Social History of Medicine最新文献

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.

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.

Using a historical case study of the World Bank and World Health Organization (WHO)'s Onchocerciasis Control Programme (OCP, 1972-2002), I explore how success is conceptualised in global health and why it matters for policy and priority-setting. First, I summarise the 'dominant' OCP success narrative that has emerged since the 1980s, which is based on public health, socio-economic and humanitarian justifications for the programme's effectiveness. Next, I analyse how socio-economic metrics linking the programme's disease control to increased labour productivity and agricultural land availability evolved in the 1980-90s. This alternative analysis of the OCP demonstrates how metrics, particularly when divorced from their assumptions and political context, are pliable and constructible. I argue that the OCP's success was actively constructed by the World Bank and that moving beyond triumphalist, programme-level 'lessons-learned' approaches within global health requires disruption of the epistemic, institutional and discursive power that 'lies beneath' success narratives.

This article presents two case studies of Scottish midwives, Mrs Laidlaw from Edinburgh and Mrs Alexander from Aberdeen who used newspaper advertising to promote their establishments. Primarily providing for women wishing to conceal their pregnancies and find alternative provisions for their children, the two providers marketed the discreet nature of their practice. Together their stories contradict the dominant strands of historiography on early nineteenth-century midwifery focussed either on its increasingly professionalised and masculinised nature or its rootedness in community practice, largely resistant to commodification. Instead, this article centres on female care and bodyworkers who found opportunities for entrepreneurship in the commercialised care sector. Through focussing on the services offered and their clandestine nature, it elucidates the experiences of lying-in of unmarried mothers of means. Highlighting the midwives' ability to adapt to the socio-cultural fabric of motherhood, it contributes to the histories of female entrepreneurship and its many forms within the care sector.

Most commentators have argued that the 'curious' tale of Epizelus is the first historical example of anxiety-related combat trauma. While the capacity to experience combat-related trauma is universal across human societies, focussing on whether Epizelus can be diagnosed with a specific contemporary traumatic condition is presentist and misguided. Instead of engaging in disputes about diagnosis, historians are better placed providing a close reading and dissection of the source material informed by historical and cultural historiography, raising new questions and offering a synthesis and analysis that can then be used responsibly by medical scholars. By doing so, the Epizelus episode can be recontextualised as an epiphany of a god: a story with deep meaning for the Athenians by the time that Herodotus was writing in the late fifth-century BC.

This article presents how acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) vaccine research was coordinated internationally between 1990 and 1995 by creating a special unit within the World Health Organization (WHO), the AIDS Vaccine Development (VAD) unit. This WHO's international coordination constituted a paradoxical repoliticisation of international human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) research, as it centralised scattered, privatised and sometimes hidden research within a single international organisation, while also reinscribing research in southern countries into ambivalent, postcolonial power relations by means of humanist arguments and research cohorts of military subjects. This history is important because the WHO coordination appears to have unwillingly elided the sociopolitical conditions of possibility for experimentation that were also, in part, driving the explosion of HIV infection on the continent at that time. Finally, it helps reflect on how the current global health paradigm of accelerated research for innovations and vaccine development can institute uneven research infrastructures.

The child welfare exhibitions in Delhi, held for the first time in 1920, and then from 1924 to 1932, aimed at educating mothers to look properly after their children hoping to reduce illness and mortality. These exhibitions are to be understood against two broad trends. One is a worldwide interest regarding maternal and infant mortality and a greater awareness regarding the relevance of hygiene and sanitation. The other is the set of particular concerns in India and Delhi. There was a shift in policy and language between the end of the decade of 1910 and the beginning of the decade of 1920, when sanitation acquired a new meaning which included not only drainage works or cleaning of streets, but also hygiene lessons and inspection at schools; when there was talk about public health, and greater emphasis on the role of the 'Indian public' and 'social service' in the colonial discourse.

This article traces the rise in popularity of condom usage during the 1980s HIV/AIDS epidemic in Australia's most conservative state, Queensland. This research demonstrates the efficacy of grassroots activism and organisation in promoting condom use as a life-saving measure, despite government inaction. Centring the role of the condom, this article is the first history of policy surrounding condoms in 1980s Queensland, illustrating the moral and social anxieties that coalesced at state level around the condom, which came into conflict with federal, medical, community and (particularly notably) religious perspectives. With AIDS, the condom itself became a site of acute anxiety in that it simultaneously represented a medical act of prevention and a socially fraught sexual risk. Acceptance of the condom was fostered through educational campaigns by and for targeted communities and in direct opposition to abstinence advocacy espoused by the state government.

This article contains an analysis of the use and abandonment of bloodletting in Sweden 1820-1900. Close readings of over 8,000 yearly reports by Swedish provincial doctors and popular medical handbooks, journals and notes from medical societies have been used, as well as key word searches meant to illustrate overarching tendencies. One result is that quantitative balance between humours was not an aim of therapeutic bleeding in this context. Rather, bloodletting was mainly used to reinstate regular flows in a hydraulic model of the body. It is argued that a shift from focusing on smooth flows to seeing bleeding as blood loss marked a transformation of the medical imagination from working with an 'open', malleable body to a 'closed', fixed body. This helps explain why therapeutic bleeding, for millennia the most important practice in medical practitioners' arsenal, was silently abandoned decades before the breakthrough of bacteriology and scientific medicine.