Urban history Archives

Learning to Cut

Across early modern Europe, surgeons played a key role in the provision of everyday healthcare. They dressed wounds, lanced boils, set bones, treated tumours, as well as performing specialist operations such as couching cataracts or cutting for the stone. They carried out anatomies and autopsies, prepared corpses for embalming, and, if they were entitled to do so, occasionally performed major operations such as removing cancers, amputating limbs, and trepanning skulls. Yet, while recent studies have done much to elucidate the work of surgeons, little has been published about how they were trained.

Learning to Cut fills this significant gap. A range of case studies from the French, Italian, German, and English contexts reveal diverse modes of surgical teaching and learning in early modern towns and cities, and how they were shaped by existing social, economic, and occupational structures. Equally varied were the spaces and institutions where prospective practitioners learned and experienced surgery. Thus, the shop, the patient’s house, the hospital, the guild hall, and the anatomy theatre were all sites for learning, teaching – and cutting. The chapters present rich narratives of education and, together, shed new light on the practice of early modern surgery.

Space Syntax

Professor Bill Hillier spent most of his career at The Bartlett, University College London, where he founded and developed, with a team of colleagues, an original research programme that set the study of architecture on a firm scientific basis. His transformational way of thinking about buildings and cities influenced generations of scholars, researchers and practitioners within the built environment disciplines and way beyond – in fields ranging from archaeology and biology to physics and zoology.

Space Syntax: Selected papers by Bill Hillier provides a canon of works that reflects the progression of Hillier’s ideas from the early publications of the 1970s to his most recent work, published before his death in 2019. This selection of influential works ranges from his papers on architecture as a professional and research discipline, through to his later papers that present a theory of the spatial structure of the city and its social functions. By bringing together writing from across his career-span of half a century, with specially commissioned introductions by a wide range of international experts in the field, we are able to contextualise and show the range and evolution of Hillier’s key ideas.

Rent Strikes

Since the nineteenth century, working-class families have predominantly relied on tenements for housing, with rents often consuming a large portion of their household budgets. There is a long and contested history of tenants taking collective action across time and in many contexts, including their involvement in rent strikes, but international comparisons have been scarce. Rent Strikes: A history of collective tenant actions across the world is a collaborative effort by 16 contributors from diverse countries to identify common patterns and global trajectories in the rich history of tenants’ strikes, spanning a period of almost 120 years from the early twentieth century to the Covid-19 pandemic. It brings together local, national and comparative case studies to illustrate the history of tenant mobilisation for the general public, connecting with existing scholarship and laying the groundwork for future research. Adopting a transnational perspective, it examines episodes of tenant struggles in North and Latin America, Northern and Southern Europe, and Oceania. In doing so, the book explores a range of actions, including petitions, demonstrations, boycotts and legal actions, and has a special focus on the part played by women in these movements. The contributors examine the role of ethnic, national and gender differences between tenants and landlords, while situating their studies within a broader historical context and addressing the larger questions posed in the first chapter.