Like other kinds of medical knowledge, the dissemination of nutritional knowledge required a body of authorized regular medicine, eager knowledge popularizers, a medium for diffusion, and a literate audience “keen, prepared, or possibly compelled to imbibe such publications” (Porter, 1992). In the early 20th century, the emergence and mass-circulation of women’s magazines facilitated this process in modern societies, where appreciation of science and rationality grew in public and private spheres. No exception to this trend, Japan witnessed rapid development of women’s magazines as versatile media of nutritional knowledge popularization. Attracting a vast readership among housewives, these magazines enabled the rise of nutritional awareness at Japanese homes.

With both qualitative and quantitative analysis of articles in Fujin no tomo (Women’s Friend), a leading women’s magazine in 20th-century Japan, this study examines the popularization of knowledge of nutrition standards in Japanese society. Doing so, it proposes a systematic study of nutritional knowledge circulation and a reflection on the role of public that is often portrayed as passive in science communication. I argue that Fujin no tomo created an interactive platform for engaging nutritional knowledge popularization activities. As participants in the two-way communication with nutrition professionals, Japanese women readers wrote to share their desires, requests, and experiences concerning nutrient count and standardized meal planning at private home kitchens. With a spatula in one hand and a pen in the other, they were active knowledge recipients, popularizers, and producers.

The paper aims to investigate the revival of medicinal plants in Italy in the interwar period (1920-1940). This was a crucial time for the pharmaceutical sector, which began to shift from natural to chemical products. Italy, poor in raw materials useful for medicinal preparations and backward in basic chemistry, however, imported most of the new products, mainly from Germany.

In the 1930s, an alternative industrial plan took form, which involved a revival of natural-based medicine, updated with the most modern knowledge and methods. It is important to note how this attention to natural medicine, present in some other areas, had peculiar characteristics, Italy being one of the main producers of herbs for medicines, essences and perfumes in Europe.

The paper examines the policy of the fascist regime, which was in favor of this autarkic solution; the initiatives of the industrial sector; and the studies and proposals put forward in the scientific academic field. In this latter environment, the revival of medicinal plants was justified by the continuity of a tradition of scientific studies going back to the creation of botanical gardens back to the Middle Ages. At the same time, there was an awareness that a form of herbal-related knowledge was still well spread among the rural population, who indeed distrusted "official" medicines and doctors, as documented by the anthropological research. However, the relationship between this widespread popular knowledge, moreover often the preserve of women, and official scholars was highly ambivalent.

[Originally conceived for the symposium 081, withdrawn].

The cultural and scientific background developments from the Weimar period and advent of Nazi Germany have laid bare peculiar inscriptions of modernity (Greenberg, 2015). Even though these were not explicitly addressed by contemporary neurologists, they posed severe challenges for the “nervous” Weimar Republic. This paper describes a problem field that can be seen as comprising enduring dilemmas related to bourgeois Germans’ widely held opinion that the processes of cultural “degeneration” had increased since the turn of the century, including ‘fatigue’, ‘malnutrition’, and ‘nervous degeneration’ (Hau, 2003). While Weimar and its intense debates laid the groundwork for profound changes in medical and neurological research and clinical practices too, it is specifically the enduring legacies from those dramatic events in the specific place of 1920s-Germany that eventually gave rise to the creation of the rehabilitative medicine field. This paper looks at the social history of émigré Jewish and non-Jewish neurologists following their emigration avenues to the US and Canada, where they applied their Weimar understandings of the human body, the place of social medicine, and exchanged new concepts of ‘restitution’, ‘healing’, and ‘holism’ with their North American peers (Stahnisch, 2010). The biographies and fates of individuals, such as Kurt Goldstein (1878-1965), Walther Riese (1890-1976), and Herta Seidemann (1900-1984) display a variety of influences on medical reintegration, disability responses, and social rehabilitation. Their exchanges with North American peers and institutions help us uncovering the ongoing legacies of the impressive innovation potential of Weimar Germany in the wider field of medicine post-WWII.

In 1931, Professor Georges Robertson, superintendent of the Royal Edinburgh Hospital for Nervous and Mental Diseases, opened a clinic designed for the observation, diagnosis and treatment of ‘troubled’ children and young people. It was located outside the walls of the Edinburgh’s main psychiatric hospital, and it operated as a consultation service for children residing in and around the city. Alongside child guidance clinics and emergency medicine clinics, child psychiatric clinics marked a turning point in the care and treatment of the young. By favouring an outpatient model of care, child psychiatry – as a medical discourse and practice – became resolutely embedded within a social understanding of child development. Indeed, contrarily to institutionalisation, child psychiatric clinics aimed at maintaining the child within their social and familial environment. Psychiatrists had to look beyond hereditary factors and into the child’s social relationships, their nurturing and education, as well as their overall health to assess, treat, and care for them.
This paper focuses on the medical and social discourses that led to the opening of Edinburgh’s child psychiatric clinics during the interwar period. By analysing the Royal Edinburgh Hospital’s administrative reports, medical and social experts’ publications, and press articles, this presentation argues that these new clinics reframed psychiatric expertise by shifting its primary focus from correction and treatment to assessment and diagnosis, which in turn placed a greater responsibility for implementing and maintaining the child's treatment onto individual families inside their home.