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This paper examines the role of Carl Gustav Carus within the emerging field of physical anthropology during the mid-nineteenth century. Despite his extensive connections with contemporary anthropologists, Carus's craniological approach was increasingly marginalized, ultimately excluding him from the foundational phase of German anthropology. Reconstructing Carus's craniological network from largely unpublished correspondence, this study presents four key aspects. First, it traces the scholar's research in craniology, situating it within Goethe's and Oken's morphological vertebrae theory. Second, it outlines the typology and transnational scope of his craniological network. Third, the paper explores Carus's complex relationship with anthropology, highlighting the tension between his physiognomic methods and the evolving anatomic standards of his time. Lastly, the analysis highlights his aristocratic approach to anthropology, characterized by selective access to his cranial collection and an emphasis on the European "genius" as the pinnacle of human development. Ultimately, although well-connected among his peers, Carus was marginalized as physical anthropology shifted toward more empirical, metrical-morphological methodologies.

Starting in 1970, this article studies how Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant was built. It follows the station's operational history until 1982. During that year, reactor block one suffered a torn reactor channel, four years prior to the well-known catastrophe of 1986. It uncovers the genesis of these accidents by analyzing everyday history at the construction site. Construction relied on long established tools and processes, tried out at large-scale and mostly non-nuclear development areas. Masons, carpenters, and welders dealt with planned quotas and deadlines, material and personnel shortages, as well as a lack of quality management. The tools they used to build this nuclear giant were rather a shock of the old (Edgerton) than futuristic.It uncovers circumstances, non-alignments, and decisions that amounted to a working environment characterized by a technocratic culture. This culture overemphasized the fulfillment of plans and quotas to the detriment of safety as should have been warranted by the nature of a nuclear reactor as specified in plans and regulations. By following the plant's construction in its everyday struggles, this article shows characteristics of the working culture that evolved on-site and led to the accident of 1982. This innovative approach aids understanding of why and how the catastrophe of 1986 came about-beyond the two standard reasons established in the literature, namely a faulty reactor design and mistakes made by the operators.

The history of childhood has recently gained increasing attention in the history of medicine. This essay review discusses key publications addressing care relations, institutionalization, and medicalization of childhood. It focuses on studies of pediatrics, children's convalescent homes, infant institutions, and the gendered dimensions of pediatric practices. These works reveal how closely historical knowledge orders were tied to violence and control, and how strongly medicalized institutions shaped childhoods. At the same time, processes of de- and restructuring since the 1960s indicate a shift of interpretive authority from medicine to psychology and pedagogy. The review argues for a stronger intersectional and gender-historical perspective to grasp the dynamics of power, care, and knowledge in shaping children's lives.

This article analyzes how industrial psychologists used mechanical devices to study the efficiency of human labor. One major proponent of this research field, commonly known as "Psychotechnik," was Walther Moede. He invented a so-called bimanual tester-"Zweihandprüfer"-that enabled him to quantify the subjects' performance in aptitude tests, and then translate these findings into forecasts of future efficiency and productivity. Industrial psychologists interpreted their results as seemingly objective and unbiased indicators of the subjects' skills which made it possible to allocate workers, employees, and apprentices to their appropriate position within companies. This article, in contrast, argues that the classification of workers and employees was to a certain degree based on the examiners' qualitative value judgements. Drawing on printed sources such as psychotechnical journals and textbooks as well as experiments of their own with a bimanual tester, the author is able to show how industrial psychologists interpreted, evaluated, and categorized the participants' aptitude test results. Psychotechnicians claimed scientific authority and, hence, the power to classify individuals as "failures" or "gifted." While industrial psychologists argue that they were able to rationalize the distribution of work in the 1920s, this article reveals the leeway there is for interpretation when translating allegedly "objective" test results.

This paper delves into the complex construction and regulation of prostitution in colonial Hong Kong, exploring how intersecting dynamics of race, gender, class, and sexuality influenced perceptions and governance. Drawing on intersectionality, doing gender, and performativity frameworks, it analyzes the role of patriarchal imperialist capitalism, medical expertise, and humanitarian networks in shaping colonial attitudes toward prostitution, particularly through the enactment of contagious diseases (CD) ordinances. Despite existing scholarship on imperial regulation, there is a notable gap regarding the nuanced construct of the prostitute herself and its impact on regulatory practices. Through examination of historical documents, the paper reveals the interdependence between colonial and domestic constructions of race, sexuality, and class, highlighting their influence on legislative approaches in Britain and its colonies. By situating Hong Kong within broader imperial networks and scrutinizing medico-moral discourse and capitalist imperatives, the study exposes contradictions in colonial regulation, emphasizing the enduring legacies of exploitation. It advocates for further research into the performance and policing of prostitution, stressing the necessity of an intersectional lens to comprehend the complexities of colonial history.

In the early modern period, alchemical writings circulating under disguised author identities were part of a shadow economy of pseudepigraphical alchemical knowledge. By the end of the 16th century at the latest, the term Via Veritatis appeared as the title of alchemical, especially transmutatory, writings. For the period up to the 18th century, eighteen different versions were identified, which can be divided into five different text groups in terms of content. While the two older text groups (typus 1 and 2) criticize the state of contemporary alchemy and show the supposedly only true way to transmutation, the other text groups (typus 3 to 5) consist of a large number of systematically structured process instructions. However, a connection to the fictional person of Basilius Valentinus cannot be proven for all texts. The Via Veritatis texts of typus 1 and 2 show no obvious connections to Basilius Valentinus. For texts of typus 3 to 5, however, there appears to be reference to Basilius Valentinus in content and form. Based on the classification system proposed by Lawrence Principe for the corpus of Basilius Valentinus' writings, these can be assigned to sub-corpus C.