Social History of Medicine - recent issues

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

The NHS at 60: Perspectives on Health Care Systems

Moscucci, O. — 2008-11-19

The British National Health Service 1948-2008: A Review of the Historiography

Gorsky, M. — 2008-11-19

This article surveys historical writing on the British National Health Service since its inception in 1948. Its main focus is on policy-making and organisation and its principal concerns are primary care and the hospital sector, although public health, and psychiatric and geriatric care are briefly discussed. The over-arching narrative is one of transition from paternalism and technocratic planning to market disciplines and a discourse of choice, and of the ceding of professional autonomy by clinicians to managers and to the state. These issues are discussed in a chronological survey of policy-making from Bevan's ‘creation’ to the Blair era. Later sections consider evaluations of the service, starting with Webster's thesis that the NHS has been subject to prolonged under-funding, particularly under Conservative stewardship, then moving to assessments of the Thatcher, Major and Blair reforms. Much of the historical literature on the NHS is contentious and opinions are sharply divided on the reform era since the 1970s and the trajectories this has set for the future.

History and Health Policy in the United States: The Making of a Health Care Industry, 1948-2008

Stevens, R. A. — 2008-11-19

The UK's National Health Service is approaching its sixtieth anniversary, an oppportune time perhaps to consider the case of the United States, where there is no national health service. Federal law requires hospitals to treat those who enter their emergency rooms, but not for free; military veterans are offered care in health facilities supported by federal tax dollars and the national Medicare programme provides government-sponsored health insurance for specified services to those over 65 years of age and to individuals certified as disabled. However, Medicare does not provide health services, which are predominantly purchased in the private sector. This article considers the history of American health care over the past 60 years, reflecting the diverse ways in which health care is embedded in the economy, politics, power structures and culture of the United States and discussing what it is like to have a health care industry without having a national health service or universal health insurance. The article concludes that, since the Second World War, the United States has been successful in achieving highly specialized, valued, life-improving health care for most—not for all—members of the population, but at a huge and rising cost. Notable achievements have been produced by the public–private mix of the American health enterprise. However, broad questions of social class, illness, insurance and the burden of payment for health care remain in a society with widening divisions of the population by socio-economic class, education, health literacy and computer skills.

'Vision and Vested Interests': National Health Service Reform in South Africa and Britain during the 1940s and Beyond

Digby, A. — 2008-11-19

Both Britain and South Africa considered major health reforms during the 1940s and there was mutual interest in the ideas being generated. In South Africa, the Report of the National Health Services Commission of 1944 advocated a national health service based on health centres that would integrate curative, preventive and promotive work. Parallel with this were plans by the provinces for free hospital treatment. Scarce finance, together with political and medical vested interests, meant that the health centre ideal only survived in minor form. In Britain, a free national health service was created in 1948, in which a reformed structure of hospitals was central, and early plans for health centres were marginalised. In each country, limited financial resources and vested interests—in the form of powerful medical professional associations or (in the case of South Africa) of provincial administrations—delayed, scaled down or reshaped the original reforming vision.

A National Health Service, By Comparison

Freeman, R. — 2008-11-19

The National Health Service (NHS) has always been compared to other things, to other organisations and systems both at home and abroad. This paper explores those comparisons, beginning with the origins of national public health care in Lloyd George's study of German social insurance, and ending with Gordon Brown's claims for the NHS as ‘the best insurance policy in the world’. It considers the comparisons and contrasts made for and with the NHS at the time of its foundation and the comparison of state and market around 1990, before reviewing the contemporary function of comparison as form and basis of health governance. The paper presents three related patterns of thought: one prompted by encounter with the other, one sustained by metaphor and one developed in more formal, analytic comparison. It concludes by discussing why comparison itself is such a dangerous and contested thing.

The Languages of Science, the Vocabulary of Politics: Challenges to Medical Revival in Punjab

Sivaramakrishnan, K. — 2008-11-19

This article examines the ideas and processes that shaped the construction of an alternative and complementary agenda for ‘indigenous’ Ayurvedic medicine in British colonial Punjab, in response to the consolidation of western medical authority and intervention. Located in the early twentieth century, this study analyses the growing movement amongst indigenous practitioners to recast and legitimise the moorings of their learning and practice as they addressed the political ideologies and structures that buttressed colonial medicine, such as its claims to represent a ‘scientific’ rational-critical tradition and its projection of the civilising and modernising claims of colonial rule. While Ayurvedic ‘revival’ has been broadly associated with a movement of Hindu political-cultural nationalism and revival, this study argues that there were important challenges in ethnic, cultural-political alignments that constantly undermined and punctuated the broader agenda of Hindu cultural-political mobilisation that was emerging in these years in urban centres across North India. Based on a cache of little-known vernacular tracts and pamphlets and with interviews with hereditary Ayurvedic practitioners, this study explores the ideas and vocabulary employed by a minority of Sikh practitioners of Ayurvedic medicine in Punjab, as they sought simultaneously to contest and reformulate the claims both of ‘western’, scientific medicine and that of ‘indigenous’ Hindu Ayurvedic learning.

