This book explores the social history of venereal disease and public health in New Zealand in the twentieth-century by re-evaluating existing international scholarship on disease control and issues of morality. By using untapped archival material, this case study highlights the wider importance in international research into the interception of health agencies and targeted groups and the impact of gender, race and class on the venereal disease debate.

This book brings an important new perspective to the study of sex trafficking by considering the different types of social contracts which existed in the past that had sexual labour or activity as an inherent component. It outlines the nature of these social institutions – marriage, temporary marriage, debt bondage, and slavery – which were recognized in local law, carried no stigma, and endured for long periods. It discusses how labour pledged in return for a loan of cash or as a result of a punishment dictated by the state often included sexual labour, and how this could take the form of servicing the master of the house, his guests, or foreign travellers, who paid the debt-holder for the privilege, and how even wives of different ranks, temporary or permanent, and children, were pledged as sureties for loans. The book, which covers the modern states of Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam, argues that cultural norms are not static, that sexual contracts are more complicated than simply ‘marriage’ or ‘prostitution’, and that as trafficking for sexual purposes increases, those engaging in humanitarian intervention should improve their knowledge of the historical underpinnings of cultural understandings of familial and contractual obligations.

The Oxford Handbook of the History of Medicine celebrates the richness and variety of medical history around the world. In recent decades, the history of medicine has emerged as a rich and mature sub-discipline within history, but the strength of the field has not precluded vigorous debates about methods, themes, and sources. Bringing together over thirty international scholars, this handbook provides a constructive overview of the current state of these debates, and offers new directions for future scholarship. There are three sections: the first explores the methodological challenges and historiographical debates generated by working in particular historical ages; the second explores the history of medicine in specific regions of the world and their medical traditions, and includes discussion of the `global history of medicine'; the final section analyses, from broad chronological and geographical perspectives, both established and emerging historical themes and methodological debates in the history of medicine.

In recent decades, there has been considerable interest in writing histories of medicine that capture local, regional, and global dimensions of health and health care in the same frame. Exploring changing patterns of disease and different systems of medicine across continents and countries, A Global History of Medicine provides a rich introduction to this emergent field. The introductory chapter addresses the challenges of writing the history of medicine across space and time and suggests ways in which tracing the entangled histories of the patchworks of practice that have constituted medicine allow us to understand how healing traditions are always plural, permeable, and shaped by power and privilege. Written by scholars from around the world and accompanied by suggestions for further reading, individual chapters explore historical developments in health, medicine, and disease in China, the Islamic World, North and Latin America, Africa, South-east Asia, Western and Eastern Europe, and Australia and New Zealand. The final chapter focuses on smallpox eradication and reflects on the sources and methods necessary to integrate local and global dimensions of medicine more effectively. Collectively, the contributions to A Global History of Medicine will not only be invaluable to undergraduate and postgraduate students seeking to expand their knowledge of health and medicine across time, but will also provide a constructive theoretical and empirical platform for future scholarship.

When New Zealand forces arrived in Italy following the 1943 Armistice with the Allied forces, it was inevitable they would mingle with the local population. The Italians opened their homes and hearts to the New Zealand soldiers who delighted in finding young Italian signorinas everywhere. In Love and War tells of the liaisons and love affairs of New Zealand soldiers and their Italian sweethearts during World War Two. For some the result was marriage, leading to a new and often strained life for the Italian war brides on the other side of the world. For others, their wartime romance ended in heartbreaking separation when the Kiwi soldiers were posted elsewhere or returned home. Unknowingly, some left behind children who would grow up without ever meeting their natural fathers. While the New Zealand commanding officers did their very best to curtail fraternisation between Kiwi soldiers and the civilian population, for servicemen starved of female company relationships were easy to fall into. These touching stories of their romantic wartime encounters reveal the human side of war.

From the nineteenth-century British Poor Laws, to an early twentieth-century Aboriginal reserve in Queensland Australia, to AIDS activists on the streets of Toronto in the 1990s, Bodily Subjects explores the historical entanglement between gender and health to expose how ideas of health - a concept whose meanings we too often assume to understand - are embedded in assumptions about femininity and masculinity. These essays expand the conversation on health and gender by examining their intersection in different geo-political contexts and times. Constantly measured through ideals and judged by those in authority, healthy development has been construed differently for teenage girls, adult men and women, postpartum mothers, and those seeking cosmetic surgery. Over time, meanings of health have expanded from an able body signifying health in the nineteenth century to concepts of "well-being," a psychological and moral interpretation, which has dominated health discourse in Western countries since the late twentieth century. Through examinations of particular times and places, across two centuries and three continents, Bodily Subjects highlights the ways in which the body is both subjectively experienced and becomes a subject of inquiry. Contributors include Barbara Brookes (University of Otago), Brigitte Fuchs (University of Vienna), Catherine Gidney (St Thomas University), Mona Gleason (University of British Columbia), Natalie Gravelle (York University), Rebecca Godderis (Wilfrid Laurier University), Antje Kampf (Humboldt University of Berlin), Marjorie Levine-Clark (University Colorado Denver), Wendy Mitchinson (University of Waterloo), Meg Parsons (University of Auckland), Tracy Penny Light (University of Waterloo), Patricia A. Reeve (Suffolk University), Anika Stafford (Simon Fraser University), and Thomas Wendelboe (University of Waterloo).

George Rosen's wide-ranging account of public health's long and fascinating history is an indispensable classic. Since publication in 1958, George Rosen's classic book has been regarded as the essential international history of public health. Describing the development of public health in classical Greece, imperial Rome, England, Europe, the United States, and elsewhere, Rosen illuminates the lives and contributions of the field's great figures. He considers such community health problems as infectious disease, water supply and sewage disposal, maternal and child health, nutrition, and occupational disease and injury. And he assesses the public health landscape of health education, public health administration, epidemiological theory, communicable disease control, medical care, statistics, public policy, and medical geography. Rosen, writing in the 1950s, may have had good reason to believe that infectious diseases would soon be conquered. But as Dr. Pascal James Imperato writes in the new foreword to this edition, infectious disease remains a grave threat. Globalization, antibiotic resistance, and the emergence of new pathogens and the reemergence of old ones, have returned public health efforts to the basics: preventing and controlling chronic and communicable diseases and shoring up public health infrastructures that provide potable water, sewage disposal, sanitary environments, and safe food and drug supplies to populations around the globe. A revised introduction by Elizabeth Fee frames the book within the context of the historiography of public health past, present, and future, and an updated bibliography by Edward T. Morman includes significant books on public health history published between 1958 and 2014. For seasoned professionals as well as students, A History of Public Health is visionary and essential reading.