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Nourishing food, clean air and exercise: medical debates over environment and polar hygiene on Robert Falcon Scott’s British National Antarctic expedition, 1901–1904 Med. Hist. (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2024-03-18 Edward Armston-Sheret
The late nineteenth and early twentieth century saw dramatic new developments in climatic medicine, particularly the institutionalisation of thinking about tropical hygiene. There were also more limited efforts to understand how hygiene theories should be applied in a polar environment. Studying the British National Antarctic Expedition (1901–1904), led by Robert Falcon Scott, helps us understand how
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Smallpox Geographies: vaccination, borders and Indigenous peoples in Australia’s coastal north Med. Hist. (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2024-03-18 Chi Chi Huang, Alison Bashford
Australia’s approach to its biosecurity and borders has always been two-pronged – quarantine first, vaccination second. This article asks what this combination looked like in practice by exploring two neglected smallpox vaccination campaigns directed towards Indigenous peoples in the early twentieth century. We argue these were important campaigns because they were the first two pre-emptive, rather
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Spanish–French leech trade and its consequences: From the increase in medical demand to resource depletion and technical innovation Med. Hist. (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2024-03-18 Damián Copena, María Gómez-Martín
This article studies the impact caused by the success and dissemination of Broussais’ theories on the use of leeches as a medical supply on Spanish–French trade relations, as well as its consequences for the Spanish market between 1821 and the 1860s. Analysing the documents produced by the different public administrations, together with newspaper and archival sources in both Spain and France and the
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Thorny entanglements: feminism, eugenics and the Abortion Law Reform Association’s (ALRA) campaign for safe, accessible abortion in Britain, 1936–1967 Med. Hist. (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2024-03-18 Susanne Maria Klausen
For the past two decades anti-abortionists in the Global North have been aggressively instrumentalising disability in order to undermine women’s social autonomy, asserting, falsely, there is an insuperable conflict between disability rights and reproductive rights. The utilisation of disability in struggles over abortion access is not new, it has a history dating back to the interwar era. Indeed, decades
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‘A sad inheritance of misery’: the cultural life of hereditary scrofula in eighteenth-century England Med. Hist. (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2024-03-15 Noelle Dückmann Gallagher
This essay argues that scrofula was one of several disorders, including gout, rickets, and venereal disease, that were ‘rebranded’ as hereditary in response to broader cultural changes that took place during the Restoration and eighteenth century in England. While the purposes of scrofula’s recategorisation were more political than medical, they resulted in this heretofore relatively obscure childhood
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Work, marriage and premature birth: the socio-medicalisation of pregnancy in state socialist East-Central Europe Med. Hist. (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2023-10-13 Kateřina Lišková, Natalia Jarska, Annina Gagyiova, José Luis Aguilar López-Barajas, Šárka Caitlín Rábová
Reproductive health in state socialism is usually viewed as an area in which the broader contexts of women’s lives were disregarded. Focusing on expert efforts to reduce premature births, we show that the social aspects of women’s lives received the most attention. In contrast to typical descriptions emphasising technological medicalisation and pharmaceuticalisation, we show that expertise in early
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Syphilis, blanchiment and French colonial medicine in sub-Saharan Africa during the interwar period Med. Hist. (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2023-10-13 Guillaume Linte
During the interwar period, France put unprecedented efforts into public health measures targeting the colonised populations of sub-Saharan Africa. This investment in health was seen as crucial to ensuring the renewal of the African labour force needed for the economic development of the colonies. Syphilis, although less deadly than other endemic or epidemic diseases such as yellow fever, sleeping
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The power of the ‘universal’: caste and missionary medical discourses of alcoholism in the Telugu print sphere, 1900–1940 Med. Hist. (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2023-10-13 Tarangini Sriraman
