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JOANNA BOURKE

Blogs
Here are my latest blogs! Enjoy.


The Eye: A History
Cicero (106-43 B.C.): ‘Nature has given us eyes to declare our internal emotions’. Paulo Coelho (1947-): ‘The eyes are the mirror of the...
Feb 5, 202417 min read
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The Stomach: A History
Punch divided the stomach into four ‘Faculties’. It called the first the ‘Sustaining Faculty’, which dealt with foods that were essential...
Feb 5, 202416 min read
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Hair: A History
In June 2015, Rachel Dolezal was exposed for having lied about being of African American heritage. Dolezal was head of her local branch...
Feb 5, 202415 min read
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Feet (and Feetishism!)
The foot. Where will feet take us today? In the middle of a pandemic [I first wrote this blog during lock-down!], most of us will be...
Feb 5, 202417 min read
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Clitoris and Penis: A History
This blog comes with a warning: it is not for those delicate of hearing or squeamish of stomach because today I am writing about two sex...
Feb 5, 202416 min read
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Breasts: Free the Nipple!
On 21 June 1986, nine American women removed their shirts in a park in Rochester, New York. They were protesting against a law which...
Feb 5, 202417 min read
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Cruelty to Animals
Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s ‘Girl Making a Dog Dance on Her Bed’ was painted in the late 1760s. The painting is typical of his decadent...
Feb 5, 202420 min read
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State Torture
Just two months after the 9/11 attacks in New York City and Washington DC, Fox TV broadcast the first of their series ‘24’. The main...
Feb 5, 202429 min read
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Breast Cancer: Stories and Activism
In September 1971, Ebony magazine published an article that broke a major taboo: a survivor of breast cancer wrote candidly about her...
Feb 5, 202425 min read
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AIDS: A History
Between 25 and 40 million people worldwide have died as a result of opportunistic infections arising from AIDS or Acquired...
Feb 5, 202431 min read
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Tuberculosis: A History
What does tuberculosis look like? If we are thinking about the early-nineteenth century, we might imagine an emaciated, white, male...
Feb 5, 202428 min read
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Sickle Cell Disease: A History
In April 1973, cinemas throughout America began screening a tearjerking love story, the plot of which revolved around sickle cell...
Feb 5, 202423 min read
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Polio: A History (The Great Cat Massacre of 1916!)
The Great Cat Massacre in New York City began in July 1916. By the end of that month, 72,000 cats and around 8,000 dogs had been...
Feb 5, 202423 min read
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Dementia: A History
A few weeks before writing this blog, I was launching a book that I had recently published. A former PhD student of mine and someone I...
Feb 5, 202425 min read
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Breast Cancer: A History
Suddenly feeling a lump in one’s breast is terrifying, yet it is an experience suffered by one in every eight women in Britain and...
Jan 7, 20246 min read
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Digital Ways of Dying
A fortnight ago, a friend sent me a light-hearted reminder that it was her birthday in a few days. She does this every year. The problem...
Jan 3, 20249 min read
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Headache: A History
In 1964, author and critic Susan Sontag published a little-known short story entitled ‘Man with a Pain’. It is an eloquent reflection not...
Jan 3, 20247 min read
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Sexual Assault: The Courtroom
Review of Heather R. Hlavka and Sameena Mulla’s Bodies in Evidence. Race, Gender, and Science in Sexual Assault Adjudication (New York:...
Jan 3, 20245 min read
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