Roy Porter Student Essay Prize Winner * Psychiatry Limited: Hyperactivity and the Evolution of American Psychiatry, 1957-1980

Smith, M. — 2008-11-19

Hyperactivity is the most commonly diagnosed childhood psychiatric disorder in north America. Most physicians believe that the disorder is a neurological dysfunction which is best treated with stimulants, such as ritalin. Accounts of the history of hyperactivity written by physicians, psychologists and even historians suggest that the disorder was always conceived as such. This paper argues that, on the contrary, the notion that hyperactivity was a neurological condition only emerged after vigorous debate during the 1960s between three competing fields within American psychiatry: specifically psychoanalysis, social psychiatry and biological psychiatry. Biological psychiatry won the debate, not because its approach to hyperactivity was more scientifically valid, but rather because its explanations and methods fit the prevailing social context more readily than that of its rivals. American psychiatry's refusal to draw pluralistic conclusions about hyperactivity undermined the development of a deeper understanding of the disorder. The history of hyperactivity provides an ideal lens through which to view the evolution of psychiatry from a field dominated by Freudian psychoanalysis to one rooted in the neurosciences.

Whatever Happened to Health Education? Mapping the Grey Literature Collection Inherited by NICE

Loughlin, K., Berridge, V. — 2008-11-19

The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) contracted public health historians to assess a collection of grey literature inherited from the Health Development Agency (HDA). The records stem mainly from the HDA's forerunners, the Health Education Authority and the Health Education Council. Material in the collection spans the period 1970–2004, although the majority of records date from the 1980s and 1990s. A broad range of health topics are covered and the main focus of the collection is public health education. The issue of smoking and health is strongly represented throughout the timeline of the collection. From the 1980s, material on HIV/AIDS is equally well represented. Indeed, the AIDS material held in this collection is particularly significant, as the Health Education Authority took responsibility for the national AIDS education campaign from the mid-1980s. The collection offers possibilities for research into the post-war history of public health but its future is currently uncertain.

Causes of Death in Nineteenth-Century New England: The Dominance of Infectious Disease

Noymer, A., Jarosz, B. — 2008-11-19

This is a response to the recent contribution by Flurin Condrau and Michael Worboys on epidemics and infections in the nineteenth century. We present data from New England showing that infectious disease deaths were in the majority in the nineteenth century. In the data we examine, the epidemiologic transition is intact.

Notes on Contributors

2008-11-19

Marketing Health: Smoking and the Discourse of Public Health in Britain, 1945-2000

Pennock, P. — 2008-11-19

Global Efforts to Combat Smoking: An Evaluation of Smoking Control Policies

Elliot, R. — 2008-11-19

Heroin: The Treatment of Addiction in Twentieth-Century Britain

Campbell, N. D. — 2008-11-19

Discovering Addiction: The Science and Politics of Substance Abuse Research

Mold, A. — 2008-11-19

Devil of the Domestic Sphere: Temperance, Gender and Middle Class Ideology, 1800-1860

Warner, J. — 2008-11-19

Medicating Modern America: Prescription Drugs in History

Tobbell, D. A. — 2008-11-19

DNA: Promise and Peril

Scully, J. L. — 2008-11-19

Fundamentals of the Stem Cell Debate: The Scientific, Religious, Ethical and Political Issues

Ford, M. — 2008-11-19

The Sterilization Movement and Global Fertility in the Twentieth Century

Largent, M. A. — 2008-11-19

Scottish Midwives: Twentieth-Century Voices

Nuttall, A. — 2008-11-19

Medical Records for the South Wales Coalfield c. 1890-1948: An Annotated Guide to the South Wales Coalfield Collection

