Recurring economic crises, like the one of 2007-2008, led to criticism of economic research and a demand to develop new strategies to avoid them. Standard economic theories use conventional approaches to deal with economic challenges, heterodox theories try to develop alternatives with which to face them. It remains unclear whether the 2007-2008 crisis led to a change in economic research as well as to a consideration of alternative approaches. We used co-word analysis to map the structure of economic research in Germany between 2005 and 2014. Core topics within economic research, such as “market” or “production” hardly shift and can be linked to standard economic theories. Peripheral topics such as “inequality” or “unemployment” show greater dynamics. However, only a few of these topics can be linked to heterodox approaches. Certain changes have occurred in reaction to the 2007-2008 crisis. However, the unchanged importance of standard economic topics raises the question whether these changes are sufficient to face coming economic challenges.

The tension between theoretical and practical knowledge was particularly problematic for trainee physicians. Unlike civic apprenticeships in surgery and pharmacy, in early modern England there was no standard procedure for obtaining education in the practical aspects of the physician’s role, a very uncertain process of certification, and little regulation to ensure a suitable reward for their educational investment. For all the emphasis on academic learning and international travel, the majority of provincial physicians returned to practice in their home area, because establishing a practice owed more to networks of kinship, patronage and credit than to formal qualifications. Only when (and where) practitioners had to rely solely on their professional qualification to establish their status as young practitioners that the community could trust would proposals to reform medical education, such as those put forward to address a crisis of medicine in Restoration London, which are examined here, be converted into national regulation of medical education in the early nineteenth century, although these proposals prefigured many informal developments in medical training in the eighteenth century.

This paper focuses on the Jewish nursing profession in Poland during the interwar period. We argue that the integration of Jewish women in medical activity under the AJDC (American Jewish Distribution Committee) and TOZ (Towarzystwa Ochrony Zdrowia Ludności Żydowskiej [the Society for the Protection of the Health of the Jewish People]) emerged in Poland less from the adoption of gender equality and more out of necessity. On the one hand, JDC and TOZ needed Jewish nurses and public health nurses to carry out their health campaigns and build a public health infrastructure. On the other hand, a new generation of Jewish women needed job opportunities that would enable them to make a living and be independent. More broadly this case study shows that the implementation of American “reformative” ideals into the local Polish reality, including in the newly emerging public health field, involved adaptation, negotiation, and in some cases, resentment.

Linking up with recent studies on the experience of space and place in modern youth literature, this article analyzes how the “journey” as a narrative line and motif transformed Dutch early modern travel books for children from classical teaching instruments into explorative knowledge places. In the popular seventeenth-century Glorious and Fortunate Journey to the Holy Land, young readers were invited to travel within the book, which was presented as a place that covers material pages to observe as well as imagined places to read about. Eighteenth-century travel books, for example written by Joachim Heinrich Campe, shifted from an inner to an empirical mode of travelling. They raised the suggestion that they offered unmediated observations and travel experiences, as if reading about places was equal to seeing places. Since travel literature facilitated active knowledge quisition among youngsters, but also left little room for autonomous innovations or different interpretations, this article reveals the emancipatory as well as restrictive character of such places of learning. By turning reading into a kind of travelling, travel books served as a substitute for travel.

The imitation of adults was the dominant educational early modern model, as it had been from the classical era. Yet, from 1500 onward, this traditional model clashed with new pedagogical ideals that explored if and how the youthful mind differed from the adult. To investigate this clash, I examine individual and aggregate cases – taken from the Dutch (illustrated) textual culture – representing conceptualizations of what has been labelled “the curiosity family” (concepts such as curiosity, inquisitiveness, invention). As previously established, during the seventeenth century, curiosity turned from a vice to a virtue among adults. Textual evidence suggests that for the early modern Dutch youth, docility, long valued, remained the guiding ideal. Shortly after 1700, however, two changes can be detected: for youth, travel literature and travel as a metaphor became a means to explore the world without adults; and for adults, the experimental learning style of the young became a new learning model.