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In 1918, excellent nursing care was the primary treatment for influenza. The disease was not well understood, and there were no antiviral medications to inhibit its progression or antibiotics to treat the complicating pneumonia that often followed. The social, cultural, and scientific context of the times shaped the profession's response. The Great War created a severe civilian nursing shortage: 9,000 trained white nurses were sent overseas and thousands more were assigned to U.S. military camps. The shortage was intensified because the nursing profession failed to fully utilize African American nurses in the war effort, and refused to use nurses' aides in the European theater. Counterbalancing these problems, excellent nurse leaders, advanced preparations for a domestic emergency, infrastructure provided by the National Organization for Public Health Nurses and the Red Cross Town and Country Nurses, and a nationwide spirit of volunteerism enhanced the profession's ability to respond effectively to the emergency on the home front.

The trauma-writings of World War I nurses have been identified as an important and influential corpus of early 20th-century works. Not only did the rediscovery of these writings in the later 20th century serve to recognize the importance of women's writings as part of the historical record, and identify certain female writers as some of the most important thinkers of the modernist movement; they also demonstrated the importance of the nursing perspective as one element of wartime experience. This paper considers a number of influential works written by both nurses and members of the Voluntary Aid Detachments (VAD) who assisted with nursing work during the war. The paper identifies how nurses and VADs presented their experiences of war trauma. It also considers how some writers strove to attach meaning to (or in some, cases expressed their sense of the meaninglessness of) the suffering caused by the war. The paper considers further how some nurses themselves experienced trauma as a result of their exposure to wartime work, and how some writers developed what are referred to as "philosophies of suffering," in which they struggled to understand suffering as an element of human experience.

The study of civic activity has become a central focus for many social scientists over the past decade, generating considerable research and debate. Previous studies have largely overlooked the role of youth socialization into civic life, most notably in the settings of home and school. Further, differences along gender lines in civic capacity have not been given sufficient attention in past studies. This study adds to the literature by examining the potential pathways in the development of youth civic activity and potential, utilizing both gender-neutral and gender-specific structural equation modeling of data from the 1996 National Household Education Survey. Results indicate that involvement by parents in their child's schooling plays a crucial, mediating role in the relationship between adult and youth civic activity. Gender differences are minimal; thus adult school involvement is crucial for transmitting civic culture from parents to both female and male youth.

Having reversed its pronatalist policies in 1988, the Islamic Republic of Iran implemented one of the most successful family planning programs in the developing world. This achievement, particularly in urban centers, is largely attributable to a large women-led volunteer health worker program for low-income urban neighborhoods. Research in three cities demonstrates that this successful program has had a host of unintended consequences. In a context where citizen mobilization and activism are highly restricted, volunteers have seized this new state-sanctioned space and successfully negotiated many of the familial, cultural, and state restrictions on women. They have expanded their mandate from one focused on health activism into one of social, if not political, activism, highlighting the ways in which citizens blur the boundaries of state and civil society under restrictive political systems prevalent in many of the Middle Eastern societies.

Prior research shows that members of voluntary organizations are more likely to protest than nonmembers. But why, among members, do some protest while others do not? I explore whether organizational involvement-the extent in which members engage in the "life" of their organizations-affects protest. I identify four dimensions of involvement-time and money contributions, participation in activities, psychological attachment, and embeddedness in interpersonal communication networks. Only the first dimension has robust effects on protest, and they are nonlinear: intermediate contributors have the highest protest rates. The three other dimensions substantially increase protest only under specific "involvement profiles."

We examine how and why donors divide gifts between people in the present (across distance) and between the present and future (across time). US donors tend to give less to charities that benefit the poor and more to charities that benefit the non-poor (such as museums, universities, and arts organizations). Many of these wealthier charities have created endowments that benefit not only present persons, but also future persons. We develop a shorthand framework for linking time to distance in charitable allocations that incorporates a "proximity preference," i.e., charity that prefers those who are nearer to us whether by reason of physical distance, psychic-identity, or temporal distance. Even though ethical considerations suggest that recipients' level of need should be the dominant factor in allocating gifts, donors also express preferences, ceteris paribus, for benefits arriving sooner rather than later, and for recipients who are ''closer'' rather than farther away.

This article examines the role of humanitarian discourse and development in reconfiguring the contemporary culture of empire and its war on terror. It takes as its point of entry the immensely popular biographical tale, Three Cups of Tea, which details how the American mountaineer Greg Mortenson has struggled to counter terrorism in Northern Pakistan through the creation of schools. Even as this text appears to provide a self-critical and humane perspective on terrorism, the article argues that it constructs a misleading narrative of terror in which the realities of Northern Pakistan and Muslim life-worlds are distorted through simplistic tropes of ignorance, backwardness and extremism, while histories of US geopolitics and violence are erased. The text has further facilitated the emergence of a participatory militarism, whereby humanitarian work helps to reinvent the military as a culturally sensitive and caring institution in order to justify and service the project of empire.

