Social History of Medicine最新文献

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.

In August 1920, Dr Lysander Maybury began a course of weekly injections into the longitudinal sinus of newborn Leslie Shewry. Although Maybury told Leslie's parents that he would be giving their son injections, he did not tell them that he had diagnosed congenital syphilis. The precise nature of Leslie's treatment was also unknown to his parents until many years later when they brought a case for damages against Maybury. They alleged that he had wrongly diagnosed and unnecessarily and improperly treated their son, leaving him permanently disabled. Furthermore, they alleged that he lacked the necessary skills and training to perform such delicate injections and that he was negligent in persisting with treatment when he knew that Leslie suffered convulsions after each injection. Shewry v. Maybury is a microhistory in which the intimate disruptions wrought by one man reveal a great deal about the nature and consequences of medical negligence in interwar Britain.

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.

This article explores a colonial sanitation programme in Nigeria during the interwar period: the training and employment of Africans as sanitary inspectors to improve public health. From the early 1930-45, local health inspectors trained to educate the African public on modern hygiene principles emerged in a society where poverty made people pursue their changing personal interests in ways that challenged colonial laws and deviated from ethical standards governing behaviour in African society. In this landscape, some African sanitary inspectors and local chiefs articulated other meanings to the colonial hygiene project. Beyond the conventional racial analysis of colonial health, the article critiques the agentive role of local rulers and sanitary inspectors who shaped the health intervention. It concludes that by 1945, the well-intentioned programme had developed complications expected in an environment of budget restraint and economic hardship, transforming Yoruba towns into sites of power struggle between sanitary inspectors and the people.

The relationship between mortality and socioeconomic status is among the most debated topics within historical demography. This article scrutinises social disparities in infant mortality and its underlying mechanisms in mid-nineteenth-century Amsterdam. We apply two methods of survival analysis (Cox proportional hazard models and Fine-Grey competing risk models) on newly digitised individual-level cause-of-death data for infants born in 1856 combined with civil certificates and population register data. Through a comparison of all-cause and cause-specific mortality, we bring to light important social differences in infants' mortality risks; hazard ratios for congenital and birth disorders during early post-neonatal infancy were over 50 per cent lower for Amsterdam's middle class than for unskilled workers. We argue that the social differentiation in infant mortality reflects stark intra-urban disparities in maternal health across social groups as well as a degree of medical ineffectiveness or even indifference structured along the same socioeconomic lines.