Barron H. Lerner, The Good Doctor: A Father, A Son, and the Evolution of Medical Ethics
(Source: Social History of Medicine)
Source: Social History of Medicine - October 28, 2015 Category: History of Medicine Authors: Stark, L. Tags: Focus on Biography Source Type: research
Paula J. Martin. Suzanne Noël: Cosmetic Surgery, Feminism and Beauty in Early Twentieth-Century France
(Source: Social History of Medicine)
Source: Social History of Medicine - October 28, 2015 Category: History of Medicine Authors: Davis, K. Tags: Focus on Biography Source Type: research
Mrs Stone & Dr Smellie: Eighteenth-century Midwives and their Patients
(Source: Social History of Medicine)
Source: Social History of Medicine - October 28, 2015 Category: History of Medicine Authors: Badger, F. Tags: Focus on Biography Source Type: research
William Clift's Sketches of Executed Murderers
William Clift (1775–1849) was John Hunter's last assistant and six years after Hunter's death he became the first conservator of the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons of England. It was the conservator's duty to anatomise murderers who had been sentenced to death and dissection. Clift dutifully fulfilled his role and recorded any medically noteworthy features of the bodies. But he did something quite out of the ordinary and singular when he drew careful and sensitively observed portraits of the freshly executed criminals. The drawings are captivating because of the way in which they occupy a represent...
Source: Social History of Medicine - October 28, 2015 Category: History of Medicine Authors: Neher, A. Tags: Sources and Resources Source Type: research
'Insane emigrants' in transit. Psychiatric Patients' Files as a Source for the History of Return Migration, c. 1910
This article highlights a source that can contribute to the history of migration and mental health: the case records of Eastern European emigrants who tried to enter America at the beginning of the twentieth century, but were refused entrance because of their alleged insanity. Some of these unfortunates ended up in the Netherlands, on their way back home, having travelled to the United States through Rotterdam with the Holland-America Line. Psychiatric patient files were analysed relating to 85 ‘insane emigrants’ who were admitted to Maasoord, a psychiatric hospital near Rotterdam. This article offers an evalua...
Source: Social History of Medicine - October 28, 2015 Category: History of Medicine Authors: Blok, G. Tags: Second Opinion Source Type: research
Medico-politics of Gendered Health: The Case of Cardiovascular Prevention in East and West Germany, 1949-1990
This paper analyses the gendered understanding of cardiovascular disease (CVD) prevention in East and West Germany between 1949 and 1990. In both Germanys, so I want to argue, the connection between gender roles and socio-political thinking shaped the gendered course of prevention programmes. By considering the gendered nature of prevention programmes, I aim to contribute to the history of preventive health care in post-war Germany. Peter Baldwin has shown that the historical analysis of prevention practices can provide insights into the political and cultural contexts, in which they are applied and the link between concep...
Source: Social History of Medicine - October 28, 2015 Category: History of Medicine Authors: Madarasz-Lebenhagen, J. Tags: Original Articles Source Type: research
'Dear Father my health has broken down': Writing Health in Irish Charity Letters, 1922-1940
Through an exploration of thousands of Irish begging letters, written between 1920 and 1940 to the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, this paper brings together medical history and the history of the scribal culture of ordinary people in order to offer a ‘new history from below’ of poverty, ill health and the patient. It examines the writing of health in the narratives the poor created; the relationship they constructed between ill health, religion, poverty and medicine; and the role this construction played in making a case for charitable consideration. It is argued that in the hands of these ordinary writer...
Source: Social History of Medicine - October 28, 2015 Category: History of Medicine Authors: Earner-Byrne, L. Tags: Original Articles Source Type: research
Making up 'Vulnerable' People: Human Subjects and the Subjective Experience of Medical Experiment
This paper explores how ‘the human subject’ was figured historically and expands the interpretive range available to historians for understanding the subjective experiences of people who have served in medical experiments in the past. We compare LSD studies on healthy ‘volunteers’ conducted in two experimental settings in the 1950s: the US National Institutes of Mental Health's (NIMH) Addiction Research Center (ARC) Lexington, Kentucky and the NIH Clinical Center (NIHCC) in Bethesda, Maryland. Sources consist of oral history interviews, transcripts and archival documents including photographs and re...
