Medical History最新文献

Developments such as the opening of the first psychiatric outpatient clinic, the emergence of psychiatric social work, the surge of interest in psychology and psychiatry, and the tightening of notions about sexual hygiene, intersected with the rise of the mental hygiene movement in India from 1930s. There exists little to no discussion on how mental hygiene developed in the colonies. This study is the first to shed light on the lesser-known chapter of psychiatry in India. The dynamics of family, childhood, and nation-state when merged with ideas about racism, caste, and communalism were critical in the making of new nation-states like India. Moreover, the trajectory of India's participation in international health movements, such as psychoanalysis and mental hygiene, allowed for exchange and participation. India's participation in the mental hygiene movement allowed the growth of psy-disciplines in innumerable ways. This paper fills in a major lacuna in historical writing by providing an outline of the number of interconnected developments in the colonies, which are often sidelined. The international visibility of India also permitted India to take centre stage in many significant studies that were conducted by the World Health Organization after the Second World War.

Since Foucault's seminal work in the 1960s on the consequences of eighteenth-century discursive shifts in medicine, the establishment of hospitals during this period has often been interpreted as a progressive innovation driven primarily by medical scientists. However, less attention has been given to the ways in which the founding of hospitals was intertwined with domestic traditions and the practical challenges inherent in their implementation. By examining the establishment of the Seraphim Hospital in Stockholm, along with subsequent hospital foundations in Sweden, the practical difficulties involved become evident. Some of these challenges, particularly those related to funding difficulties, bear a striking resemblance to contemporary discussions on enhancing the efficiency of healthcare, despite the differing historical contexts. In the Swedish eighteenth-century context, ecclesiastical authority in medical matters persisted and played a role in the establishment process, while the military character of the kingdom also influenced hospital development. The conclusion drawn is that both national and local conditions shaped how medical reforms were conceived and practised. The historiographical emphasis on novelty and change may, at times, obscure the continuity of past practices, which undeniably played a crucial role in shaping the new. The concept of path dependency is thus employed not only to trace these historical connections but also to explore the ways in which they influenced the Swedish context, ultimately shaping the trajectory of hospital development in the country.

Examining the systemic exploitation of mentally ill individuals, this study focuses on the practices of the British colonial administration in Kabba Province, Northern Nigeria (1900-1947). This research investigates how colonial authorities employed biopolitical strategies to categorise, control, and exploit this vulnerable population for labour, prioritising colonial economic and administrative interests. The study utilises a qualitative methodology, primarily analysing archival documents from the National Archives of Nigeria (NAK), Kaduna, and Arewa House Archives (AHA), to uncover the forced labour system's practices and rationalisations. Crucially, it incorporates oral sources from direct descendants of ethno-medical practitioners, former colonial staff, traditional chiefs, and learned community members. This oral history component provides vital intergenerational knowledge, contextualising archival findings and offering perspectives often absent from official records, ensuring a nuanced understanding of pre-colonial mental health practices and colonial-era lived experiences. Secondary literature on colonial biopower, mental health history, and regional history provides a comparative framework. Findings indicate the colonial administration systematically repurposed traditional care and established new mechanisms to identify, isolate, and compel mentally ill individuals into various forms of forced labour for infrastructure and economic extraction. In conclusion, this research significantly contributes to scholarship on vulnerable populations during colonialism, illuminating the intricate link between mental illness, labour, and power in colonial Nigeria, and informing contemporary debates on mental health, human rights, and historical justice.

This article examines the place of habit in the medical thought and practices of 18th-century Britain. Scholars, including Steven Shapin and Phil Withington, have shown that habit was important to the broadly humoral understandings of health, disease, and regimen that dominated in Europe for much of the early modern period. In this article, I offer the first sustained attempt to understand the role of habit in the medical thought of 18th-century Britain, focusing on the influential Scottish physician William Cullen. For the first time engaging with all of Cullen's work on habit, including his correspondence, pathological lectures, and clinical lectures, I show that medics of the 18th century developed a new understanding of habit, linked to changing ideas about the nervous system. Increasingly, they emphasised the role that habit could play in causing the periodical return of bodily functions, even when there appeared to be no plausible physical cause. In so doing, medics engaged with one of the key debates of the 18th century - the contested notion that human nature itself might be contingent on social and environmental conditions. For them, habit provided the means by which society could quite literally change the body. These ideas come through clearly in the striking suggestion - hitherto unnoticed - that menstruation was the product of habit, arising not from nature but from culture. Discussions of menstruation reveal the political stakes of habit, with links to highly contested debates about the role that bodies of different genders might play in society.

This article analyzes the medicalisation strategies deployed by Peruvian alienists in the daily life of the Lima Asylum during the last third of the 19th century. Special attention is given to the process of hospitalisation of the insane in the psychiatric hospital, since this administrative procedure reveals the dialogue, confrontation, and negotiation between the asylum staff and the state and social bodies in the public management of insanity. Through the support of the civil authorities in charge of the psychiatric hospital administration, we argued that the local alienists sought to impose medical knowledge in the asylum space as the legitimate criterion for the confinement of the insane in Peru. This process was not without tensions, setbacks, and disputes, especially with the families and the state agencies of control and social defence seeking to preserve their former prerogatives over the fate of their insane.However, we propose that these medicalisation strategies promoted by the alienists in the daily space of the Lima Asylum managed to situate psychiatric care as a state problem and these actors as experts in the public management of insanity.