This article explores missionary medical discourses in three Telugu journals published in the early twentieth century, to analyse how caste pivoted denunciations of alcohol, especially toddy and arrack, in the Madras Presidency and the Hyderabad state. It argues that one women’s missionary journal, Vivekavathi, deployed medical knowledge to formulate subtle and occasionally explicit condemnations of
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Trained Army Nurses in Colonial India: Early Experiences and Challenges Med. Hist. (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2023-10-13 Preethi Mariam George, John Bosco Lourdusamy
The paper examines the introduction of trained female nurses for the British army men in colonial India between 1888 and 1920. It discusses the genesis of the Indian Nursing Service (INS), including the background and negotiations leading up to its formation, terms of employment, duties and working conditions of the nursing sisters. The memoir of Catharine Grace Loch, who served as the first Chief
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Ways of knowing the health of livestock populations: the age of surveys, 1928–65 Med. Hist. (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2023-09-05 Abigail Woods
This article advances historical understandings of health, veterinary medicine and livestock agriculture by examining how, in mid-twentieth-century Britain, the diseases of livestock were made collectively knowable. During this period, the state extended its gaze beyond a few, highly impactful notifiable diseases to a host of other threats to livestock health. The prime mechanism through which this
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Medical imagery in Maximus of Tyre’s Orations Med. Hist. (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2023-09-05 Sophia Xenophontos
Imagery is an overarching feature of Maximus of Tyre’s Orations which has never been the subject of systematic investigation. This paper provides a starting point by focusing exclusively on medical imagery, one of the most pervasive and instrumental types of imagery in Maximus’ work that has gone entirely unnoticed in the literature to date. This paper shows that Maximus uses medicine (especially its
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A history of thalidomide in India Med. Hist. (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2023-09-05 Ludger Wimmelbücker, Anita Kar
In contrast to the well-known stories of the embryotoxic drug, thalidomide, in countries where it was responsible for large numbers of birth defects, there is limited information on its history in India. Its presence before 2002, when the country issued the first marketing licence for a thalidomide-containing preparation, is assumed to be negligible. This article challenges this view by showing that
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The ‘new era in medicine’: John Ryle and the promotion of social medicine Med. Hist. (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2023-09-05 John Stewart
John A. Ryle was Britain’s first professor of Social Medicine. In the 1930s and 1940s, at the peak of his influence, he was a vigorous proponent of social medicine, then a relatively new, if contested, field. This article examines Ryle’s views and activities under three broad headings: What was social medicine? What were Ryle’s politics? Why prioritise medical education? We conclude with the apparent
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On the Heart of the Hippocratic Corpus: its meaning, context and purpose Med. Hist. (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2023-09-05 Ryan C. Fowler
Though the Hippocratic text On the Heart has garnered significant attention in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries from classicists, physicians and historians of medicine alike, no commentary on this important work currently exists. There remain, however, central questions of interpretation concerning a number of important points: in particular, how the author understands the structure and functioning
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Have we lost sleep? A reconsideration of segmented sleep in early modern England Med. Hist. (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2023-08-01 Niall Boyce
The theory that the people of the early modern period slept in well-defined segments of ‘first’ and ‘second’ sleeps has been highly influential in both scholarly literature and mainstream media over the past twenty years. Based on a combination of scientific, anthropological and textual evidence, the segmented sleep theory has been used to illuminate discussions regarding important aspects of early
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Workhouse or asylum? Accommodating pauper lunatics in nineteenth-century England Med. Hist. (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2023-08-01 Alistair Ritch
The late eighteenth and early nineteenth century witnessed a dramatic increase in the number of pauper lunatics being admitted to institutions and many mentally-ill paupers found their way into workhouses. The range of options existing for the admission of paupers, who at the time were described as lunatics or insane, included private madhouses, charitable asylums, public asylums as well as workhouses
