Pub Date : 2024-06-12eCollection Date: 2024-08-01DOI: 10.1093/shm/hkae029
Nicola Smith
This article explores the fundamental role of Lancashire's medical voluntarism in providing restorative orthopaedic treatments to the region's First World War, disabled ex-servicemen and assisting in their return to society. It offers a case study of orthopaedic treatments and schemes of rehabilitation provided at Grangethorpe Hospital, Rusholme, between 1914 and 1918. Forming a regional comparison to existing histories of First World War disabled ex-servicemen, which focus primarily on the interwar period, this article traces continuities in pioneering medicine and examples of Lancashire-based medical individuals and institutions. In doing so, this article demonstrates how the region's response to disablement during the Industrial Revolution underpinned the construction of charities and the advancement of orthopaedic treatments required to provide rehabilitative care during the First World War. Moreover, this paper situates Lancashire and its commitment to medical voluntarism and the reconstruction of disabled ex-servicemen as a key site in the UK's history of voluntarism.
{"title":"Medical Voluntarism and Orthopaedic Advancements: Lancashire and the Disabled Ex-Servicemen of the First World War.","authors":"Nicola Smith","doi":"10.1093/shm/hkae029","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/hkae029","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article explores the fundamental role of Lancashire's medical voluntarism in providing restorative orthopaedic treatments to the region's First World War, disabled ex-servicemen and assisting in their return to society. It offers a case study of orthopaedic treatments and schemes of rehabilitation provided at Grangethorpe Hospital, Rusholme, between 1914 and 1918. Forming a regional comparison to existing histories of First World War disabled ex-servicemen, which focus primarily on the interwar period, this article traces continuities in pioneering medicine and examples of Lancashire-based medical individuals and institutions. In doing so, this article demonstrates how the region's response to disablement during the Industrial Revolution underpinned the construction of charities and the advancement of orthopaedic treatments required to provide rehabilitative care during the First World War. Moreover, this paper situates Lancashire and its commitment to medical voluntarism and the reconstruction of disabled ex-servicemen as a key site in the UK's history of voluntarism.</p>","PeriodicalId":21922,"journal":{"name":"Social History of Medicine","volume":"37 3","pages":"635-649"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2024-06-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11531405/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142576943","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Summary The colonial authorities in India had always been watchful of the drinking activities of the European soldiers and sailors, expressing concerns about their moral and physical health. The article suggests that such anxieties motivated the European population in India, particularly in its early days, to investigate the drinking practices of the local population and examine the effects of locally distilled liquor on their health and constitution. Through an analysis of a petition and a Commission report, the paper explores a dialogue between a group of European distillers and the Fort William Medical Board in early nineteenth-century Calcutta, focussing on the topics of drinking and health. The article argues that these early interrogations on the local drink not just reinforced the racial stereotypes concerning taste and technology but also consolidated the idea of the ‘tropic’ that continued to inform Anglo-Indian medical discourses in subsequent years.
{"title":"Interrogating ‘Parriah Arrack’: Anxieties Over Health, Race and Drinking in Early Colonial Calcutta","authors":"Sarbajit Mitra","doi":"10.1093/shm/hkae027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/hkae027","url":null,"abstract":"Summary The colonial authorities in India had always been watchful of the drinking activities of the European soldiers and sailors, expressing concerns about their moral and physical health. The article suggests that such anxieties motivated the European population in India, particularly in its early days, to investigate the drinking practices of the local population and examine the effects of locally distilled liquor on their health and constitution. Through an analysis of a petition and a Commission report, the paper explores a dialogue between a group of European distillers and the Fort William Medical Board in early nineteenth-century Calcutta, focussing on the topics of drinking and health. The article argues that these early interrogations on the local drink not just reinforced the racial stereotypes concerning taste and technology but also consolidated the idea of the ‘tropic’ that continued to inform Anglo-Indian medical discourses in subsequent years.","PeriodicalId":21922,"journal":{"name":"Social History of Medicine","volume":"51 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-05-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141190544","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Summary This article examines moral therapy in relation to writing by fee-paying ‘lunatic’ asylum patients from the upper and middle classes. Their work was published in a nineteenth-century monthly periodical, The Morningside Mirror. There is an intersection of the periodical with status and the interests of gentlemanly values. Despite their psychopathological diagnoses, which included melancholia, writers for the Mirror retained their human capacity to share poignant insights into love and social injustice. Edinburgh’s reputation as a cultural and scientific centre of learning provided opportunities for the asylum to market itself as an iconic sanctuary that could maintain the materially privileged lifestyles of patients. The Morningside Mirror offered creative activity, self-esteem maintenance and public recognition. It connected the Asylum to the society outside. The expression of logic as reflective of the repair of reason signalled, from the viewpoint of psychological medicine, the Mirror’s therapeutic impact and utility to project reputation.
