Tag: standard works

‘Handbuch der Architektur’ (1880–1943): A German Design Manual for the Building Profession

~ Susanne Jany

The first volume of the massive reference book series Handbuch der Architektur  (Handbook of Architecture) was published in 1880.1 At this time, the population of European cities was growing at a hitherto unprecedented scale, industrialization outside of England was reaching its peak, and traffic infrastructure was taking on global dimensions. The building boom of the newly founded German Reich was in full swing too. Suddenly, workshops, post offices, hospitals, and more had to deal with ever increasing numbers of customers or patients and goods that demanded bigger, spatially and functionally more differentiated facilities. Novel types of buildings, such as railway stations, department stores, and disinfection plants, presented architects with the pressing question of how to design them appropriately to their purposes and so that building and using them would be cost efficient.

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The Handbook as Genre: Conflicting Concepts in 1950s Physics Publishing

~ Alrun Schmidtke

Why should researchers publish printed books in an age when everything is expected to be available online and when print is widely deemed outdated? Similarly, from 1955 to 1988, physicists who published articles in the 78-volume Handbuch der Physik—Encyclopedia of Physics had to explain to their colleagues why they were participating in a project that many thought too slow, too heavy, too expensive, too definitive, yet not dependable or up-to-date enough. Some authors were assailed by doubts themselves since publication dates were pushed back by the publisher time and time again. (Surely, the editor would have declined his own role in the project, had he known that the series would take some 33 years to complete.) Looking at the early period of the making of this handbook reveals some interesting aspects of the characteristics of science publishing in the mid-twentieth century, right when the struggling German publishing industry was seeking ways to gain traction,1 and just before journal publishing as a stand-alone publishing model picked up pace.2 Continue reading “The Handbook as Genre: Conflicting Concepts in 1950s Physics Publishing” →

Mental Disorders, Collective Observation, and the International Classification of Diseases

~ David Robertson

Over four decades ago, the distinguished epidemiological psychiatrist Norman Sartorius wrote, “the history of psychiatric classification is in fact a history of psychiatry.”1 During the 1960s and 1970s, Sartorius had been at the center of research by the World Health Organization (WHO) on the international classification and prevalence of mental disorders. During that era, the organization significantly transformed its classificatory manual, the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD), releasing the ICD–9 in 1977. The ICD is the standard international manual for recording mortality and morbidity data for insurance and epidemiological purposes. WHO is currently in the final stages of completing its latest update to the text, ICD–11.

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