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‘Pearls’ of the nineteenth-century: from therapeutic actors to global commodities medicinal leeches in the Ottoman Empire Med. Hist. (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2023-08-01 Büşra Arabacı
Nineteenth-century physicians increasingly favoured leeching – the placing of a live leech onto a patient’s skin to stimulate or limit blood flow – as a cure for numerous ailments. As conviction in their therapeutic properties spread, leech therapy dominated European medicine; France imported over fifty million leeches in one year. Demand soon outpaced supply, spawning a lucrative global trade. Over-collection
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Participating in eradication: how Guinea worm redefined eradication, and eradication redefined Guinea worm, 1985–2022 Med. Hist. (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2023-08-01 Jonathan David Roberts
Guinea worm disease (dracunculiasis) is a debilitating waterborne disease. Once widespread, it is now on the brink of eradication. However, the Guinea Worm Eradication Programme (GWEP), like guinea worm itself, has been under-studied by historians. The GWEP demonstrates an unusual model of eradication, one focused on primary healthcare (PHC), community participation, health education and behavioural
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Medical fears of the malingering soldier: ‘phony cronies’ and the Repat in 1960s Australia Med. Hist. (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2023-08-01 Effie Karageorgos
The fear of the malingering soldier or veteran has existed in Australia since its first nationwide military venture in South Africa. The establishment of the Repatriation Department in 1917 saw the medical, military and political fields work collectively, to some extent, to support hundreds of thousands of men who returned from their military service wounded or ill. Over the next decades the medical
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Scandinavian entry points to social medicine and postcolonial health: Karl Evang and Halfdan Mahler in India Med. Hist. (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2023-07-18 Sunniva Engh, Niels Brimnes
Our contributions examine the Norwegian Karl Evang's (1901-1981) and the Dane Halfdan Mahler's (1923-2016) participation in international health co-operation facilitated by the World Health Organization (WHO) in India in the 1950s. While Evang’s was a hectic, but relatively short visit as part of a WHO visiting team of medical scientists in 1953, Mahler’s spanned the entire decade on assignments as
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Negotiating social medicine in a postcolonial context: Halfdan Mahler in India 1951–61 Med. Hist. (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2023-07-18 Niels Brimnes
This article investigates how World Health Organisation (WHO) Director-General Halfdan Mahler’s views on health care were formed by his experience in India between 1951 and 1961. Mahler spent a large part of the 1950s in India assigned as WHO medical officer to tuberculosis control projects. It argues that Mahler took inspiration from the official endorsement of the doctrine of social medicine that
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The complexities of postcolonial international health: Karl Evang in India 1953 Med. Hist. (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2023-07-18 Sunniva Engh
In February and March 1953, a WHO Visiting Team of Medical Scientists worked in India, collaborating with local medical students and professionals. This article studies the complexities of early postcolonial international health work and the relations between the young WHO and the newly independent countries, from the position of the team’s vice chairman, Norwegian doctor Karl Evang. While the WHO
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Rise of Siddha medicine: causes and constructions in the Madras Presidency (1920–1930s) Med. Hist. (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2023-07-18 D. V. Kanagarathinam, John Bosco Lourdusamy
This essay aims to situate the emergence of Siddha medicine as a separate medical system in the erstwhile Madras Presidency of colonial India within a broader socio-economic context. Scholars who have worked on Siddha medicine have stressed more on political dimensions like nationalism and sub-nationalism with inadequate attention to the interplay of various (other) factors including contemporary global
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An ordinary malaria? Intermittent fever in Denmark, 1826–1886 Med. Hist. (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2023-07-18 Mathias Mølbak Ingholt
Intermittent fever is a historical diagnosis with a contested meaning. Historians have associated it with both benign malaria and severe epidemics during the Early Modern Era and early nineteenth century. Where other older medical diagnoses perished under changing medical paradigms, intermittent fever ‘survived’ into the twentieth century. This article studies the development in how intermittent fever
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‘The poetry of psychiatry’: existential analysis and the politics of psychopathology in Franco’s Spain Med. Hist. (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2023-07-18 Enric J. Novella
