Pratik Chakrabarti, Medicine & Empire: 1600-1960
(Source: Social History of Medicine)
Source: Social History of Medicine - January 19, 2015 Category: History of Medicine Authors: Singh, N. Tags: Book Reviews Source Type: research
Joan Cadden, Nothing Natural Is Shameful: Sodomy and Science in Late Medieval Europe
(Source: Social History of Medicine)
Source: Social History of Medicine - January 19, 2015 Category: History of Medicine Authors: Puff, H. Tags: Book Reviews Source Type: research
Helen King, The One-Sex Body on Trial: The Classical and Early Modern Evidence
(Source: Social History of Medicine)
Source: Social History of Medicine - January 19, 2015 Category: History of Medicine Authors: Read, K. D. Tags: Book Reviews Source Type: research
'Pretty Pioneering-Spirited People': Genetic Counsellors, Gender Culture, and the Professional Evolution of a Feminised Health Field, 1947-1980
Between the late 1940s and the 1980s, the field of genetic counselling transformed from a peripheral interest of physician-geneticists, to a profession dominated by women with Masters degrees. Drawing on oral histories with genetic counsellors, this article explains how the professional evolution of genetic counselling was shaped by a changing gender culture that could be simultaneously advantageous and challenging for counsellors. Within this culture, the evolution of genetic counselling was shaped by counsellors' interactions with physicians-geneticists within a ‘system of professions’, and their position bet...
Source: Social History of Medicine - January 19, 2015 Category: History of Medicine Authors: Stillwell, D. Tags: Original Articles Source Type: research
'Roy Porter Student Prize Essay, 2012' Easing the Passing: R v Adams and Terminal Care in Postwar Britain
This article examines the 1957 trial for murder of Dr John Bodkin Adams in the context of medical care of the dying in postwar Britain. R v Adams is significant because it is understood to have rendered lawful the medical administration of pain-relieving drugs to the dying even when it is known they will hasten death. I argue the legal sanction of this practice in the 1950s reflected and reinforced the rising authority and faith invested in physicians as specialists in terminal care. Specifically, the case highlights the role of the administration of potent narcotics in the establishment of care of the dying as a branch of...
Source: Social History of Medicine - January 19, 2015 Category: History of Medicine Authors: Mahar, C. Tags: Original Articles Source Type: research
Inter-imperial Learning and African Health Care in Portuguese Angola in the Interwar Period
This article shows that, aside from economic and humanitarian considerations, the international critique of Portugal's colonial policies and ensuing anxieties that the country might lose its colonies were decisive in convincing political decision makers in Lisbon to provide the necessary funding for this project. The article's main argument is that the Angolan AMI programme was profoundly and deliberately shaped by processes of inter-imperial comparison and borrowing. Efforts towards the institutionalisation of inter-imperial learning and collaboration, though backed by international organisations such as the League of Nat...
Source: Social History of Medicine - January 19, 2015 Category: History of Medicine Authors: Coghe, S. Tags: Original Articles Source Type: research
The 'Regiment of Skeletons': A First World War Medical Collection
Soon after the outbreak of the First World War, pathologists and senior military clinicians set out to record and collect information relating to conflict-related conditions and wounds. This material included not only statistics, case histories and clinical illustrations, but also models and human remains. This paper discusses the largest British concentration of such specimens, in the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons of England. Pathological preparations and images arrived from the front and elsewhere to be preserved and exhibited—word, image and object juxtaposed—with the intention of trainin...
Source: Social History of Medicine - January 19, 2015 Category: History of Medicine Authors: Alberti, S. J. M. M. Tags: Original Articles Source Type: research
Performing State Medicine During its 'Frustrating' Years: Epidemiology and Bacteriology at the Local Government Board, 1870-1900
This article is about the performance—referring to the projection and reception—of state medicine in late Victorian Britain. Moving away from the lens of the ideas and policies historians have previously explored, I focus on epidemiological and bacteriological investigations of typhoid fever as they were conducted through the Medical Department of the Local Government Board, during the period historian Roy MacLeod characterised as a ‘frustrating’ one in the history of state medicine. The article focuses on two late Victorian epidemiological investigations, Richard Thorne Thorne's 1879 study of an ou...
