Social History of Medicine - current issue

From Poison Peddlers to Civic Worthies: The Reputation of the Apothecaries in Georgian England

Corfield, P. J. — 2009-04-01

Trust is not automatically granted to providers of professional services. The doctors of Georgian England were, by later standards, deficient in medical knowhow, particularly before the mid-nineteenth-century scientific understanding of antiseptics, and much satirised. Nonetheless, the emergence of a coherent medical profession indicates that the picture was far more intricate and positive than the satirists implied. Patients sought care as well as cure; and medical practitioners had no problems in finding custom. This essay reassesses the apothecaries’ role in the slow transition whereby reputable practitioners differentiated themselves from ‘quacks’. The change was propelled by three linked processes: firstly, the intersection of expanding medical supply with insistent consumer demand, noting that demand plays a key role alongside supply; secondly, the intersection of local power-broking within Britain's growing towns with an ethos of community service, whereby apothecaries joined the ranks of ‘civic worthies’ and trusted care-givers; and, lastly, the intersection of shared medical knowledge among practitioners at all levels with the creation of a distinctive professional identity. As public trust grew, so Parliament was emboldened in 1815 to license the Apothecaries Society as the regulatory body for the medical rank-and-file, so launching the distinctive Anglo-American system of arm's-length state regulation.

'Manchu Anatomy': Anatomical Knowledge and the Jesuits in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century China

Asen, D. — 2009-04-01

Beginning in the last decade of the seventeenth century, the French Jesuits Joachim Bouvet and Dominique Parrenin instructed the Kangxi Emperor in contemporary anatomical knowledge. Parrenin's instruction resulted in a Manchu anatomical atlas containing Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood. This paper uses this case to examine the role of anatomy in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European understandings of China and its medicine. I argue that the authority which Bouvet and Parrenin afforded anatomical knowledge gained from dissection informed their comparisons of Chinese and European medical learning. I also examine ways in which illustrations of this atlas were made to demonstrate the certainty of European anatomy and its applicability to Chinese bodies. Production of the ‘Manchu Anatomy’ was thus an important moment in the process through which anatomy became a category in European understandings of China and its medicine during and after the eighteenth century.

Sex, Masturbation and Foetal Death: Filipino Physicians and Medical Mythology in the Late Nineteenth Century

Reyes, R. A. G. — 2009-04-01

As a case study of the Filipino elite's engagement with western medicine, this article looks at the writings of two brothers who studied in Paris in the 1880s, Trinidad H. Pardo de Tavera (1857–1925) and Félix Pardo de Tavera (1859–1932). It focuses first on Trinidad's observations on folk beliefs and popular medicine in the Philippines, and secondly on Félix's doctoral dissertation, in which he examined the causes of foetal death during early pregnancy. Both the Pardo de Tavera brothers found the methods of modern scientific medicine to be greatly superior in diagnosing and treating disease than the diverse practices followed in the Philippines. But in embracing western medicine, I shall argue, they and other young Filipino physicians of their generation simultaneously embraced western moral prejudices and proscriptions that had no basis in science.

Paul Ehrlich's Colonial Connections: Scientific Networks and Sleeping Sickness Drug Therapy Research, 1900-1914

Neill, D. — 2009-04-01

Between 1900 and 1914, a major sleeping sickness epidemic arose in many parts of Africa. Despite the competitive nature of European science in this period, the German immunologist Paul Ehrlich developed a collaborative transnational network of researchers and clinicians who worked together to carry out drug therapy trials on sleeping sickness patients in numerous African colonies. This kind of collaboration was possible when researchers shared complementary goals, and collectively this network played a significant role in shaping part of the European response to controlling an epidemic disease in Africa. Together with demonstrating how and why Ehrlich and his partners cooperated across nations and borders in their search for a drug that would cure the disease, this essay also explores what effect the drug trials had on African patients in Entebbe, British Uganda, and in Brazzaville, the capital of French Equatorial Africa.

Shell-Shock and Psychological Medicine in First World War Britain

Loughran, T. — 2009-04-01

Historians have viewed the experience of shell-shock in First World War Britain as a crucial episode in the development of ‘modern’ psychological medicine, arguing doctors initially believed shell-shock was caused by the physical effects of shell explosions, and only gradually realised these were psychological disorders, treatable by psychotherapy. This article argues that conceptual frameworks of pre-war medicine provided models of mind-body relations which allowed doctors to recognise the emotional origins of shell-shock on the outbreak of war. Distinct schools of ‘physical’ and ‘psychological’ thought only emerged in 1916; physical theories persisted beyond 1918; and the war had an uneven effect on engagement with psychodynamic theories. Adoption of psychological vocabulary outstripped understanding, and widespread dissemination also resulted in hostility. Shell-shock marked an important moment in the emergence of the distinct disciplines of psychology and psychiatry in Britain, but this did not involve a radical departure from pre-war concepts of mental health.

Families and Institutions for Shell-Shocked Soldiers in Australia after the First World War

Larsson, M. — 2009-04-01

Since the 1980s, numerous historical studies have provided a complex picture of the relationship between families and psychiatric institutions. Historians of shell-shock have been slow to respond to this literature. Instead, their primary interest has been in the medical treatment of the condition, as well as state and cultural responses. This article offers a fresh perspective on the treatment of shell-shocked soldiers by examining families' involvement in their institutionalisation in Australia after the First World War. It explores how kin mobilised the repatriation discourse of ‘preference’ to secure treatment for veterans in segregated mental hospitals which separated military cases from ‘confirmed civilian lunatics’. This article argues that by asserting that ex-servicemen were a more deserving class of patient, veterans' kin strategically deployed the stigma of mental illness to ensure better quality care for ex-servicemen, preserve their heroic identity as soldiers, and deflect some of the eugenic shame of ‘madness’.