This article examines the presence and influence of the work of Swiss psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger and existential analysis (Daseinsanalyse) in Spanish psychiatry in the central decades of the 20th century. First, and drawing on various printed and archival sources, it reconstructs the important personal and professional ties that Binswanger maintained with numerous Spanish colleagues and describes
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A vaccination romance: Rider Haggard’s Dr. Therne (1898) in the vaccination debate Med. Hist. (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2023-04-20 Juliana Broad
Henry Rider Haggard, the famed author of adventure romances, wrote the novel Dr. Therne (1898) in response to weakening compulsory smallpox vaccination laws, thus entering one of the most heated debates of the late nineteenth century. With Dr. Therne, Haggard aimed to intervene in the lives of the many working-class anti-vaccinationists who, from the 1850s onwards, mobilised to evade what they perceived
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Pioneers in pathology and female role models: the Jewish scientists Rahel Rodler, Ruth Silberberg, Lotte Strauss and Zelma Wessely Med. Hist. (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2023-04-20 Hendrik Uhlendahl, Stephanie Kaiser, Nico Biermanns, Dominik Groß
So far, female physicians have played a minor role in scientific studies of Nazi victims; this also applies to specialists in pathology. Against this background, the present study examines the biographies of the outstanding Jewish pathologists Rahel Rodler (1878–1944), Ruth Silberberg (1906–97), Lotte Strauss (1913–85) and Zelma Wessely (1914–2004). The focus is on their roles as women scientists and
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Smallpox and immunisation policies in Argentina from the nineteenth to the twentieth century Med. Hist. (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2023-04-20 María Silvia Di Liscia
This work examines the history of smallpox, a highly infectious and epidemic disease, in Argentina, throughout different governments and public health policies from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. The study focuses on the smallpox vaccine and the social and collective significance of universal immunization. It also analyses the relationship between governments of different political orientations
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The penetration of financial capital and the growth of private hospital groups in Europe: the case of Spain (1975–2022) Med. Hist. (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2023-04-20 Margarita Vilar-Rodríguez, Jerònia Pons-Pons
From the last decades of the twentieth century, above all, in the more service-oriented post-industrial economies, and in a context of debilitation of public health systems, health care became exponentially profitable, thereby attracting new types of investors. In fact, this new stage entails moving from the commercialisation of health care to its financialisation; that is, medical care becomes just
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Acroagonines: Ugo Cerletti’s audacious attempt to place the neurophysiological effects of electroconvulsive therapy in vials Med. Hist. (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2023-01-17 Elisabetta Sirgiovanni
In the years 1947–57, following a turbulent retirement, Ugo Cerletti, the father of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) (1938), invested his energies in a new audacious project conceived as an extension of his ECT research. Forced to leave the direction of the Sapienza University Clinic, he got funds from the National Research Council of Italy to carry out his experimental activities, and founded a ‘Center
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Age matters: health, older people and gerohygiene in the late Soviet Union Med. Hist. (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2023-01-17 Susan Grant
In the late Soviet period, a great deal of research was conducted on older people’s health, with the Institute of Gerontology Academy of Medical Sciences (AMN) USSR in Kyiv spearheading a great deal of this. Of particular interest was older people’s ability to work beyond retirement age, the issue of premature ageing, as well as physical activity, diet and living conditions. Many of these interests
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Finding ruh in the forebrain: Mazhar Osman and the emerging Turkish psychiatric discourse Med. Hist. (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2023-01-17 Kutluğhan Soyubol
This article examines the emergence of modern psychiatric discourse under the culturally Islamic yet radically secular context of the early Turkish republic (1923-1950). To do so, it focuses on the psychiatric publications of Mazhar Osman [Uzman] (1884-1951), the widely acknowledged “father” of modern Turkish psychiatry; and aims to genealogically trace his scientific project of reconceptualizing ruh