Morrison, S. — 2008-11-19

Maritime Quarantine: The British Experience, c.1650-1900

McLean, D. — 2008-11-19

Public Health and Municipal Policy Making: Britain and Sweden, 1900-1940

Sheard, S. — 2008-11-19

Kissing Can Be Dangerous: The Public Health Campaigns to Prevent and Control Tuberculosis in Western Australia, 1900-1960

Greenlees, J. — 2008-11-19

The Great Nation in Decline: Sex, Modernity and Health Crises in Revolutionary France c. 1750-1850

Smith, L. W. — 2008-11-19

Aghor Medicine: Pollution, Death and Healing in Northern India

Attewell, G. — 2008-11-19

Diversity and Division in Medicine: Health Care in South Africa from the 1800s

Crozier, A. — 2008-11-19

States of Mind: Searching for Mental Health in Natal and Zululand, 1868-1918

Coleborne, C. — 2008-11-19

Notes on Book Reviewers

2008-11-19

Corrections, Volume 21

2008-11-19

Fragmentation as Metaphor in the Classical Healing Sanctuary

Hughes, J. — 2008-07-30

This article focuses on the models of body parts that were dedicated in Classical healing sanctuaries in the fifth and fourth centuries bc. My interpretation builds on, but goes beyond, the traditional reading of the votive body parts, which sees the visual form of these objects as serving (only) to illustrate the part of the body that was ill or malfunctioning. I argue that these objects can also be read as representing the fragmentation or disaggregation of the human body, and I introduce evidence which indicates that the ancient dedicants themselves recognised and explored this aspect of the votive imagery. In order to reconstruct the significance of these anatomical fragments in the social and religious context of Classical Greece, I call upon a range of contemporary images and texts from both within and beyond the healing sanctuary. I suggest that the fragmentation of the body in the sanctuary served as a metaphor which gave visual form and social meaning to the otherwise intensely personal experience of illness. Furthermore, I argue that this symbolic dismemberment also played a dynamic functional role in the process of healing, which was itself metaphorically conceived as the reintegration of the dedicant's broken body.

'Your Very Thankful Inmate': Discovering the Patients of an Early County Lunatic Asylum

Smith, L. — 2008-07-30

Recent studies of the historical development of lunatic asylums have increasingly sought to gain access to the experiences and perspectives of patients and their families. Generally, historians have had to rely mainly on data extracted from admissions records or casebooks. With one or two notable exceptions, little material has survived emanating directly from patients. This article draws largely on a collection of correspondence from the Gloucester Asylum in the period 1827 to 1843. Most of the letters were written by patients' relatives to the medical superintendent. They offer valuable insights into a range of issues—circumstances that led to admission; the quality of relationships between patients and their families; interactions between community and institution; perceptions of life in the asylum; the processes of recovery, discharge and after-care. It becomes clear that, rather than the asylum being a closed and isolated institution, there was ongoing dialogue between patients, relatives, and medical officers, both to exchange information and also to promote recovery, discharge, and re-settlement in the community.

Education, Mutualism, and Medical Consumers in Third Republic France, 1882-1914

Lacy, C. — 2008-07-30

When the republican government of France revised the curriculum of its newly expanded programme of public instruction in the 1880s, a significant emphasis was placed on teaching female students about basic family health care. Home economics manuals stressed the importance of entrusting the family's health to a physician, which in turn depended on spending a portion of the household budget on dues for a mutual aid society. At a time when the medical marketplace offered an increased array of options for treatment, and pervasive pharmaceutical advertising directly appealed to sick people as consumers, French republican politicians, social reformers and physicians viewed education as the means to persuade the public to rely on professional, scientific medicine. Given the role that women played in administering medical treatment in the home and in managing the household budget, persuading female students that mothers should entrust their family's health to a physician was essential to the expansion of the doctor's authority, which was an important component in the professionalisation of medicine.

Bioprospecting and Resistance: Transforming Poisoned Arrows into Strophantin Pills in Colonial Gold Coast, 1885-1922

Osseo-Asare, A. D. — 2008-07-30

The rise of pharmaceutical chemistry in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century dovetailed with the wars of imperial expansion in Africa. The drug strophanthin joined the official roster of the British Pharmacopoeia in 1898; meanwhile, British troops were the target of poisoned arrows on the Gold Coast. This article argues for a global history of drug discovery through the case of strophanthin in colonial West Africa. The drug's key ingredient, the seeds of various Strophanthus species, also critical to poison arrow manufacture, was at the centre of power struggles between colonial administrators and communities in the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast Colony and Togoland throughout the 1920s. In 1885, Africans had control of their land and unrestricted access to Strophanthus and other plants. By 1905, a British military presence had been established and poisoned arrows were outlawed. Simultaneously, breakthroughs in pharmaceutical chemistry increased international demand for Strophanthus seeds, prompting an unsuccessful export scheme from the Gold Coast during the First World War. Reading narratives of drug discovery in Europe against colonial politics in West Africa reveals the world history in which pharmaceuticals continue to be embedded.

