Social History of Medicine - Advance Access

Capacity to Marry: Law, Medicine and Conceptions of Insanity

Hasson, E. — 2009-07-02

Summary Historically, English law has not constructed insanity as intrinsic to the individual, but rather as something to be determined by his or her abilities within the context of a particular situation. The courtroom provides the most visible forum within which the discourses of law and medicine interact, and yet the civil law context has been left largely unexamined by historians of madness. This paper seeks to begin to address that gap, through an examination of court cases determining competency in marriage. Using primarily nineteenth-century cases—claiming nullity of marriage on the basis that one party was insane and thus unable to give valid consent to the marriage contract—it explores how this ‘compartment’ of insanity is conceptualised.

Films of Fact: A History of Science in Documentary Films and Television

Hayward, R. — 2009-06-09

Breeding Contempt: The History of Coerced Sterilizations in the United States

Mezzano, M. — 2009-06-05

Gesunder Leben: Die Lebensreformbewegung im 20. Jahrhundert

Hau, M. — 2009-06-04

'A Cheap, Safe and Natural Medicine': Religion, Medicine and Culture in John Wesley's Primitive Physic

Shuttleton, D. E. — 2009-06-04

Trauma and Memory: Reading, Healing, and Making Law

Neuner, S. — 2009-06-03

Defending the Indefensible: The Global Asbestos Industry and its Fight for Survival

Melling, J. — 2009-06-03

Dying to Get High: Marijuana as Medicine

Snelders, S. — 2009-06-03

Psychedelic Psychiatry: LSD From Clinic to Campus

Mold, A. — 2009-06-03

Attending Madness: At Work in the Australian Colonial Asylum

Takabayashi, A. — 2009-06-03

Antimicrobial Drugs: Chronicle of a Twentieth-Century Medical Triumph

Hamilton-Miller, J. M. T. — 2009-06-03

La Clinica: A Doctor's Journey Across Borders

Ablard, J. D. — 2009-06-03

Curar, Sanar y Educar. Enfermedad y Sociedad en Mexico, Siglos XIX y XX

Eraso, Y. — 2009-06-03

Biomedical Ambiguity: Race, Asthma, and the Contested Meaning of Genetic Research in the Caribbean

Wald, P. — 2009-06-03

Unnatural History: Breast Cancer and American Society

Lowy, I. — 2009-06-03

Making Women's Medicine Masculine: The Rise of Male Authority in Pre-Modern Gynaecology

Lee, B. R. — 2009-06-03

The Sleep of Others and the Transformation of Sleep Research

Thomson, M. — 2009-06-03

Sexuality at the Fin de Siecle: The Making of a 'Central Problem'

Oosterhuis, H. — 2009-06-03

Well-being: A Cultural History of Healthy Living

Forth, C. E. — 2009-06-03

Racial Science and British Society, 1930-62

Hall, L. A. — 2009-06-03

Pestilence and Headcolds: Encountering Illness in Colonial Mexico

Morfin, L. M. — 2009-06-03

The Vaccinators: Smallpox, Medical Knowledge and the 'Opening' of Japan

Aldous, C. — 2009-06-03

Islam and Healing: Loss and Recovery of an Indo-Muslim Medical Tradition, 1600-1900

Mukharji, P. B. — 2009-06-03

The Realities of Witchcraft and Popular Magic in Early Modern Europe: Culture, Cognition, and Everyday Life

Elmer, P. — 2009-06-03

Medicine and Religion in Enlightenment Europe

Marshall, P. — 2009-06-03

With Words and Knives: Learning Medical Dispassion in Early Modern England

Brockliss, L. — 2009-06-03

Hospital Policy in Sub-Saharan Africa and Post-Colonial Development Impasse

McPake, B. — 2009-06-02

The pattern of hospital development was set in colonised sub-Saharan countries in the early twentieth century on the basis of the demands of the colonial project and the strategies of missions. In the immediate post-independence period, democratic and egalitarian policy in some countries pointed to the expansion of health services to under-served areas. However, the idealism associated with independence waned and more pronounced tensions emerged. Plans for expanded primary health care systems were sacrificed in favour of hospital services for a privileged elite. Over the same period, a group of international agencies have been associated with the promotion of more egalitarian and primary health care-focused strategies. But there has been a failure to engage at the political level and a willingness to accept instead token assent to the strategy. The consequence for hospitals has been an impasse. Hospitals do not meet elite expectations but neither do resources reach the larger population.

History, Policy and the Social History of Medicine

Szreter, S. — 2009-06-02

The History and Policy network at www.historyandpolicy.org is an initiative designed to make relevant aspects of historians' research accessible to those involved in deliberating over public policy. Originally founded as a website in 2002, it is now a growing network of professional historians who are assisted by a full-time external relations office. There are now over 80 policy papers on the website, from ancient to modern history, many of them derived from research in the social history of medicine. From the personal perspective of one of the network's founders, the article briefly outlines the nature and purpose of History and Policy and encourages historians of medicine to consider the opportunity of presenting more of their work before a wider public audience.