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In search of lost fleas: reconsidering Paul-Louis Simond’s contribution to the study of the propagation of plague Med. Hist. (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2023-01-17 Christos Lynteris
Paul-Louis Simond’s 1898 experiment demonstrating fleas as the vector of plague is today recognised as one of the breakthrough moments in modern epidemiology, as it established the insect-borne transmission of plague. Providing the first exhaustive examination of primary sources from the Institut Pasteur’s 1897–98 ‘India Mission’, including Simond’s notebooks, experiment carnets and correspondence
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Physicians imprisoned in Franco Spain’s Miranda de Ebro “Campo de Concentración” Med. Hist. (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2023-01-17 Esther Cuerda-Galindo
Miranda de Ebro was created in 1937 to imprison Republicans and foreigners who fought with the International Brigades in Spanish Civil War. From 1940, the camp was used only to concentrate detained foreign refugees with no proper documents. More than 15 000 people, most of them from France and Poland, were kept there until the camp was closed in January 1947. Playing both sides of the international
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Total prevention: a history of schistosomiasis in Japan Med. Hist. (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2022-07-01 Alexander R. Bay
In Japan, schistosomiasis was endemic in Yamanashi Prefecture and a few other hotspot areas where the Miya’iri snail lived. The parasite’s lifecycle relied on the intermediary Miya’iri snail as well as the human host. Parasite eggs passed into the agrarian environment through untreated night soil used as fertiliser or through the culture of open defecation in rural Japan. Manmade rice fields and irrigation
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Making the medical mask: surgery, bacteriology, and the control of infection (1870s–1920s) Med. Hist. (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2022-07-01 Thomas Schlich, Bruno J. Strasser
This article examines the introduction of the medical mask in the late nineteenth century at the intersection of surgery, bacteriology and infection control. During this important episode in the longer history of the medical mask, respiratory protection became a tool of targeted germ control. In 1897, the surgeon Johannes Mikulicz at the University of Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland), drawing on the bacteriological
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Mobilising through vaccination: the case of polio in France (1950–60s) Med. Hist. (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2022-07-01 Baptiste Baylac-Paouly, María-Victoria Caballero, María-Isabel Porras
Poliomyelitis is a disease whose incidence steadily increased during the second half of the twentieth century on both sides of the Atlantic. If in the United States the epidemics which afflicted young children each summer became a major public health issue, in France, polio was considered less pressing than other diseases. This article, based on original archives from the Pasteur and Mérieux institutes
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Pain, medicine and the monitoring of war violence: the case of rifle bullets (1868–1918) Med. Hist. (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2022-07-01 Taline Garibian
The St Petersburg declaration, signed in 1868, is a milestone in the history of warfare and humanitarian law, as it prohibits the use of explosive bullets, which are considered to cause unnecessary suffering. As this article shows, the framing of this declaration that put suffering at its centre, as well as the development of the humanitarian movement, favoured the birth of a new field of expertise:
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Immigrant Irishwomen and maternity services in New York and Boston, 1860–1911 Med. Hist. (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2022-04-01 Ciara Breathnach
Medical acculturation forms a crucial part of the process of migration, and equally, the influx of migrants can shape how medical structures develop in receiving societies – nowhere is that more evident than in the American metropolis. In the late nineteenth century, few ethnic groups caused such sustained bio-hazard concerns as the Irish in America. Poverty and the sheer numbers migrating in the post-Famine
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Ca’ Granda, an avant-garde hospital between the Renaissance and Modern age: a unique scenario in European history Med. Hist. (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2022-04-01 Mirko Mattia, Lucie Biehler-Gomez, Emanuela Sguazza, Paolo Maria Galimberti, Folco Vaglienti, Daniele Gibelli, Pasquale Poppa, Giulia Caccia, Marco Caccianiga, Stefano Vanin, Laura Manthey, Richard L. Jantz, Domenico Di Candia, Emanuela Maderna, Giuliana Albini, Sachin Pawaskar, Franklin Damann, Anna Maria Fedeli, Elena Belgiovine, Daniele Capuzzo, Fabrizio Slavazzi, Cristina Cattaneo