Strengthening the Will: Public Clinics for the Nervously Ill in Sweden in the First Half of the Twentieth Century

Pietikainen, P. — 2009-04-01

This article examines the development of state-run clinics for the nervously ill in Sweden in the interwar years. After the establishment of the Royal Board of Pensions in 1914, an institution for the care of the chronically neurotic was high on the agenda of this governmental agency. The Swedish state became actively involved in the fight against nervous illnesses, and the primary goal of these state-financed clinics was to turn neurotic patients into productive citizens. Neurotics were seen as a large group of potential invalids who might become a heavy burden on the national economy. They needed to be provided with effective therapy that would strengthen their will and restore their capacity so that they could be swiftly returned to normal life. It was this principle that characterised the clinical work at these institutions. The further development of the care of neuroses was the subject of a long and arduous debate that took place at the Swedish Society of Medicine in 1937. Neurosis was regarded as a national malady (folksjukdom) mainly because medical professionals—neurologists, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and internists—formulated it in terms of an extremely contagious diagnosis which, by the 1950s, seemed to affect everyone.

'That Won-Ton Soup Headache': The Chinese Restaurant Syndrome, MSG and the Making of American Food, 1968-1980

Mosby, I. — 2009-04-01

This paper examines the ‘discovery’ of the Chinese restaurant syndrome in 1968 and subsequent reactions by the medical community, scientists, public health authorities and the general public to dangers posed by the common food additive monosodium glutamate (MSG) and by Chinese cooking more generally. It argues that Chinese restaurant syndrome was, at its core, a product of a racialised discourse that framed much of the scientific, medical and popular discussion surrounding the condition. This particular debate brought to the surface a number of widely held assumptions about the strangely ‘exotic’, ‘bizarre’ and ‘excessive’ practices associated with Chinese cooking which, ultimately, meant that few of those studying the Chinese restaurant syndrome would question the ethnic origins of the condition.

Public Health, Environment and Surveying

Mills, D. — 2009-04-01

The object of this article is to draw the attention of public health historians to the importance of plans produced by engineers for Victorian sewerage schemes. These plans assist in the understanding of the complex and rapidly changing technical aspects of the subject. The topographical information displayed is valuable in the analysis of the problems facing contemporaries. The article includes simple explanations of engineering and cartographic points, partly through the use of three extracts from the plan prepared by George Giles for the Lincoln proposals of 1849–50. Relevant work on the history of town plans by Harley and Oliver is referred to, including some details from the latter's annotated list of towns surveyed for sanitary purposes by the Ordnance Survey in the early 1850s.

Epidemics and Infections in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Condrau, F., Worboys, M. — 2009-04-01

Notes on Contributors

2009-04-01

Leprosy in Premodern Medicine: A Malady of the Whole Body

Giglioni, G. — 2009-04-01

Pestilential Complexities: Understanding Medieval Plague

Fabbri, C. N. — 2009-04-01

Sex, Sin, and Science: A History of Syphilis in America

Taithe, B. — 2009-04-01

Mapping Out the Venereal Wilderness: Public Health and STD in New Zealand 1920-1980

Brookes, B. — 2009-04-01

Unimagined Community: Sex, Networks and AIDS in Uganda and South Africa

Whiteside, A. — 2009-04-01

Cholera and Nation: Doctoring the Social Body in Victorian England

de Almeida, J. R. — 2009-04-01

Tuberculosis and the Politics of Exclusion: A History of Public Health and Migration to Los Angeles

Bashford, A. — 2009-04-01

Saving Sickly Children: The Tuberculosis Preventorium in American Life, 1909-1970

Kirby, S. — 2009-04-01

La Ciudad Impura: Salud, Tuberculosis y Cultura en Buenos Aires, 1870-1950

Di Liscia, M. S. — 2009-04-01

Deadly Companions: How Microbes Shaped our History

Greenwood, D. — 2009-04-01

Biomedicine in the Twentieth Century: Practices, Policies and Politics

Nicolson, M. — 2009-04-01

Medicine by Design: The Architect and the Modern Hospital, 1893-1943

Kelly, J. — 2009-04-01

Hospitals and Healing from Antiquity to the Later Middle Ages

Totelin, L. — 2009-04-01

Galen and the Rhetoric of Healing

Petit, C. — 2009-04-01

Anatomy of Passions

Coffin, J.-C. — 2009-04-01

A History of the Heart

Erickson, R. — 2009-04-01

The History and Poetics of Scientific Biography

Reinarz, J. — 2009-04-01

Cancer in the Twentieth Century

Barnes, E. — 2009-04-01

History of Psychiatry and Medical Psychology

Prior, P. — 2009-04-01

Madness to Mental Illness: A History of the Royal College of Psychiatrists

Thalassis, N. — 2009-04-01

Madness in Buenos Aires: Patients, Psychiatrists, and the Argentine State, 1880-1983

Zulawski, A. — 2009-04-01

Sexual Inversion: A Critical Edition

Beccalossi, C. — 2009-04-01

Renovating Russia: The Human Sciences and the Fate of Liberal Modernity, 1880-1930

Healey, D. — 2009-04-01

Missionaries and Their Medicine: A Christian Modernity for Tribal India

Chatterjee, N. — 2009-04-01

Practising Colonial Medicine: The Colonial Medical Service in British East Africa

Wall, R. — 2009-04-01

Medicine's Moving Pictures: Medicine, Health and Bodies in American Film and Television

Butler, M. — 2009-04-01

From Transmitted Deprivation to Social Exclusion: Policy, Poverty, and Parenting

Stewart, J. — 2009-04-01

Autism's False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure

Fitzgerald, M. — 2009-04-01

Notes on Book Reviewers

2009-04-01

Editorial Note

2009-04-01