{"title":"Educative Psychological Treatment at Edinburgh’s Royal Asylum: Unfolding The Morningside Mirror, 1845–1882","authors":"Christopher Holligan","doi":"10.1093/shm/hkae022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/hkae022","url":null,"abstract":"Summary This article examines moral therapy in relation to writing by fee-paying ‘lunatic’ asylum patients from the upper and middle classes. Their work was published in a nineteenth-century monthly periodical, The Morningside Mirror. There is an intersection of the periodical with status and the interests of gentlemanly values. Despite their psychopathological diagnoses, which included melancholia, writers for the Mirror retained their human capacity to share poignant insights into love and social injustice. Edinburgh’s reputation as a cultural and scientific centre of learning provided opportunities for the asylum to market itself as an iconic sanctuary that could maintain the materially privileged lifestyles of patients. The Morningside Mirror offered creative activity, self-esteem maintenance and public recognition. It connected the Asylum to the society outside. The expression of logic as reflective of the repair of reason signalled, from the viewpoint of psychological medicine, the Mirror’s therapeutic impact and utility to project reputation.","PeriodicalId":21922,"journal":{"name":"Social History of Medicine","volume":"150 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-05-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140834254","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Summary This article examines the place of alcoholic patients in French psychiatry in the 1950s and 1960s, an era of incipient psychiatric reform. Relying on medical literature, national and department archives, as well as hitherto unexploited patient files from one of the first anti-alcoholic consultations opened in the early 1950s in Paris, it shows how new therapies and drugs, such as disulfiram, revived the interest of psychiatrists for alcoholism and enabled the outpatient treatment of alcoholics. However, the study of patient trajectories reveals that ambulatory care did not substitute itself for hospitalisation. The article then analyses how the psychiatrist–patient relation was transformed in the framework of the consultation, and included new stakeholders such as social workers and family members. It finally explains why therapeutic enthusiasm gave way, at the end of the 1960s, to increasing doubts concerning the role of the psychiatrist in the cure of alcoholism.
{"title":"French Psychiatry and Alcoholism in the 1950s and 1960s: The Paradoxes of Outpatient Care","authors":"Anatole Le Bras","doi":"10.1093/shm/hkae020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/hkae020","url":null,"abstract":"Summary This article examines the place of alcoholic patients in French psychiatry in the 1950s and 1960s, an era of incipient psychiatric reform. Relying on medical literature, national and department archives, as well as hitherto unexploited patient files from one of the first anti-alcoholic consultations opened in the early 1950s in Paris, it shows how new therapies and drugs, such as disulfiram, revived the interest of psychiatrists for alcoholism and enabled the outpatient treatment of alcoholics. However, the study of patient trajectories reveals that ambulatory care did not substitute itself for hospitalisation. The article then analyses how the psychiatrist–patient relation was transformed in the framework of the consultation, and included new stakeholders such as social workers and family members. It finally explains why therapeutic enthusiasm gave way, at the end of the 1960s, to increasing doubts concerning the role of the psychiatrist in the cure of alcoholism.","PeriodicalId":21922,"journal":{"name":"Social History of Medicine","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140834253","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-04-24eCollection Date: 2024-11-01DOI: 10.1093/shm/hkae018
Julie Marfany
Small local hospitals have been neglected by historians, and frequently assumed to have been marginal to their communities and largely obsolete by the eighteenth century. This paper questions such assumptions via a case study of Catalonia. It provides the first comprehensive estimates for the number of hospitals over the course of the eighteenth century, and then examines a sample of surviving accounts and other documentation to analyse the extent and nature of care provided. While the quality of care varied and most hospitals were restricted by their income, particularly against a background of war and rising prices, many nevertheless provided considerable care both to transient populations of foundlings and migrants and to their local communities. The paper calls for a re-evaluation of these forms of care in line with the re-evaluation of women's caring work.