The Ospedale Maggiore, known as Ca’ Granda, was founded in 1456 by will of Francesco Sforza, Duke of Milan, and was considered for almost five centuries a model for Milanese, Italian and even European healthcare. Attracting patients from all over Europe, the Ca’ Granda distinguished itself for the introduction of new treatments and innovative health reforms. In the burial ground of the hospital still
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Beneath the skin: method and perception in Hippocratic medicine Med. Hist. (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2022-04-01 Jorge Torres
This paper examines some neglected aspects of Hippocratic medicine, drawing special attention to certain methodological questions concerning the role of sense perception in the acquisition of medical knowledge. I argue that there is greater epistemological uniformity among the texts of the Hippocratic Corpus than is sometimes assumed. I provide a careful reading of seemingly inconsistent Hippocratic
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Medicine and the critique of war: military psychiatry, social classification and the malingering patient in colonial India Med. Hist. (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2022-04-01 Sanaullah Khan
The treatment of injured Indian soldiers in Britain during WWI deployed particular ways of recording injuries and using them to make judgments about loyalty to the Imperial Army by assessing the soldier’s ability to malinger. This was possible by using personal correspondences between soldiers and their families for ethnographic ends ie. to determine susceptibility to develop mental illness through
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The South American medical communities in the genesis of the tropical medicine: construction and circulation of knowledge on American leishmaniasis in the beginning of the twentieth century Med. Hist. (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2022-04-01 Denis Guedes Jogas
This article aims to demonstrate how researchers from different South American countries took part in the process of globalisation of the tropical medicine paradigm, through research on leishmaniasis found in this region. The main objective of the present article is to highlight the role of these researchers, as well as of their scientific institutions, in a global history of tropical medicine which
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Aro Velmet, Pasteur’s Empire: Bacteriology & Politics in France, Its Colonies, & the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), pp. xiv + 306, $78.00, hardback, ISBN: 9780190072827. Med. Hist. (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2022-01-01 C. Michele Thompson
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Sethina Watson, On Hospitals: Welfare, Law and Christianity in Western Europe, 400–1320 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2020). 376 pp. ISBN 978-0-19-884753-3. Med. Hist. (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2022-01-01 Herwig Weigl
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Cholera, British seamen and maritime anxieties in Calcutta, c.1830s–1890s ‘The William Bynum Prize Essay’ Med. Hist. (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2021-11-01 Manikarnika Dutta
From the mid-nineteenth century, seamen were increasingly identified as vectors of epidemic diseases such as cholera. The rising acceptance of the germ theories of disease and contagion and the transition from sail to steam at this time increased the fear of the rapid spread of contagious diseases through these mobile people. This article examines how the British naval authorities, ship surgeons and
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Sex work, containment and the new discourse of public health in French colonial Levant Med. Hist. (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2021-11-01 Pascale N. Graham
This article addresses how French academics, doctors and state bureaucrats formulated sex work as a pathology, an area of inquiry that had to be studied in the interest of public safety. French colonisation in the Levant extended the reach of this ‘expertise’ from the metropole to Lebanon under the guise of public health. Knowledge produced by academics was used to buttress colonial state policy, which
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Assessing the conduct of juveniles: diagnosis and delinquency, 1900–2013 Med. Hist. (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2021-11-01 Laura D. Hirshbein
American child psychiatrists have long been interested in the problems of delinquent behaviour by juveniles. With the rise of specific psychiatric diagnoses in the 1960s and 1970s, delinquent behaviour was defined within the diagnosis of conduct disorder. Like all psychiatric diagnoses, this concept was shaped by particular historical actors in context and has been highly contingent on assumptions
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Fluid deafness: earwax and hardness of hearing in early modern Europe Med. Hist. (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2021-11-01 Ruben E. Verwaal
This article discusses hearing disability in early modern Europe, focusing on medical ideas to demonstrate a profound shift in thinking about deafness over the course of the eighteenth century. Scholars have previously described changes in the social status of the deaf in the eighteenth century, pointing at clerics’ sympathy for the deaf and philosophers’ fascination with gestures as the origin of
