Recommended for “frequent perusal” and “improving the science of medicine”: Benjamin Rush’s American editions and the circulation of medical knowledge in the early Republic

Between 1809 and 1813 leading American physician Benjamin Rush (1745–1813) devoted a significant portion of his time to the production of “American Editions” of four British and colonial medical texts by Thomas Sydenham (1624–1689), Sir John Pringle (1707–1782), William Hillary (1697–1763), and George Cleghorn (1716–1789). This occurred during a period where Rush might have written a textbook detailing his preferred medical system for students outright. Instead, he opted for a different form of knowledge production and proliferation that focused on creating fictive conversations and encouraging critical reading rather than rote memorization. He dedicated these heavily annotated documents to the medical students of the United States of America and set them up as a pedagogical tool. Analysis of these texts helps uncover the reading practices of Rush and the manner in which he expected Americans to mediate their usage of foreign texts and theories after the American Revolution.     

‘She’s not a slag because she only had sex once’: Sexual ethics in a London secondary school

The premature sexualisation of young people is a source of intense public anxiety, often framed as an unprecedented crisis. Concurrently, a critical scholarship highlights problematic assumptions underpinning this discourse, including a positioning of young people as morally compromised passive subjects, and a disconnect between the reductionist framework and the complexity of young peoples’ lived experiences. Drawing from ethnographic research in a London school, in this article I argue that by attending to the everyday lives of pupils, a more nuanced picture of moral and sexual change and continuity emerges. Using the framework of ‘ordinary ethics’, which identifies ethics as pervasive in speech and action, I demonstrate the multiple ways by which young people define and act according to what they consider sexually good and right. In this way the analytical focus is shifted from passivity to activity and we can appreciate how young people today are evincing a sexual ethics of force and efficacy.     

A Diagnostic Teaching Intervention for Classroom Teachers: Helping Struggling Readers in Early Elementary School

With the advent of “Response to Intervention” there has been emphasis on preventing reading disabilities. This study examined the effectiveness of a classroom teacher Tier II intervention for struggling readers in kindergarten and first grade called the Targeted Reading Intervention. Three rural schools were randomly assigned to experimental and control conditions, with 8 experimental and 12 control classrooms. Five struggling and five non‐struggling readers were randomly selected from each classroom. With the support of biweekly coaching, experimental teachers instructed struggling readers in one‐on‐one sessions in the classroom. Intent‐to‐treat analyses revealed significant kindergarten gains for initial word identification but no significant gains in first grade. Discussion focuses on the use of classroom teachers to prevent reading disabilities.