History Affect

In conjunction with the relaunch of an exhibition I have co-curated with Cynthia Tang at McGill University Library, I re-post this piece that first appeared on the blog WarChildHope . The exhibition runs from January until April, and, if you happen to be in Montreal, the vernissage is on February 6th at 5:30. You can also order my biography of Edward Jenner here . Vaccination was born in a time of war. Children, principal vectors of the smallpox virus, became the incubators of immunological hope. Prior to the massive public-awareness campaign spearheaded by Edward Jenner in 1798, distributing both the knowledge and the means of safe protection against smallpox, the smallpox virus itself had been preserved and propagated in the arms of children. It was common medical practice, in fact well into the nineteenth century, to inoculate children with smallpox in the hope that they would escape with a light dose of the disease. Jenner himself had suffered the ordeal at the age...

I'm extremely pleased to announce the publication of The History of Emotions (Manchester University Press). Get it here . It was written to provide an accessible but nonetheless comprehensive starting point for scholars and students alike to this burgeoning field. Here's the blurb:   The history of emotions is the first accessible book on the theories, methods, achievements, and problems in this burgeoning field of historical inquiry. Historians of emotion borrow heavily from the disciplines of anthropology, psychology, philosophy and neuroscience, and stake out a claim that emotions have a past and change over time. This book introduces students and professional historians to the main areas of concern in the history of emotions, discussing how the emotions intersect with other lines of historical research relating to power, practice, society and morality. Providing a narrative of historical emotions concepts, the book is the go-to handbook for understanding the pro...