When pandemic influenza arrived from the United States in 1918-1920 to strike Canada with devastating force, the health system was overwhelmed. Although emergency hospitals were established in public buildings including schools and universities, many sick remained in their homes. Because of the war, many physicians and nurses were overseas. Many of those who were in Canada became flu victims. The result was a massive call for volunteers. Although a few men responded, most volunteers were women. These women, many of whom had little or no training, risked their lives by acting as nurses in existing and emergency hospitals and by assisting sick families in their homes. Many became ill and some died. The result is an incredible portrait of volunteer response to a major medical emergency.

Over the course of twenty-eight years, between 1964 and 1991, members of the Iowa Porkettes, the women's auxiliary to the Iowa Pork Producer's Association (IPPA), promoted pork products in order to assert their roles as agricultural producers. For the members of the Porkettes, technological change and the growth of agribusiness provided new opportunities to challenge patriarchal hierarchies in agricultural organizations. Over time, as the overall number of hog farmers declined and the agricultural marketplace increasingly demanded professional expertise, the Porkettes transformed a women's auxiliary into a female-led commodity organization. Initially, members participated in appropriately "feminine" activities including Pork Queen contests, lard-baking contests, consultations with high school home economics instructors, and the distribution of promotional materials. By the late 1970s, however, members began to employ a new rhetoric shaped by their labor on the farm to claim an important stake in the production and marketing of commodities. They took responsibility for large-scale advertising campaigns, managed a growing budget, and became leaders within the IPPA. Their experiences offer insight into broader developments of second wave agrarian feminisms that enabled farm women's organizations to renegotiate gendered divisions of labor, claim new public spaces for women, and demand greater recognition from male agricultural leaders.

In light of public sector reforms in Canada and elsewhere, this paper focuses on the shift of emphasis from social to private responsibilities and raises new questions about the forces of private enterprise and market-based partnerships. Under neoliberal governmental agendas, privatizing responsibility links to three main developments: the reconsideration of the relations of public and private; the mobilization of responsible citizenship; and the formation of a cultural mentality of rule that works alongside these developments. The research for this article is based on extensive analysis of policy documents and public sector reform initiatives, as well as interviews with Canadian federal public service employees.

Since the end of the First World War the Rockefeller Foundation has spearheaded a large-scale programme in the field of education for the health professions (doctors and nurses). In several countries throughout the world, but with its efforts concentrated on Europe, it has financed schools, constructed information networks, granted research scholarships and awarded training bursaries. In so doing it has not, however, been in the business of propagating an irresistible "American model," nor has it pursued a huge undertaking in disinterested aid. Through an attempt to contextualize these programmes, to bring to light the existence of common reference points, to retrace the work with local participants and to appraise cleavages within the philanthropic apparatus, this article proposes a fine-grained reading of the role of the Rockefeller Foundation at the Faculté de Médecine (Faculty of Medicine) and the Ecole d'Infirmières et d'assistantes sociales (Training School for Nurses and Social Workers) in Lyon between 1917- and 1940. It analyses these institutions in terms of the transactions, negotiations and appropriations that highlight their joint-venture character and it identifies their varied impact.

Taking a cross-national perspective, we investigate linkages between volunteer work, informal help, and care among Europeans aged 50 or older. Based on 27,297 personal interviews from the 2004 Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe, we estimate univariate and multivariate probit models, which allow us to analyze the interrelationship between those non-market productive activities. There is substantial variation in the participation in volunteering, helping, and caring between countries. Independent of the general level of activity in a country, we find evidence for a complementary and interdependent relationship between all three activities. Our findings not only suggest an important role of societal opportunity structures in elders' productive engagement, but also support notions of the existence of a general motivation to be active.

This article intends to examine the conditions of the city of Rio de Janeiro, regarding the city's health safety of the living and housing condition of its workers, which helped bringing about the spread of tuberculosis in the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century. Evidencing the high incidence of tuberculosis at this time, it intends to verify the reasons for creating the Brazilian League Against Tuberculosis and its purpose, analyzing its project of assistance to children's health and its intervention to discipline, which resulted in the creation of the Dona Amélia Queen Reformatory.

