Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra is Professor of Social and cultural History at the University of Amsterdam. She has published on the granting of asylum in the Dutch Republic, deviance and tolerance, witchcraft and cultures of misfortune in the sixteenth to twentieth centuries, the reception of homoeopathy in the Netherlands, and on women and alternative health care un the Netherlands in the twentieth century. She recently edited, Remedies: Drugs, Medicines and contraceptives in Dutch and Anglo-American Healing Cultures (Rodopi, 2002), and with Roy Porter, Cultures of Neurasthenia from beard to the First World War (Rodopi, 2001). She is currently working on the history of psychiatry and mental health care in the Netherlands in the twentieth century.

Hilary Marlandis Reader in History and Director of the Centre for the History of Medicine at the University of Warwick. She is former editor of Social History of Medicine, and has published on midwifery and childbirth in the Netherlands, nineteenth-century medical practice, women and medicine, and infant and maternal welfare. She is currently working on puerperal insanity in nineteenth-century Britain and preparing a monograph study, Dangerous Motherhood: Insanity and Childbirth in the Nineteenth Century.