Multidisciplinary collection of essays on the relationship of infertility and the "historic" STIs--gonorrhea, chlamydia, and syphilis--producing surprising new insights in studies from across the globe and spanning millennia. A multidisciplinary group of prominent scholars investigates the historical relationship between sexually transmitted infections and infertility. Untreated gonorrhea and chlamydia cause infertility in a proportion of women and men. Unlike the much-feared venereal disease of syphilis--"the pox"--gonorrhea and chlamydia are often symptomless, leaving victims unaware of the threat to their fertility. Science did not unmask the causal microorganisms until thelate nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Their effects on fertility in human history remain mysterious. This is the first volume to address the subject across more than two thousand years of human history. Following asynoptic editorial introduction, part 1 explores the enigmas of evidence from ancient and early modern medical sources. Part 2 addresses fundamental questions about when exactly these diseases first became human afflictions, withnew contributions from bioarcheology, genomics, and the history of medicine, producing surprising new insights. Part 3 presents studies of infertility and its sociocultural consequences in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Africa, Oceania, and Australia. Part 4 examines the quite different ways the infertility threat from STIs was perceived--by scientists, the public, and government--in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germany, France, and Britain, concluding with a pioneering empirical estimate of the infertility impact in Britain. Simon Szreter is Professor of History and Public Policy, University of Cambridge, and Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge.

Sex and Suffering is a ground-breaking work. It tells the often shocking story of women's desperation to gain control over their lives and their health, and of medicine's struggle to comprehend and manage the mysteries of nature. It offers a graphic and revealing history of childbirth in Australia; of the medical care of women; of nursing and gender roles; and of the impact of immigration on Australian society. Remarkably, thousands of detailed case notes, from the 1850s to the 1930s, survived intact at the Royal Women's Hospital, Melbourne. For the first time in the English-speaking world a historian was allowed to work directly from these confidential patient records. Janet McCalman vividly recreates the lives of patients and the daily work of a hospital. She enables readers to follow the institution through times of growth and economic depression, through the grim history of criminal abortion, and through the inspiring story of medical science and surgery since the coming of anaesthesia. Sex and Suffering is a vivid and absorbing social history of women's health, seen through the work of Australia's oldest women's hospital.

Journeyings begins with a tram journey-the sixty-nine tram collecting boys and girls from Melbourne s middle-class heartland on their first day of school for 1934. It marks the beginning of an extraordinary journey through Australian private life that commences with the gold rushes of the 1850s and concludes in our own time, tracing the life journeyings of a generation of boys and girls from four of Melbourne s legendary private schools. In an engrossing and highly original exploration of one of the most neglected subjects in Australian social history-the middle class-Janet McCalman has produced a worthy successor to her acclaimed portrait of working-class life, Struggletown.