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Between colonial medicine and global health: protein malnutrition and UNICEF milk in the Belgian Congo Med. Hist. (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2021-11-01 Samuël Coghe
During the last decades of colonial rule, Belgian colonial authorities, health agencies and researchers intensely engaged with kwashiorkor, a severe syndrome that was deemed widespread among young children in some parts of the Belgian Congo and Ruanda-Urundi and chiefly attributed to protein malnutrition. To fight kwashiorkor, the Belgian government, in the early 1950s, set up a joint milk distribution
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Negotiating South–South cooperation for mental health: the World Health Organization and the African Mental Health Action Group, 1970s–90s Med. Hist. (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2021-11-01 Yolana Pringle
This article explores the African Mental Health Action Group (AMHAG), one of the earliest examples of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) attempts to promote ‘ownership’ over development through the South–South cooperation envisaged in Technical Cooperation in Developing Countries. Formed in 1978, the AMHAG was intended to guide national and regional policy on mental health, while also fostering
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Marga Vicedo, Intelligent Love: The Story of Clara Park, Her Autistic Daughter, and the Myth of the Refrigerator Mother (Boston: Beacon Press, 2021), pp. 1+259, $28.95, hardback, ISBN: 9780807025628. Med. Hist. (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2021-10-01 Sam Fellowes
inAsia. The archival Chapters 5–7 offer a fresh glimpse of Saiki’s cultural and scientific diplomacy, which placed Japan on the map of global nutrition science. Chapter 8 stresses the negative effects of the Second WorldWar on Japanese health and nutrition and the promotion of animal protein and improved health under U.S. occupation after the war. This study admirably bridges medical and diplomatic
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Sunil Pandya, Medical Education in Western India: Grant Medical College and Sir Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy’s Hospital (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019), pp. xxiv+561, £70.99, hardback, ISBN: 9781527518056. Med. Hist. (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2021-10-01 Saurav Kumar Rai
Europe andAfrica as diagnoses of banzar – the psychological affliction of longing for home, derived from the Kimbundu word banza – emerged from the dungeons of the Atlantic slave trade and middle passage voyages during which many enslaved people suffered intense depression and committed suicide. Healing Knowledge in Atlantic Africa pushes historians of medicine to consider Atlantic Africa as a dynamic
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Carla Bittel, Elaine Leong and Christine von Oertzen (eds.), Working with Paper: Gendered Practices in the History of Knowledge (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), pp. ix + 310, $55.00, hardback, ISBN: 9780822945598. Med. Hist. (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2021-10-01 Emma Marshall
Working with Paper is a rich and engaging investigation into what is traditionally viewed as the humblest of materials, but which has immense value beyond its role as a data carrier, as this book demonstrates. Its essays examine paper practices and their intersection with constructions and negotiations of gendered power and knowledge, ranging from the sixteenth to twentieth centuries across Europe
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Kalle Kananoja, Healing Knowledge in Atlantic Africa: Medical Encounters, 1500–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), pp. xii + 258, $99.99, hardback, ISBN: 9781108491259. Med. Hist. (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2021-10-01 Christopher M. Blakley
research on paper as a materia medica, used for example to make plasters, is particularly interesting. Interactions between domestic and scholarly spheres are also considered in SimonWerrett’s essay on the reuse of eighteenth-century wastepaper, including for hairdressing techniques bound up with contested notions of femininity and masculinity. Moving into the modern period, Carla Bittel and Linker
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Harold J. Cook, ed., Translation at Work: Chinese Medicine in the First Global Age (Leiden: Brill; Boston, MA: Rodopi, 2020), pp. xii + 214, $144.00, hardback, ISBN: 9789004362741. Med. Hist. (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2021-06-01 Hansun Hsiung
experience and adaptation in the production of the very same texts. Bouras-Vallianatos’ meticulous analysis of John Zacharias’ composition and presentationmethods as well as Zacharias’ incorporation of ‘oriental’ materia medica into his work proves that late Byzantine physicians updated their material according to contemporary needs and interests. The sixth and final chapter before the conclusion is