'Our lives are bad but our luck is good': A Social History of Leprosy in Singapore

Seng, L. K. — 2008-07-30

This paper examines the social history of individuals with leprosy living in Singapore under the law of compulsory segregation. Using official sources and oral history interviews, the paper explores both the colonial and postcolonial states' motivations behind the policy and its effects on leprosy sufferers and the public at large in a cosmopolitan, progressive country. First, by tracing the continuity of the colonial policy into the postcolonial period, segregation, it is argued, stemmed not only from British anxieties towards the Asian ‘races’, which appeared to be the case in the earlier era, but from a deeper ‘high modernist’ resolve, shared by both the British and the postcolonial People's Action Party governments, to mould individuals into model subjects and citizens using the principles and techniques of modern science and administration. This paper also presents patient experiences of and responses to segregation and the social stigma against leprosy. It contends that official social control over the leprosarium was never completely hegemonic but was continually contested, individually and collectively, and overtly and covertly, by the residents, giving form in the long run to semi-autonomous ways of everyday life in the institution.

Poverty, Crime and Mental Illness: Female Forensic Psychiatric Committal in Ireland, 1910-1948

Kelly, B. D. — 2008-07-30

This article focuses on case-records of all women admitted to the Central Criminal Lunatic Asylum, Dublin between 1910 and 1948. The majority of women were Roman Catholic (85.4 per cent) and had a mean age of 36.4 years. The majority were convicted of a crime (85.7 per cent), of whom 75.0 per cent were convicted of killing, most commonly child-killing. The majority of women detained ‘at the Lord Lieutenant's Pleasure’ (indefinitely) were convicted of murder (51.7 per cent), assault (20.7 per cent) or infanticide (13.8 per cent); mean duration of detention was 5.6 years. The most common diagnoses were ‘mania’ or ‘delusional insanity’ (38.1 per cent) and ‘melancholia’ (23.8 per cent); 7.1 per cent were considered ‘sane’. Following their detention, 28.1 per cent of women were transferred to district asylums and the remainder were released under various different circumstances. In common with similar studies from other countries, these data demonstrate that the fate of these women was largely determined by a combination of societal, legal and medical circumstances, as evidenced by the socio-economic profile of women admitted and changes in admission patterns following the introduction of the Mental Treatment Act 1945. The role of other factors (such as religion) in determining their fate merits further study.

Medicine, Masculinity, and the Disappearance of Male Menopause in the 1950s

Watkins, E. S. — 2008-07-30

In an earlier article, I described how the topic of male menopause lived on in the popular press from the mid-1950s through the mid-1990s in spite of its contemporary absence from the medical literature. The present article addresses the question of why male menopause vanished from medical discourse in the 1950s. This disappearance offers an interesting case study of how and why diagnoses and therapies fall in and out of favour. For this particular set of symptoms, psychiatry replaced endocrinology as the explanatory framework, and tranquilisers replaced hormones as the preferred therapy. But medical fashion was not the only factor determining diagnosis and treatment. In the 1950s, when the dominant model of masculinity clearly differentiated men from women, male patients and their male physicians alike balked at the idea that men could suffer from what seemed like a woman's problem, namely, menopause. The diagnosis of a stress-induced condition fitted better with the image of the hardworking breadwinning male, especially among middle-aged men who might also have worried about becoming superannuated. Cultural conceptions of masculinity and ageing figured significantly in the framing of this condition.

'The Scarlet Woman in Person': The Establishment of a Family Planning Service in Northern Ireland, 1950-1974

McCormick, L. — 2008-07-30

There is now an increasing body of research on the history of birth control and family planning. However, little work has yet been carried out on the provision and establishment of clinics at a local and regional level after 1945. This article seeks to fill this gap by describing and interpreting the establishment of a family planning service in Northern Ireland from the 1950s onwards. The distinctive religious, social, political and cultural situation in the province ensured that the manner in which clinics were established and the issues and difficulties that were faced differed from those elsewhere in the United Kingdom. Northern Ireland provides a valuable case-study of how local and regional differences influenced the establishment and growth of family planning services.