Source: Social History of Medicine - October 28, 2015 Category: History of Medicine Authors: Campbell, N. D., Stark, L. Tags: Original Articles Source Type: research
Bolstering the Greatness of the Homeland: Productivity, Disability and Medicine in Franco's Spain, 1938-1966
The Spanish Civil War ended in 1939 with the victory of the rebel forces led by General Franco, beginning a dictatorship that combined: the establishment of a militarised state to guarantee order; the charismatic authority of the head of state; an enormous bureaucratic apparatus to legitimise its legality; and a strict defence of tradition. In this paper we analyse the way in which disability and rehabilitation formed part of this political programme between the years 1938 and 1966. We highlight the perceived dangers posed by disability and how it was moulded to fit the fundamental principles and goals of the Franco regime...
Source: Social History of Medicine - October 28, 2015 Category: History of Medicine Authors: Martinez-Perez, J., Del Cura, M. Tags: Original Articles Source Type: research
'A Chequered (and Mated) Scientific Career': Robert Case and the Politics of Occupational Bladder Cancer
This article examines Case's pioneering survey and, in particular, the reaction of industry and government to the confirmation that α-naphthylamine, β-naphthylamine, and benzidine were carcinogens. Robert Case's papers and unpublished government and trades union records are used to shed new light on how the chemical industry and government delayed the publication of Case's pathbreaking study and initially hid the results from trade unions. The finding that workers in other industries, such as rubber, were at risk was first censored and then edited by rubber manufacturers. Case's experience has parallels with oth...
Source: Social History of Medicine - October 28, 2015 Category: History of Medicine Authors: Higgins, D., Tweedale, G. Tags: Original Articles Source Type: research
'The bones tell a story the child is too young or too frightened to tell': The Battered Child Syndrome in Post-war Britain and America
This article traces the emergence of child abuse as a medical concern in post-war Britain and America. In the early 1960s American paediatricians and radiologists defined the ‘battered child syndrome’ to characterise infants subjected to serious physical abuse. In the British context, paediatricians and radiologists, but also dermatologists and ophthalmologists, drew upon this work and sought to identify clear diagnostic signs of child maltreatment. For a time, the x-ray seemed to provide a reliable and objective visualisation of child maltreatment. By 1970, however, medical professionals began to invite social...
Source: Social History of Medicine - October 28, 2015 Category: History of Medicine Authors: Crane, J. Tags: Original Articles Source Type: research
Charles V. Roman and the Spectre of Polygenism in Progressive Era Public Health Research
This article explores how polygenist carryovers made their way into early twentieth-century medical and public health studies on the links between race and venereal disease during the American social hygiene movement (1910–40). It also recovers the work of the African-American physician, ethicist, and social hygienist, Dr Charles V. Roman, who stressed during this period that the idea of common human ancestry should push public health researchers to think more creatively and critically about the social and environmental factors shaping health outcomes and black susceptibility to sexual diseases. (Source: Social History of Medicine)
Source: Social History of Medicine - October 28, 2015 Category: History of Medicine Authors: Keel, T. D. Tags: Original Articles Source Type: research
Fathers and Hospital Childbirth in New Zealand
This article explores the reasons for that social change, including ideas in the 1950s about the psychological benefits to the family of men's attendance, and the influence of the women's and consumer movements of the 1970s. It then examines attitudes to the changes among health professionals as well as men and women themselves, and explores whether, once men's attendance had become the norm, the reality met expectations. (Source: Social History of Medicine)
Source: Social History of Medicine - October 28, 2015 Category: History of Medicine Authors: Bryder, L. Tags: Original Articles Source Type: research
Migration and Madness at Sea: The Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-century Voyage to New Zealand
This article draws on a range of sources—including surgeon superintendents' reports as well as asylum records—to examine the mental health of migrants and crew on the voyage to New Zealand during the Victorian and Edwardian eras. It examines key themes such as relations between crew and passengers, the emotional dimensions of insanity, attempts to export the insane, and collaboration between doctors and relatives in adhering to mental health legislation in order to repatriate the insane, all of which facilitate assessment of wider debates about medical authority. While surgeon superintendents documented actions...
Source: Social History of Medicine - October 28, 2015 Category: History of Medicine Authors: McCarthy, A. Tags: Original Articles Source Type: research
'A virtue beyond all medicine': The Hanged Man's Hand, Gallows Tradition and Healing in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-century England
From the eighteenth century through to the abolition of public executions in England in 1868, the touch of a freshly hanged man's hand was sought after to cure a variety of swellings, wens in particular. While the healing properties of corpse hands in general were acknowledged and experimented with in early modern medicine, the gallows cure achieved prominence during the second half of the eighteenth century. What was it about the hanged man's hand (and it always was a male appendage) that gave it such potency? While frequently denounced as a disgusting ‘superstition’ in the press, this popular medical practice...
Source: Social History of Medicine - October 28, 2015 Category: History of Medicine Authors: Davies, O., Matteoni, F. Tags: Original Articles Source Type: research
