Medical History最新文献

This article studies the impact caused by the success and dissemination of Broussais' theories on the use of leeches as a medical supply on Spanish-French trade relations, as well as its consequences for the Spanish market between 1821 and the 1860s. Analysing the documents produced by the different public administrations, together with newspaper and archival sources in both Spain and France and the literature and legislation of that period, allows us to understand the evolution of this trade and the heavy impact it had on the autochthonous population of this animal resource. The article reveals how, at the beginning of the 1820s, leeches became an important medical supply and how the demand for them increased significantly. This gave rise to a trade relation between Spain and France that led to the overexploitation of the resource, the issuing of regulations on the matter, and the search for technological solutions to increase the production of leeches.

This article explores missionary medical discourses in three Telugu journals published in the early twentieth century, to analyse how caste pivoted denunciations of alcohol, especially toddy and arrack, in the Madras Presidency and the Hyderabad state. It argues that one women's missionary journal, Vivekavathi, deployed medical knowledge to formulate subtle and occasionally explicit condemnations of toddy and arrack as unclean and unhealthy substances. The journal relied on universal medical and missionary, British and American knowledge frameworks to mark out Dalits and other marginalised castes as consumers of these local beverages. This stigma was conjured through medical narratives of marginalised castes as lacking in the knowledge of alcohol's relation to digestion, toddy's role in ruining maternal and child nutrition, the unhygienic environment of arrack shops and their propensity to 'alcoholism'. However, this article also traces counter-caste voices who too invoked 'the power of the universal' to dispel caste stigma against marginalised castes. While both sets of voices deployed medical 'enslavement' to alcohol as an interpretive move, they differed in their social imperatives and political imaginaries, defined in caste terms. This article explores a third set of implications of the term 'universal' by analysing global medico-missionary narratives of alcohol in two other Telugu journals. On a methodological plane, this article also pushes for a hybrid reading of what counts for 'scientific instruction', where hymns, catechisms, parables and allegories are considered alongside conventional scientific experiments. In that sense, it upholds vernacular missionary publications as an invaluable resource for the social history of medicine.

Reproductive health in state socialism is usually viewed as an area in which the broader contexts of women's lives were disregarded. Focusing on expert efforts to reduce premature births, we show that the social aspects of women's lives received the most attention. In contrast to typical descriptions emphasising technological medicalisation and pharmaceuticalisation, we show that expertise in early socialism was concerned with socio-medical causes of prematurity, particularly work and marriage. The interest in physical work in the 1950s evolved towards a focus on psychological factors in the 1960s and on broader socio-economic conditions in the 1970s. Experts highlighted marital happiness as conducive to healthy birth and considered unwed women more prone to prematurity. By the 1980s, social factors had faded from interest in favour of a bio-medicalised view. Our findings are based on a rigorous comparative analysis of medical journals from Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia and East Germany.

During the interwar period, France put unprecedented efforts into public health measures targeting the colonised populations of sub-Saharan Africa. This investment in health was seen as crucial to ensuring the renewal of the African labour force needed for the economic development of the colonies. Syphilis, although less deadly than other endemic or epidemic diseases such as yellow fever, sleeping sickness and bubonic plague, was one of the most widespread infections in France's sub-Saharan colonies. This article demonstrates the contradictory nature of the colonial medicine approach to this disease during the interwar years. The negative impact of syphilis on population growth in Africa made it a major threat to the colonial project, and France put significant, costly investment into tackling the disease, focusing its efforts on maternal and child health. However, a closer look at syphilis control in sub-Saharan Africa reveals that the disease was also minimised as a public health issue, under-resourced and downplayed by colonial doctors and administrators. This neglect was embodied in the invention of a new colonial disease, 'exotic syphilis', which was presented as being a relatively benign skin disease among the African populations. It was also reflected in care practices, via a form of mass medicine based on the use of blanchiment, which consisted of knowingly limiting treatment to a superficial effect.

This article advances historical understandings of health, veterinary medicine and livestock agriculture by examining how, in mid-twentieth-century Britain, the diseases of livestock were made collectively knowable. During this period, the state extended its gaze beyond a few, highly impactful notifiable diseases to a host of other threats to livestock health. The prime mechanism through which this was achieved was the disease survey. Paralleling wider developments in survey practices, it grew from small interwar beginnings into a hugely expensive, wide-ranging state veterinary project that created a new conception of the nation's livestock as a geographical aggregation of animals in varying states of health. This article traces the disease survey's entanglements with dairy cows, farming practices, veterinary professional politics and government agendas. It shows that far from a neutral reflection of reality, surveys both represented and perpetuated specific versions of dairy cow health, varieties of farming practice and visions of the veterinary professional role. At first, their findings proved influential, but over time they found it harder to discipline their increasingly complex human, animal and disease subjects, resulting in unconvincing representations of reality that led ultimately to their marginalization.

Though the Hippocratic text On the Heart has garnered significant attention in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries from classicists, physicians and historians of medicine alike, no commentary on this important work currently exists. There remain, however, central questions of interpretation concerning a number of important points: in particular, how the author understands the structure and functioning of the heart.The significance of this text for the history of cardiovascular medicine can be found first in its position as being radically advanced in its portrayal of the inner structure of the heart when compared with any other Hippocratic text. At the same time, the text falls dramatically short of the discoveries of the Alexandrian researchers who studied during the Hellenistic period-that is, around the same period as this text's likely composition. In addition, this work contains the first extant description of the valves of the heart, and its detailed descriptions of a cuspid valve and the chordae tendineae have led several scholars to imagine that this text even contains evidence of either a systematic dissection of an animal heart or-what seems impossible outside of Alexandria, Egypt at that time-evidence of the dissection of a human heart.This article intends to provide a full commentary on the text by consolidating, and in some cases correcting, previous interpretive attempts to understand an often referenced, and at times misinterpreted, ancient medical treatise.

John A. Ryle was Britain's first professor of Social Medicine. In the 1930s and 1940s, at the peak of his influence, he was a vigorous proponent of social medicine, then a relatively new, if contested, field. This article examines Ryle's views and activities under three broad headings: What was social medicine? What were Ryle's politics? Why prioritise medical education? We conclude with the apparent failure of the social medicine project, at least as envisioned by Ryle.