Willem Dicke. Brilliant Clinical Observer and Translational Investigator. Discoverer of the Toxic Cause of Celiac Disease

We can admire and learn from physicians with acute clinical acumen and superb approaches to translational research. The observations and studies of Dr. Willem Dicke, a Dutch pediatrician, on the toxic effects of a protein component of wheat and rye demonstrate the highest quality of such investigations. From a clinical observation of one child with celiac disease, through years of historical questioning and empirical dietary suggestions of patient families, he concluded that such foods were toxic. When research became possible after the second world war and fecal fat measures as a hard end point became available he studied 5 children in detail to establish the validity of his clinical clues.

War, State and Society in Mid‐Eighteenth‐Century Britain and Ireland – By Stephen Conway

‘Mi Li’ Revisited: Horace Walpole and the Idea of China

Some time in the early 1780s Horace Walpole wrote a Chinese fairy tale to amuse himself and to entertain a young girl of his acquaintance. Named ‘Mi Li’ after its protagonist, it was printed in 1785, together with five others, under the title Hieroglyphic Tales . The tale is a satire, directed at the East India Company's pursuit of profit and Britain's transforming mercantile–colonial enterprise after the American revolutionary war. This paper represents an effort to understand ‘Mi Li’ within the context of contemporary ideas about China and English attitudes towards a wider world.

Extending the realm of health policy with a “new public health” approach: A comparative look at the Canadian and Swedish national experiences

Modern health‐care systems in OECD countries were built around hospitals and the preferences of organized medicine and are largely focused on acute‐care services and services provided by doctors. Starting in the early 1980s, however, the professionalization in several countries of trades traditionally involved in health promotion, together with the constitution of a group of researchers in social epidemiology and the corresponding development of specialized schools and research centres, brought new actors into health policy‐making worldwide. This led to the extension of contemporary health policy beyond the post‐war bio‐medical model into population health promotion and social policy. This article describes and analyses the means (and limitations) used by Canada and Sweden for extending the action radius of health policies. Results show that national policies in health promotion beyond the health sector contributed above all to developing and legitimizing an official discourse that presents social problems as factors affecting social inequalities in health. Health promotion represented a tool for maintaining central social norms, as national governments were re‐defining their role in social policy. Sommaire: Les systèmes modernes de soins de santé dans les pays de l'OCDE ont été construits autour d'hôpitaux et des préférences de la médecine organisée et sont essentiellement axés sur les services de soins intensifs de courte durée et les services médicaux. Cependant, depuis le début des années 1980, la professionnalisation des métiers traditionnellement impliqués dans la promotion de la santé survenue dans plusieurs pays, associée à la constitution d'un groupe de chercheurs en épidémiologie sociale et le développement d'écoles et de centres de recherche spécialisés ont introduit de nouveaux acteurs dans l'élaboration de politiques en matière de santéà l'échelle mondiale. Cela a entraîné une transformation de la politique de la santé contemporaine, qui a dépassé le modèle biomédical d'après‐guerre pour s'étendre à la promotion de la santé de la population et à la politique sociale. Le présent article décrit et analyse les moyens utilisés par le Canada et la Suède pour étendre le rayon d'action des politiques de la santé et les limites auxquelles ils font face. Les résultats indiquent que les politiques nationales visant la promotion de la santé au‐delà du secteur de la santé ont contribué avant tout à développer un discours officiel qui présente les problèmes sociaux comme des facteurs ayant une incidence sur les inégalités sociales de la santé. La promotion de la santé a représenté un outil pour maintenir des normes sociales nationales, alors que les gouvernements centraux redéfinissaient leur rôle en matière de politique sociale.

‘Beauty Will Save the World’: Beauty Discourse and the Imposition of Gender Hierarchies in the Post‐War Chechen Republic

This paper utilises the case study of the recent Miss Chechen Beauty pageant in order to discuss the ways in which gendered discourses and practices have affected the situation of women in the post‐war Chechen Republic. Although, on the surface, they appear to have little in common, the paper draws on connections between women's bodies and nation‐states in order examine practices such as beauty pageants, honor killings, and government‐enforced modesty campaigns that are currently taking place in the republic. Ultimately, the paper argues that beauty contests and modesty campaigns share in common the fact that they are being utilised by the state to relegate women to private spaces and to re‐enforce gender hierarchies in the aftermath of two brutal conflicts.

The USA's Reaction to the Bolivian Revolution of 1952: Pragmatism and the Inter‐American System

Many historians view the Eisenhower administration's policies towards Latin America as dominated by a narrowly anti‐communist mindset and based on a limited understanding of Latin American nationalism. A closer examination of the administration's relationship with Bolivia's revolutionary regime challenges this over‐simplification. By nurturing Bolivian nationalism, while simultaneously pushing it towards more agreeable policy stances, the Eisenhower administration wanted to show nationalists across Latin America and beyond that there were benefits in co‐operating with the USA. Appreciating the importance and power of Third‐World nationalism in the post‐war era, Eisenhower sought to ensure that these emerging nations remained firmly in the Western camp economically and diplomatically. In Bolivia, this effort was ultimately unsuccessful. High aid levels and co‐operative policies proved insufficient to bring lasting prosperity and stability to Bolivia. Furthermore, although many officials recognised the importance of co‐opting regional nationalism, growing US influence on Bolivian domestic policy served to antagonise nationalist resentment. Bolivians and the many other Latin Americans continued to feel economic hardship and neglect, and were more influenced by polarising US interventions in Guatemala and Cuba than by seemingly benevolent US policies in Bolivia.