{"title":"Marginal and Obsolete? Rural Hospitals in Early Modern Europe: A Case Study of Catalonia.","authors":"Julie Marfany","doi":"10.1093/shm/hkae018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/hkae018","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Small local hospitals have been neglected by historians, and frequently assumed to have been marginal to their communities and largely obsolete by the eighteenth century. This paper questions such assumptions via a case study of Catalonia. It provides the first comprehensive estimates for the number of hospitals over the course of the eighteenth century, and then examines a sample of surviving accounts and other documentation to analyse the extent and nature of care provided. While the quality of care varied and most hospitals were restricted by their income, particularly against a background of war and rising prices, many nevertheless provided considerable care both to transient populations of foundlings and migrants and to their local communities. The paper calls for a re-evaluation of these forms of care in line with the re-evaluation of women's caring work.</p>","PeriodicalId":21922,"journal":{"name":"Social History of Medicine","volume":"37 4","pages":"813-841"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2024-04-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11994852/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143982184","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Grégory Dufaud, Nicolas Henckes, Marianna Scarfone
Summary This introduction to this special issue devoted to mental hygiene movements in Europe examines the issues and problems facing their historical study. While the definition of mental hygiene was obvious to contemporaries, it referred to highly divergent projects in different socio-political contexts. As a result, historians have struggled to come up with a unified definition of mental hygiene as a category for analysis. After outlining historiographical responses to this question, this essay suggests that mental hygiene can best be understood as a specific way of articulating four dimensions of the psychiatric discipline, namely its organization and its relationship to the state, individuals and science. The final section provides an overview of the themes developed by the articles in this special issue.
{"title":"Psychiatry, Modernity and the Politics of the Individual: The Historical Contours of Mental Hygiene","authors":"Grégory Dufaud, Nicolas Henckes, Marianna Scarfone","doi":"10.1093/shm/hkae015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/hkae015","url":null,"abstract":"Summary This introduction to this special issue devoted to mental hygiene movements in Europe examines the issues and problems facing their historical study. While the definition of mental hygiene was obvious to contemporaries, it referred to highly divergent projects in different socio-political contexts. As a result, historians have struggled to come up with a unified definition of mental hygiene as a category for analysis. After outlining historiographical responses to this question, this essay suggests that mental hygiene can best be understood as a specific way of articulating four dimensions of the psychiatric discipline, namely its organization and its relationship to the state, individuals and science. The final section provides an overview of the themes developed by the articles in this special issue.","PeriodicalId":21922,"journal":{"name":"Social History of Medicine","volume":"43 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-04-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140628723","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Summary The question of when dogs became the recipients of veterinary care has long been debated; current scholarship does not acknowledge the long tradition of canine healthcare provided by irregular specialists prior to the late nineteenth century. This article reveals, however, that eighteenth-century Britain was home to a thriving canine medical marketplace. Among its key actors were ‘dog doctors’—individuals without formal healthcare training who regularly treated and healed dogs. This article offers the first historical account of the eighteenth-century dog doctor, contextualising and reappraising his identity, clients and services. It focusses on the dynamic career of the celebrity practitioner John Norborn, who proudly self-identified as a ‘dog doctor’ when the term was considered an insult. In doing so the article considers the conditions in which specialist care for dogs first developed and argues for a new chronology of canine veterinary medicine.
{"title":"The First Dog Doctors: Canine Healthcare Practitioners in the Eighteenth-Century Medical Marketplace","authors":"Stephanie Howard-Smith","doi":"10.1093/shm/hkae012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/hkae012","url":null,"abstract":"Summary The question of when dogs became the recipients of veterinary care has long been debated; current scholarship does not acknowledge the long tradition of canine healthcare provided by irregular specialists prior to the late nineteenth century. This article reveals, however, that eighteenth-century Britain was home to a thriving canine medical marketplace. Among its key actors were ‘dog doctors’—individuals without formal healthcare training who regularly treated and healed dogs. This article offers the first historical account of the eighteenth-century dog doctor, contextualising and reappraising his identity, clients and services. It focusses on the dynamic career of the celebrity practitioner John Norborn, who proudly self-identified as a ‘dog doctor’ when the term was considered an insult. In doing so the article considers the conditions in which specialist care for dogs first developed and argues for a new chronology of canine veterinary medicine.","PeriodicalId":21922,"journal":{"name":"Social History of Medicine","volume":"19 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-04-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140628999","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Summary The healthcare provided to expectant mothers impacts the health outcomes of the mother and infant, or infants, and reflects current social and political priorities which mirror middle-class values and leave poorer women feeling socially isolated. Utilising focus group interviews with nineteen women who were living on low-incomes in Glasgow, Scotland, when they delivered their first child between the 1970s and early 2000s, this article analyses the women’s recollections of their maternity care experiences within the changing middle-class health context. It reveals how expectant mothers remembered feeling healthcare practitioners prioritised the needs of the embryo/foetus/infant before their own. The women recalled feeling stigmatised for being pregnant and poor. While interviewees identified individual caring practitioners, overall a disconnect remained between the middle-class healthcare providers and the needs of low-income mothers. Finally, this article suggests that co-creating history with a third-sector organisation could offer a potential methodology for addressing the middle-class bias of official sources.