This article assesses the impact of the discovery of bacteriophages, which emerged from an investigation into a 1915 outbreak of bacillary dysentery in France, on influenza virus research. Specifically, it details the way in which the phages became a vehicle for importing certain assay techniques into the study of influenza and other viruses that cause infectious diseases in humans and other animals, thereby enabling the scaling up of vaccine production for these diseases. Very soon after his 1917 report of the discovery of bacteriophages, Felix d'Herelle developed an assay technique based on their ability to form countable plaques on solid media when incubated along with the dysentery bacteria. This basic technique was further refined by Macfarlane Burnet in the late 1920s. Still later, in the wake of a 1935 influenza outbreak in Australia, Burnet applied the principles of serial dilution and plaque counting, honed during his work on the phages, to develop a technique for cultivating influenza viruses in fertilised eggs and assaying them by counting the pocks induced on the chick embryo membranes. The ability to grow and assay these viruses proved crucial in developing the first successful vaccines against influenza. In the 1950s, bacteriophage assay techniques were once more carried over to the assaying of viruses on cultured cells by Renato Dulbecco and Marguerite Vogt. The importance of quantification in science, as well as the ability to apply the results of investigations in one area of biology to another, relatively unrelated field, is also discussed.

With this paper, I suggest focusing on diplo-scientific actors as a fruitful approach to study how certain actors have helped to shape international organisations through their diplomatic activities and scientific practices. Using the example of the Swedish medical physicist Rolf Sievert, I show how Sievert's personality and preferences came to decisively shape the post-war trajectory of the International Commission on Radiation Protection (ICRP) and more broadly the international landscape of radiation protection. In the inter-war period, Sievert was engaged in the ICRP and its mother organisation, the International Radiological Congress (IRC), dealing with the interwoven questions of how to formulate international radiation standards and radiation protection initiatives. Following the Second World War, Sievert became concerned with the proliferation of nuclear technologies and the spread of radioactive fallout following nuclear test bombings. Because of this concern, Sievert set out to separate the ICRP from the IRC and form a new, independent group that could deal with the dangers of the new 'Nuclear Age'. While Sievert was ultimately unsuccessful, his attempts would decisively change the purview and trajectory of the ICRP. This had large ramifications, as the ICRP continues to be the prime international organisation on radiological and medical radiation protection, formulating recommendations that are used by international, regional, national, and local groups, informing epistemic judgements on radiation research.

This article deals with the tuberculosis policy in Communist Bulgaria from the 1940s to the end of the 1950s. The focus is on the BCG vaccination as the major preventive tool. The article's reconstruction of decision-making draws on evidence from archive records produced by the Bulgarian Ministry of Health. The main question guiding the research is how past Bulgarian experiences on the one hand, and international traditions, on the other, influence medical opinion and state policy towards tuberculosis and patients with tuberculosis. How did the Cold War context shape BCG vaccination policy? The author presents the story of the 'Bulgarian' BCG strain, which was made possible by the international research networks and travels of the Bulgarian scientist Srebra Rodopska (1913-2006). Her story has recently been rediscovered and made popular in Bulgaria, in the context of debates about COVID-19. This article aims to correct the public history narrative, which has thus emerged by placing the story of the BCG vaccine within its Cold War context. The author pays attention to dependencies between medicine and politics, and to the role of the state. Despite the popular story of Rodopska as the inventor of a 'Bulgarian' BCG strain and vaccine, what actually happened was that in Bulgaria of the 1950s and 1960s, the Soviet strain and vaccine production technique were used. This was also due to Soviet pressure to follow the Soviet model of public health infrastructure.

In this article we trace a biography of vacuum aspiration in Spain between the 1960s and 1980s. Analysing the local but transnationally connected history of vacuum aspiration during late Francoism and the democratic transition, we argue that this technology was since the mid-1960s reincarnated in mainstream medical discourse as vacuum curettage, presented as a major medical innovation in diagnosis and therapy. While abortion activists working at the end of the 1970s emphasized the group and political components of a technique they called the 'Karman method', doctors performing illegal abortions within the family planning network defined vacuum aspiration in terms of safety and medical innovation. As we demonstrate, this technique embodied meanings that at times overlapped, at others conflicted, contingent on whether aspirations were linked to medical innovation, pro-abortion activism, or social justice.

The article focuses on the export of cadaveric pituitary glands from communist Bulgaria in the 1980s, used for the production of human growth hormone. The case is explored in the broader context of practices and transnational networks for the supply of pituitaries. Special attention is paid to the changes resulting from the turn to the production of recombinant growth hormone in the mid-1980s, which put an end to the international 'market' of pituitary glands. In the last sections, different perspectives are explored to make sense of the case under scrutiny: those of bioethics and biolaw, on the one hand, and of bioeconomy in a globalising world, on the other.