Investigating 'Community' through a History of Responses to Asbestos-Related Disease in an Australian Industrial Region

Hunter, C., LaMontagne, A. D. — 2008-07-30

The government of the State of Victoria has been slow to acknowledge the social costs of asbestos-related diseases (ARD) in the Latrobe Valley. Despite the emphasis on ‘community’ in the discipline of public health and in public health services since the 1970s, ARD was only recognised as a community-wide health problem because of the advocacy of people directly affected by it. An historical view of responses to ARD in a community established as an appendage to the publicly owned power industry and infused with an ethic of public service, shows that contests over the definition of ‘community’ lay at the heart of these responses. It also shows that such disputes did not arise only from the reluctance of authorities to acknowledge the problems resulting from the extensive use of asbestos in power stations. The paper highlights the political nature of the notion of ‘community’ and in doing so raises questions that have implications beyond its narrow regional focus.

Unearthing and Dissecting the Records of English Provincial Medical Education, c. 1825-1948

Reinarz, J. — 2008-07-30

The archives of medical schools are a valuable resource for researchers in the history of medicine. This article offers an introduction to the standard records which comprise five of these collections for provincial England: Birmingham, Bristol, Liverpool, Newcastle and Sheffield. It identifies unusual documents, including iconographic, manuscript and literary sources, which are available for some, but not all, collections. It concludes with a practical guide to accessing these collections, not all of which have been properly catalogued and stored in the archives of their associated universities.

Notes on Contributors

2008-07-30

Need and Care: Glimpses into the Beginnings of Eastern Europe's Professional Welfare * Guardians of the Poor, Custodians of the Public: Welfare History in Eastern Europe, 1900-1960 * Eugenik in Osterreich. Biopolitische Strukturen von 1900-1945 * Nebunia. O antropologie istorica romaneasca * O antropologie a marginalului. Psihiatria judiciara romaneasca, 1860-1940 * Iresponsabilitatea. Aspecte medico-legale, psihiatrice cu aplicatii in dreptul penal, civil si al familiei * Protiv bolesti i neznanja: Rockefellerova fondacija u meduratnoj Jugoslaviji

Turda, M. — 2008-07-30

A History of Drug Use in Sport 1876-1976: Beyond Good and Evil

Heggie, V. — 2008-07-30

Drugs and Empires: Essays in Modern Imperialism and Intoxication, c.1500-c.1930

Courtwright, D. T. — 2008-07-30

Perspectives on Risks and Regulation: The FDA at 100

Barton, P. — 2008-07-30

State of Immunity. The Politics of Vaccination in Twentieth-Century America

Jones, G. — 2008-07-30

Mad Dogs and Englishmen: Rabies in Britain, 1830-2000

Blancou, J. — 2008-07-30

The Politics of Madness: The State, Insanity, and Society in England, 1845-1914

Davis, G. — 2008-07-30

Psychiatry and Empire

Scull, A. — 2008-07-30

Neurosis and Modernity. The Age of Nervousness in Sweden

Blok, G. — 2008-07-30

Reading 'Madness': Gender and Difference in the Colonial Asylum in Victoria, Australia, 1848-1888

Parle, J. — 2008-07-30

Refiguring Unani Tibb. Plural Healing in Late Colonial India

Ernst, W. — 2008-07-30

Public Health in Asia and the Pacific. Historical and Comparative Perspectives

Harrison, M. — 2008-07-30

Midwifery, Obstetrics and the Rise of Gynaecology: The Uses of a Sixteenth-Century Compendium

Greenlees, J. — 2008-07-30

Women, Medicine and Theatre, 1500-1750: Literary Mountebanks and Performing Quacks

Gentilcore, D. — 2008-07-30

The Medieval Hospital and Medical Practice. AVISTA Studies in the History of Medieval Technology, Science and Art, Vol. 3

Schleissner, M. — 2008-07-30

Children and Sexuality: From the Greeks to the Great War

Davis, J. E. — 2008-07-30

Medicine and the Market in England and Its Colonies, c. 1450-c. 1850

Elmer, P. — 2008-07-30

Physicians and Society: A History of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh

Jenkinson, J. — 2008-07-30

The Mine Management Professions in the Twentieth-Century Scottish Coal Mining Industry

Tweedale, G. — 2008-07-30

Notes on Book Reviewers

2008-07-30