{"title":"On the Margins of Maternity: Low-Income Women’s Experiences of Maternity Care in Late Twentieth-Century Glasgow","authors":"Janet Greenlees","doi":"10.1093/shm/hkae011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/hkae011","url":null,"abstract":"Summary The healthcare provided to expectant mothers impacts the health outcomes of the mother and infant, or infants, and reflects current social and political priorities which mirror middle-class values and leave poorer women feeling socially isolated. Utilising focus group interviews with nineteen women who were living on low-incomes in Glasgow, Scotland, when they delivered their first child between the 1970s and early 2000s, this article analyses the women’s recollections of their maternity care experiences within the changing middle-class health context. It reveals how expectant mothers remembered feeling healthcare practitioners prioritised the needs of the embryo/foetus/infant before their own. The women recalled feeling stigmatised for being pregnant and poor. While interviewees identified individual caring practitioners, overall a disconnect remained between the middle-class healthcare providers and the needs of low-income mothers. Finally, this article suggests that co-creating history with a third-sector organisation could offer a potential methodology for addressing the middle-class bias of official sources.","PeriodicalId":21922,"journal":{"name":"Social History of Medicine","volume":"41 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-04-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140616409","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Correction.","authors":"","doi":"10.1093/shm/hkae017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/hkae017","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1093/shm/hkac052.][This corrects the article DOI: 10.1093/shm/hkab132.][This corrects the article DOI: 10.1093/shm/hkac032.].</p>","PeriodicalId":21922,"journal":{"name":"Social History of Medicine","volume":"36 4","pages":"719"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-03-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11151691/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141284829","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Janna Coomans, Léa Hermenault, Rogier van Kooten, Claire Weeda
Summary Antwerp’s response to the outbreak of plague in the 1570s offers new insights into the effects of epidemics on urban communities in relation to their religious, economic, and spatial fabric. Antwerp’s transition from a Catholic to Calvinist government in 1577, and back to Catholicism in 1585, allows us to study its reaction to and the effects of plague across religious boundaries within a short time span. Using GIS, we have compared various rich datasets concerning plague: the register of houses locked in quarantine; the health certificates issued by authorities; plague fatalities recorded in St. Jacob’s parish; a wide range of urban regulations; and information about the size of households, their composition, rents and real estate values in Antwerp. Combined analysis shows that Catholics and Protestants, whose houses were concentrated in different city districts and who had distinct professional and economic profiles, experienced plague quite differently, both physically and spiritually.
{"title":"Plague, Religion and Urban Space in Sixteenth-Century Antwerp","authors":"Janna Coomans, Léa Hermenault, Rogier van Kooten, Claire Weeda","doi":"10.1093/shm/hkad090","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/hkad090","url":null,"abstract":"Summary Antwerp’s response to the outbreak of plague in the 1570s offers new insights into the effects of epidemics on urban communities in relation to their religious, economic, and spatial fabric. Antwerp’s transition from a Catholic to Calvinist government in 1577, and back to Catholicism in 1585, allows us to study its reaction to and the effects of plague across religious boundaries within a short time span. Using GIS, we have compared various rich datasets concerning plague: the register of houses locked in quarantine; the health certificates issued by authorities; plague fatalities recorded in St. Jacob’s parish; a wide range of urban regulations; and information about the size of households, their composition, rents and real estate values in Antwerp. Combined analysis shows that Catholics and Protestants, whose houses were concentrated in different city districts and who had distinct professional and economic profiles, experienced plague quite differently, both physically and spiritually.","PeriodicalId":21922,"journal":{"name":"Social History of Medicine","volume":"15 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-03-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140149165","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}