Volk auf dem Weg : Transnational Migration of the Russian‐Germans from 1763 to the Present Day

This article traces the migration patterns of the Russian‐Germans across international borders from their initial settlement in the Russian Empire starting in 1763 up to the present day. In particular it analyses the reasons behind these migration flows. Both push and pull factors motivated the immigration of ethnic Germans to the Russian Empire in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A similarly complex combination of such factors spurred the various waves of emigration by Russian‐Germans out of this territory during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This article seeks to illuminate the primary causes of these migrant flows. It covers the main waves of German immigration into the Russian Empire including the initial settlement in the Volga region from 1763 to 1769, the establishment of the Mennonite colonies in Ukraine from 1789 to 1809 and the migration of German speakers to the Black Sea area from 1804 to 1856. It examines the various waves of emigration out of the territory of the former Russian Empire starting in the 1870s and continuing until today. The article goes on to analyse the immigration of Russian‐Germans to the Americas from Tsarist Russia from the 1870s until the First World War. Then it deals with the various waves of Russian‐German emigration under the Soviet regime starting in 1917–21 and reoccurring later in the 1920s, 1940s, 1970s and finally from 1987 to the collapse of the USSR. Finally, it examines the emigration of Russian‐Germans from Russia, Kazakhstan and Central Asia and their settlement in Germany until 2006. Special attention is given to the history of Stalinist repression and later discrimination against the Russian‐Germans as factors in their desire to emigrate.

National Bodies: The ‘Comfort Women’ Discourse and its Controversies in South Korea

This article examines how the nationalist discourse crystallising around the ‘comfort women’ issue (women abducted to function as sexual slaves for the Japanese Imperial Army during the Pacific War) in South Korea has eventually rendered individual victims' needs and preferences irrelevant to a larger narrative of an unforgivable offence to national sovereignty. The narrative, constructed socially with the active participation of the Korean government(s), has also linked together past grievances felt towards both Japan and the USA (their people as well as their governments) – albeit the latter appears only covertly, and on a more symbolic level its presence is indicative of the general public mood. What have been lost in the discourse are the very victims of military sexual slavery, whose fate and wellbeing has no longer been the subject of any social interest.

Against Biopolitics: Walter Benjamin, Carl Schmitt, and Giorgio Agamben on Political Sovereignty and Symbolic Order 1

While Walter Benjamin's equation of law with violence leads to his affirmation of a kind of un‐mediated divine violence and Giorgio Agamben's notion of sovereignty links politics directly with the body, Carl Schmitt's idea of sovereignty does not concern itself primarily with bare life but with an acculturated subject that links law and politics to a particular tradition. Because he is always concerned about this relationship between culture and politics, Schmitt offers a concept of the political that is better able to explain the kinds of ideological and cultural factors that impact upon politics in situations such as the Weimar Republic or the civil war in Iraq, in which cultural conflict leads to political instability. His thinking suggests that the cultural analysis of both religious and secular literary traditions can throw light on the ideological commitments that motivate political conflict.

Book Reviews

Book reviewed in this issue. Medieval and Early Modern Literature and CultureEming, Jutta, and Claudia Jarzebowski, eds.Blutige Worte: Internationales und interdisziplinäres Kolloquium zum Verhältnis von Sprache und Gewalt in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit.Heal, Bridget.The Cult of the Virgin Mary in Early Modern Germany: Protestant and Catholic Piety, 1500–1648.Keller, Hildegard Elisabeth, ed.Jakob Ruf. Leben, Werk und Studien.18 th & 19 th Century Literature and CultureAjouri, Philip.Erzählen nach Darwin. Die Krise der Teleologie im literarischen Realismus: Friedrich Theodor Vischer und Gottfried Keller.Bland, Caroline, and Elisa Müller‐Adams, eds.Schwellenüberschreitungen: Politik in der Literatur von deutschsprachigen Frauen 1780–1918.Bogdal, Klaus‐Michael, ed.Orientdiskurse in der deutschen Literatur.Gerig, Maya.Jenseits von Tugend und Empfindsamkeit. Gesellschaftspolitik im Frauenroman um 1800.Hauser, Claudia.Politiken des Wahnsinns. Weibliche Psychopathologie in Texten deutscher Autoren zwischen Spätaufklärung und Fin de siècle.Hertz, Deborah.How Jews Became Germans: The History of Conversion and Assimilation in Berlin.Hodkinson, James R.Women and Writing in the Works of Novalis: Transformation beyond Measure?Neumann, Michael.Eine Literaturgeschichte der Photographie.Phelan, Anthony.Reading Heinrich Heine.20 th & 21 st Century Literature and CultureBridgham, Fred, ed.The First World War as a Clash of Cultures.Gabor, Olivia G.The Stage as ‘Der Spielraum Gottes’.Hall, Katharina, ed.Esther Dischereit.Reitter, Paul.The Anti‐Journalist: Karl Kraus and Jewish Self‐Fashioning in Fin‐de‐Siècle Europe.Twark, Jill E.Humor Satire, and Identity: Eastern German Literature in the 1990s.Wilke, Sabine.Masochismus und Kolonialismus. Literatur, Film und Pädagogik.Witt, Mary Ann Frese, ed.Nietzsche and the Rebirth of the Tragic.German Studies across the CurriculumAllert, Beate, ed.Comparative Cinema. How American University Students View Foreign Films.Fulbrook, Mary, ed.Un‐Civilizing Processes? Excess and Transgression in German Society and Culture: Perspectives Debating with Norbert Elias.Gemünden, Gerd, and Mary R. Desjardins, eds.Dietrich Icon.Macdonald, Iain, and Krzysztof Ziarek, eds.Adorno and Heidegger: Philosophical Questions.Moses, Dirk A.German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past.