Social History of Medicine最新文献

This study examines the United Nation (UN)'s efforts to provide emergency relief for civilians during the Korean War, one of the deadliest and most devastating conflicts for civilians since World War II. The UN coordinated civilian relief during and after the war, developing a logistical system, legal framework and payment mechanism through UK banks in pounds sterling, and a distribution strategy based on European experience. United Nations Korean Reconstruction Agency (UNKRA) managed financial and legal issues, determined packing and shipping methods, resolved storage problems and distributed medical supplies in the field, either through United Nations Civil Assistance Corps Korea or UNKRA. The UN's efforts to provide civilian medical assistance to Korea set an exemplary model for later relief efforts and this study shows how this holistic system was created on the basis of experience gained during World War II and the creation of entirely new mechanisms for purchasing and delivering medical aid.

In this paper, I reassess the Meiji period (1868-1912) Japanese public health and Indigenous management policies, focussing on the Karafuto Ainu in Tsuishikari, Hokkaido. Utilising Indigenised public health frameworks, I argue that colonial policies, including forced migration, sedentarisation and paternalistic management, were significant aetiological causes of disease in Ainu communities. This approach allows us to challenge received historiographical understandings of Ainu health, which often characterise the Ainu as having been disproportionately impacted by epidemic disease because they collectively possessed 'no immunity' to numerous contagions and/or an understanding of 'hygiene'. The latter especially reflects the views of colonial hygiene inspectors who visited Tsuishikari. Pathologising Ainu culture and domestic life, Japanese officials aimed to 'cure' the Ainu of their many afflictions through zero-sum assimilation measures. However, by disavowing the material impact of colonisation on Ainu health and wellbeing, this served only to further entrench those policies which rendered Tsuishikari residents vulnerable to the spread of epidemic disease.

The paper traces the evolution of the public health measures taken by the Greek state for its protection from the spread of epidemic diseases, particularly plague and cholera, from abroad, and the development of the network of health authorities during the nineteenth century. In the article, use is made for the first time of the whole of the public health legislation of the Greek state during the period 1821-1909 (more than 1,700 laws, decrees, and circulars) on its protection from the spread of epidemic diseases. In contrast with the meagre accounts in the international bibliography, which represents the public health policy of the Greek state as having been fixed, unchanging, and centred simply on the use of quarantine as a protective measure, this study draws attention to the active, constantly changing, and dynamic policy which was followed during the nineteenth century.

By offering an organic reading of the tenth-century medical miscellany BnF, Lat. 7028, this article questions assumptions about the erratic and rudimentary nature of early medieval medicine, highlighting the compiler's purposeful selection and manipulation of contents. Following the tenets of the ancient sect of Rationalists, as described in Celsus' De medicina, the compiler gathered a consistent yet non-linear compendium, blending texts about the mythological Greek origins of medicine, anatomical parts, natural philosophy and different sets of therapeutical options, encompassing regimen, medications, and surgery. The Greek-Latin monk Johannes Philagathos is arguably the intellectual author of this eclectic miscellany, which he assembled thanks to networks of people and books that circulated between Byzantine and Ottonian areas. While preserving ancient and late antique medical traditions and visual models, this manuscript witnessed the reception of medicinal drugs from eastern lands and their inclusion in recipes, a few centuries before the flourishing of the School of Salerno.

This article investigates how a medical non-governmental organisation Médecins sans frontières (MSF) developed and promoted the treatment of Hepatitis C (HCV) in Cambodia. This article is based on an operational archive collected in real time within the MSF mission which was completed with repeated oral history interviews over a period of 5 years across the history of the humanitarian 'mission' between 2016 and 2021. This archive and a historical account produced synchronously revealed the evolution of the role of humanitarian organisations in setting the medical agenda regarding the development of a nation's health priorities. The article argues that such a campaign represents a new development for the history of humanitarian medicine. As an experimental historical project, we aimed to capture how a humanitarian organisation defined its intervention as a 'proof of concept' and developed a public health campaign from a vertical approach reliant on new and very effective treatments.

India figured prominently in the women's medical movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was both a cause-bringing medical aid to Indian women-and a career-offering employment opportunities to qualified British women doctors. Where most studies have focussed on the early years of the movement in India and the creation of the Dufferin Fund in 1885, this article explores the careers, attitudes and experiences of a second generation of white women doctors, from the outbreak of bubonic plague in 1896 to the end of the First World War. As an exercise in imperial careering, it charts the parallels and connections between women doctors in India and Britain but also assesses the obstacles to the pursuit of medical careers in India and the factors, personal, political and professional, that by 1920 were driving women's medicine in metropole and empire further apart.

This essay conducts a close examination of manuscripts of English provenance from the late Middle Ages which, while predominantly medical in nature, also contain non-medical charms and experimenta. It considers how these manuscripts might provide evidence for a particular type of medical practice, one which was founded in text-based learning, but which also sought to address the non-medical concerns and anxieties of medieval patients through the application of charms and experimenta not exclusively related to healing. This enables a more detailed picture to be drawn of medical practice in the Middle Ages but, more specifically, of medical practice within a particular stratum of society, whereby patients or clients may have looked to engage the services of a practitioner whose literacy and text-based knowledge afforded him status, but who also addressed issues that were perhaps more commonly treated by humbler diviners and healers.

The Ottoman Empire instituted state-sponsored inspection and registration of the dead in the early nineteenth century. For the first time, medical professionals known as tabib were hired to investigate the causes of deaths within Istanbul's perimeters. This initial surveillance effort in 1838-39 created the city's first two death registers, comprising 9,500 individual cases in total. In the light of these records, the current study investigates the surveillance of death and disease in the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire by situating it within the global context of registering the dead, examining the first Ottoman regulations to detail the procedures concerning the registration process and identifying the professionals engaged therein. Since the primary concern of the present study is an investigation of the administration of the dead and medical surveillance, we emphasise the discrepancies observed in the registration process and scrutinise both the medical categories used and the registering physicians' professional backgrounds.

In 1968, the barrier of marital status was removed from oral contraception. This meant that for the first time, unmarried women could legally access contraception for both social and medical reasons. As a biomedical drug, the pill required women to engage more frequently with the medical profession, purportedly redefining the patient-practitioner dynamic. However, despite the removal of legislative barriers to family planning services, societal attitudes towards the use of the pill by unmarried women continued to regulate individual behaviours and restrict their contraceptive choices. This was heightened in Scotland, which lagged behind the rest of mainland Britain in implementing family planning services. Using oral testimony, coupled with archival evidence, this article traces the implementation of family planning services by the Scottish state. It then examines unmarried women's early experiences of accessing the pill, and the impact of societal attitudes, gender inequalities and medical hostilities on their reproductive autonomy.

This is an autobiographical history of working as a sexual health adviser in the mid-1980s, a time of significant change in UK sexual health services. There are very few first-hand accounts of health advising in the literature. Autobiography is an increasingly accepted method that uses the historian's personal experience to understand the past. My work as a health adviser comprised two distinct elements. First, I saw patients with gonorrhoea, syphilis or non-specific urethritis in the clinic, and encouraged them to inform their sexual contacts, sought information on their contacts in case they did not attend, and provided a health education intervention. If the patient defaulted, or if the contacts did not attend, I sought them in the community. The second role involved providing counselling for those undertaking testing for HIV. My account provides unique testimony of lived experience in, and reflections on key issues concerning, 1980s UK sexual health services.