The personal writings of First World War nurses and VADs (volunteers) provide the historian with a range of insights into the war and women's nursing roles within it. This paper offers a number of methodological perspectives on these writings. In particular, it emphasises two elements of engagement with texts that can act as important influences on subsequent historical writings: authorial intention and scholarly interpretation. In considering the interplay of these two elements, the paper emphasises the motivations both of those who produced primary sources and of those who later used them to 'serve' particular historical interpretations. The paper examines letters, diaries and semi-fictional writings, considering the influences of gender, class and professional background on the ways in which their authors wrote. It then briefly considers the uses to which historians have put these original writings. The paper offers insights into the ways in which complex personal writings can be interpreted and concludes that the writings of First World War nurses and volunteers offer a rich and varied set of perspectives on both the war itself and the nature of wartime nursing work.

Policy science studies of networks in smoking policy segment the smoking arena into a "producer network" of industrial and retail interests and an "issue network" of anti-smoking organisations. Case studies of ASH (Action on Smoking and Health) and the Tobacco Products Research Trust (TPRT) indicate that networks in smoking policy were more complex and overlapping. ASH pioneered a new style of media-conscious health activism in the 1970s with an anti-industry line. Nevertheless the strategy of harm reduction remained an objective for industry and government, and also for some public health interests through the work of the TPRT. First safer smoking and then nicotine were the focus of these activities.

From the very beginning of the scout organization one of its main trends was the Samaritan service consisting in giving medical help to victims of disasters and acts of God. It became a domain of girls guide mainly. The articles describes a great commitment of the Polish girls guide in the medical assistance offered to their compatriots during the September campaign of 1939 and during the years of occupation from 1939 to 1945. It shows the education and training methods that prepared the girls to work with great dedication. From the first days of the war the girl guides started to work as nurses and orderlies in civil and military hospitals. They organized also their own hospitals and numerous first aid stations in bombed localities and roads frequented by fugitives escaping from the west parts of the country to the eastern territories. Under occupation, the girl guides organized their own underground medical service that collaborated strictly with military organization fighting for independence. Assisted by doctors they organized medical trainings for the members, collected medicines and sanitary materials, preparing themselves for the fights of the last part of the war. The girl guides organized groups of medical assistance of the National Army, which constituted a core of the organization medical service. During the "Storm" action several thousands of girls worked as orderlies that belonged to the combat troops of the National Army. The Warsaw insurrection was the greatest battle of soldiers of the National Army. The girls offered their help to thousands of soldiers and civilian victims.

The scientific discoveries of the U.S. Army Yellow Fever Board of 1900 are well known as are the Army physicians who led the board. Walter Reed, of course, is the best known, but James Carroll, Aristides Agramonte, and Jesse Lazear are also known, if not nationally, to their local communities. This article deals not with the known but with the unknown, meaning the volunteers who subjected themselves to the ravages of yellow fever and the real possibility of death. The year 1900 was known as a "yellow fever year" among the locals in Cuba because in the preceding year the epidemics had been relatively mild. Beginning its work in June 1900 in the midst of a deadly epidemic, the board conducted a truly remarkable set of experiments that set a benchmark for controlled clinical trials and informed consent. Because no animal model was known to be susceptible to yellow fever, they used human volunteers for their experiments. These volunteers were recruited from among Spanish immigrants and were accepted from soldiers and two civilians who volunteered. Over 30 men participated in the experiments, and 22 developed yellow fever. With expected death rates of 20% to 40%, it is incredible that none of these volunteers died. In 1929, the U.S. government honored the Americans who volunteered by placing their names on a Roll of Honor published annually in the Army Register. The successes of the 1900 U.S. Army Yellow Fever Board were truly remarkable, and many of the successes were made possible by the men who volunteered, some repeatedly, to risk their lives "in the interest of humanity and the cause of science."

After establishing herself in her career as a perioperative nurse and ensuring her grown children were settled, this author pursued her dream of working abroad as a nurse. She chose to work in Pakistan, which is where her father was born. Her experiences there gave her a new appreciation for the help that perioperative nurses can offer to the citizens of developing countries.

Orthopaedics Overseas is a volunteer organization whose roots began approximately 40 years ago. It started with the Orthopaedic Letters Club with its leader Dr. Allan McElvie and blossomed with the help of Medical International Cooperative Organization (MEDICO), Cooperative for American Relief Everywhere (CARE), and World Orthopaedic Concern (WOC). The organization's goal was to teach orthopaedics in third world countries and has grown to include programs in approximately 16 countries today. This history explains how the organization began and describes some of its great leaders. It also discusses some of the experiences of the volunteers.

From cancer and medical research, children's and women's issues, to arts, education, and culture, Carolyn Farb's skill as a volunteer fund raiser has been fine-tuned to equal that of the best professional fund raisers in the country. She has made chairing successful charitable events an art form and unselfish life's occupation.