Source: Social History of Medicine - January 19, 2015 Category: History of Medicine Authors: Steere-Williams, J. Tags: Original Articles Source Type: research
Mr Giovanni Succi Meets Dr Luigi Luciani in Florence: Hunger Artists and Experimental Physiology in the Late Nineteenth Century
This paper describes the fast of the hunger artist Giovanni Succi (1853–1918) and his stay at the laboratory of Professor Luigi Luciani (1840–1919), in Florence, in 1888. In his fight against public suspicion of fraud, Succi's success in the marketplace owed a great deal to the scientific authority of prestigious physiologists such as Luciani. In turn, the debates on the causes of resistance to hunger gained Luciani public recognition, and helped him in his attempts to promote a comprehensive image of physiology which contrasted with the contemporary trends towards medical specialization. As a result, Succi's f...
Source: Social History of Medicine - January 19, 2015 Category: History of Medicine Authors: Nieto-Galan, A. Tags: Original Articles Source Type: research
The State, the People and the Care of Sick and Injured Sailors in Late Stuart England
This article sheds new light on the depth and breadth of the Royal Navy's partnership with private care providers in one English town, Portsmouth, during the second Anglo-Dutch war (1664–67), by paying special attention to the role of landladies. We also re-examine why naval health care in England was transformed from a system based on numerous town quarters to one reliant upon a handful of private contract hospitals. A key factor in the change was naval medical officials' unwillingness to partner with landladies, because the officials identified landladies with the main failings of the town quartering system. Dishon...
Source: Social History of Medicine - January 19, 2015 Category: History of Medicine Authors: Neufeld, M., Wickham, B. Tags: Original Articles Source Type: research
Of the China Root: A Case Study of the Early Modern Circulation of Materia Medica
The early modern rise of syphilis provoked similar anxieties to those that more recently accompanied the global spread of HIV/AIDS. It also stimulated global demand for remedies. I discuss one of the most popular, known as ‘China root’ and usually identified with various species of Smilax. The drug and instructions for its use were spread westward from China by traders of all nationalities from 1535 onwards. Demand became global before being largely replaced in Europe by supplies of various American Smilax species, known collectively as ‘Sarsaparilla’. I examine the economic, political and cultural ...
Source: Social History of Medicine - January 19, 2015 Category: History of Medicine Authors: Winterbottom, A. E. Tags: Original Articles Source Type: research
'Lead[ing] 'em by the Nose into Publick Shame and Derision': Gaspare Tagliacozzi, Alexander Read and the Lost History of Plastic Surgery, 1600-1800
This paper discusses the surgical reconstruction of the nose in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This procedure was most prominently detailed by the Bolognese surgeon Gaspare Tagliacozzi in De curtorum chirurgia per insitionem libri duo (Venice: 1597), and he became synonymous with the operation. Histories of plastic surgery currently state that after Tagliacozzi's death in 1599, his procedure disappeared from medical knowledge. I demonstrate that this was not the case through a thorough book history of an English translation of De curtorum chirurgia published in London in 1687 and 1696 that was attached to the co...
Source: Social History of Medicine - January 19, 2015 Category: History of Medicine Authors: Cock, E. Tags: Original Articles Source Type: research
Jacalyn Duffin, Medical Saints: Cosmas and Damian in a Post-Modern World
(Source: Social History of Medicine)
Source: Social History of Medicine - October 28, 2014 Category: History of Medicine Authors: Schultz, N. Tags: Book Reviews Source Type: research
Sarah Ferber, Bioethics in Historical Perspective
(Source: Social History of Medicine)
Source: Social History of Medicine - October 28, 2014 Category: History of Medicine Authors: Wilson, D. Tags: Book Reviews Source Type: research
Allan V. Horwitz, Anxiety: A Short History
(Source: Social History of Medicine)
Source: Social History of Medicine - October 28, 2014 Category: History of Medicine Authors: Herzberg, D. Tags: Book Reviews Source Type: research