Visualizing and Explaining Pregnancy

Zwijnenberg, R. — 2009-05-28

Art, Sex and Eugenics: Corpus Delecti

Biernoff, S. — 2009-05-28

Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire

Popper, N. — 2009-05-28

Lovesickness and Gender in Early Modern English Literature

Williams, G. — 2009-05-28

But is it [History of] Medicine? Twenty Years in the History of the Healing Arts of China

Lo, V. — 2009-05-28

Summary This article sets out to give an account of changes to the map of the history of Chinese medicine in the last 20 years. Concentrating mainly on English language secondary sources, it charts shifting aspirations for social history of medicine in China, the impact of anthropology and the tensions between local and large-scale histories. On the one hand, there is a focus on cultural difference, and the articulation of unique styles of perception, where practitioner historians are seen to have an advantage. On the other, historians of China are shown to be facing the challenge of writing in a global context. The paper acknowledges the importance of the transmission of knowledge and practice across social, cultural and geographical boundaries as well as through time.

Boils, Pushes and Wheals: Reading Bumps on the Body in Early Modern England

Weisser, O. — 2009-05-27

Summary Bodily bumps in early modern England were not simply collections of humors that needed to be lanced and drained. Diagnosis, prognosis and treatment of skin swellings comprised a deeply rich semiotics that both patients and healers read according to a range of biographical factors, incidents, sensations, observations and experiences. Using diaries and case histories in seventeenth-century surgical texts, this article explores how both patients and healers read and treated bodily bumps. It then looks at patients and healers together during medical encounters in order to show how both parties' interpretations and observations of the body created a collaborative interpretation of health. The article shows that, long before the development of physical diagnosis in the nineteenth century, surgeons were pressing and prodding patients' bodies to discern the nature and severity of external ailments. Thus, in addition to the patient narrative, touching and manipulating the body were often significant aspects of medical diagnosis and practice in the early modern period.

Confronting Rabies and Its Treatments in Colonial Madagascar, 1899-1910

Jennings, E. T. — 2009-05-27

Summary Rabies constituted a point of cultural tension and divergence over disease in late nineteenth-century, post-conquest Madagascar. The Pasteur Institute and colonial authorities ascribed an extraordinary importance to rabies, given the means at their disposal, and given the other epidemiological challenges facing them. Local peoples, in turn, met this expertise with some trepidation, and in some cases, outright defiance. This article considers, in turn, colonial health priorities, connections between Malagasy cures and Pasteurian remedies, as well as issues of accommodation, resistance and rumour in a colonial context.

Public Health and Modernisation: The First Campaigns in China, 1915-1916

Bu, L. — 2009-05-27

Summary A nationwide movement of modern health campaigns developed in Chinese cities in 1915–16. They emphasised connections between good health, modernisation and the all-round progress of the Chinese people. The campaigns used lectures, exhibits, demonstrations and slide and film shows. This article focuses on the campaigns in three cities. It demonstrates how they championed the ideas of hygiene and sanitation and stimulated officialdom into creating new public health institutions. The campaigns became an essential element in the promotion of the idea of a modern state during a period in which China was characterised by a high degree of political instability.

Diabetes in the Tropics: Race, Place and Class in India, 1880-1965

Arnold, D. — 2009-05-27

Summary A disease predominantly of India's urban middle class and increasingly common in modern India, diabetes attracted little state medical attention either before or in the decades immediately following Indian independence in 1947. It did, however, give rise to an extensive medical literature, generated by both Indian and British doctors, pathologists and medical researchers, who understood the disease not just in terms of class susceptibility and the consequences of colonial modernity, but also in relation to racial and environmental characteristics. The rise of ‘tropical diabetes’ in India thus reflected and exemplified a wider trend towards the racialisation and tropicalisation of Indian medical thought. Despite the discovery of insulin in the early 1920s, prophylaxis and treatment of the disease in India suggested a continuing belief in a culturally distinctive approach to the disease.

On Site Bringing Medicine to Virtual Life

Baur, N. — 2009-05-25

'It was a bridge from life to death': Hospitals during the Food Crisis, Greece 1941-1944

Hionidou, V. — 2009-05-25

The famine in occupied Greece between 1941 and 1943 was a deadly one with important short- and long-term effects on society at large. This paper focuses on the effect the famine had on the operation of two hospitals, those of Hios and Hermoupolis. The unique availability of patients' registers for both hospitals means that questions relating to the hospital's role and how they were utilised by the population during the famine can be addressed. Thus the paper examines the identity of patients, how long they stayed in the hospital, the outcomes of their stay and the diseases from which they suffered. Comparisons are made with the pre-famine period in an attempt to establish whether any of the parameters changed during the famine.

The Afterlife of Images: Translating the Pathological Body between China and the West

Chiang, H. H. — 2009-02-13