this site © 2012 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Simon Szreter and Kate Fisher. Sex before the Sexual Revolution: Intimate Life in England, 1918–1963.

Simon Szreter and Kate Fisher. Sex before the Sexual Revolution: Intimate Life in England, 1918–1963.

Sex before the Sexual Revolution: Intimate Life in England 1918-1963, by Simon Szreter and Kate Fisher.

<i>Sex before the Sexual Revolution: Intimate Life in England 1918-1963</i>, by Simon Szreter and Kate Fisher.

Sex Before the Sexual Revolution: Intimate Life in England, 1918-1963, by Simon Szreter and Kate Fisher

Sex Before the Sexual Revolution: Intimate Life in England, 1918-1963, by Simon Szreter and Kate Fisher

History, historians, and development policy: a necessary dialogue

1. How and why history matters for development policy- Michael Woolcock, Simon Szreter and Vijayendra Rao 2. Indigenous and colonial origins of comparative economic development: The case of colonial India and Africa- C. A. Bayly Commentary: History, time and temporality in development discourse- Uma Kothari Historical contributions to contemporary development policy issues Social Protection 3. Social security as a developmental institution? The relative efficacy of Poor Relief provisions under the English old Poor Law- Richard Smith 4. Historical lessons about contemporary social welfare: Chinese puzzles and global challenges- R. Bing Wong Commentary: Why might history matter for development policy?- Ravi Kanbur Public Health 5. Health in India since Independence- Sunil S. Amrith 6. Health care policy for American Indians since the early 20th century- Stephen J. Kunitz Commentary: Can historians assist development policy-making, or just highlight its faults?-David Hall-Mathews Public education 7. The end of literacy: The growth and measurement of British public education since the early nineteenth century- David Vincent 8. The tools of transition: Education and development in modern southeast Asian history- Tim Harper Commentary: Remembering the forgetting in education- Lant Pritchett Natural resource management 9. Energy and natural resource dependency in Europe, 1600-1900- Paul Warde 10. Special rights in property: Why modern African economies are dependent on mineral resources- Keith Breckenridge Commentary: Natural resources and development - which histories matter?- Mick Moore Index