Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences最新文献

The remand prison of the East German Ministry of State Security in Berlin-Hohenschönhausen was the central prison of the East German secret service. It was mainly used for the investigation of political offences. In 1960, a hospital was established in the remand prison, whose doctors, according to former inmates, abused their medical authority in the interests of the secret service. While the broader history of the prison and its investigative practices have been well researched, the medical care of prisoners remains largely unexplored. Based on a systematic analysis of prisoners' personal files and other archival sources, this paper examines the role and function of the prison hospital between 1960 and 1989. We argue that the hospital functioned primarily as a disciplinary institution, serving the interests of the secret service rather than the welfare of sick prisoners. The article also considers the role of prison doctors, caught between medical ethics and political loyalty, and examines the mechanisms of prisoner discipline. The findings suggest that the hospital in Berlin-Hohenschönhausen was part of the apparatus of political persecution.

Although Depo-Provera is best known as an injectable hormonal contraceptive, the drug also served as a method of menstrual suppression for institutionalized women with intellectual disabilities in the late twentieth-century United States, even after the Food and Drug Administration refused to license it for this purpose. To understand how institutionalized women came to be injected with Depo-Provera in the 1980s, this article investigates the controversy at A School for Me, a Navajo-run institution that came under fire during a 1987 congressional hearing for administering Depo-Provera to its residents. Beyond its utility as a contraceptive, many physicians and institutional administrators saw Depo-Provera as a treatment for menstrual anxiety, a reprieve for care workers, a non-surgical substitute for sterilization, and a delayer of puberty for women with intellectual disabilities. These perceived benefits explain why some physicians and administrators championed routine injections of Depo-Provera in institutional settings, despite public backlash and concerns about the drug's potential to cause cancer. Framing Depo-Provera as a form of care enabled it to be deployed as a form of control over these women's menstruation and their bodyminds.

Although Depo-Provera is best known as an injectable hormonal contraceptive, the drug also served as a method of menstrual suppression for institutionalized women with intellectual disabilities in the late twentieth-century United States, even after the Food and Drug Administration refused to license it for this purpose. To understand how institutionalized women came to be injected with Depo-Provera in the 1980s, this article investigates the controversy at A School for Me, a Navajo-run institution that came under fire during a 1987 congressional hearing for administering Depo-Provera to its residents. Beyond its utility as a contraceptive, many physicians and institutional administrators saw Depo-Provera as a treatment for menstrual anxiety, a reprieve for care workers, a non-surgical substitute for sterilization, and a delayer of puberty for women with intellectual disabilities. These perceived benefits explain why some physicians and administrators championed routine injections of Depo-Provera in institutional settings, despite public backlash and concerns about the drug's potential to cause cancer. Framing Depo-Provera as a form of care enabled it to be deployed as a form of control over these women's menstruation and their bodyminds. Editor's Note: This article received the American Association for the History of Medicine 2025 Shryock Medal, an award for an outstanding, unpublished essay by a single author graduate student on any topic in the history of medicine.

In the standard story of the rise of professional authority in medicine in the 1920s, state medical licensing boards were partners in a coalition, led by the American Medical Association, to radically improve medical education. Boards obtained state laws that limited admission to licensing examinations to graduates of schools approved by the AMA, thus bringing about the rapid demise of low-quality schools by about 1925. The reality at the state level was quite different, however. Medical examining boards containing homeopaths, eclectics, and sometimes osteopaths could be far from reliable partners. Passing laws to benefit the medical profession was exceedingly difficult and dependent on local medical politics. Through the lens of a major medical diploma mill scandal revealed by a journalist in 1923, this paper examines reform efforts in three states greatly affected by the scandal: Missouri, where the scandal originated, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. In each of these states, graduates of low-quality schools as well as fake doctors from diploma mills were able to take a state examination and practice. This paper argues that the AMA, far from being the major player in the elimination of inadequate schools, could set standards but had to stay on the sidelines.

At the end of the nineteenth century, the advent of x-ray machines fueled American medicine's reliance on technology, transforming hospitals and the medical profession. X-ray manufacturers pursued the nascent hospital market as competition and patent feuds accelerated x-ray machine modifications. Hospitals incorporated clunky new machines and employed x-ray photographers, but as the unruly apparatus stabilized, physicians joining the new specialty of radiology discounted the toils of machine troubleshooting and promoted their medically qualified x-ray interpretations. This article frames early medical radiography in terms of boundary work, highlighting how discourse among physicians, x-ray photographers, and hospital administrators vied to establish a privileged demarcation between radiological science and photographic craft. Ultimately, radiologists supplanted x-ray photographers by leveraging the automation of x-ray machines and capitalizing on the epistemic shift from photographic objectivity to qualified interpretations. By focusing on this overlooked aspect of x-ray incorporation into hospitals, this work provides a unique perspective on how harnessing mechanization and authoritative medical interpretations can shift professional boundaries.

The emergence of the neurosurgical patient as a novel clinical entity in the Netherlands was marked by a lingering conflict between neurologists and neurosurgeons, in which both types of specialists sought to assume the clinical and institutional leadership of neurosurgical patient care. In the 1920s and 1930s, neurologists had facilitated the establishment of the first generation of neurosurgeons in the country, and in the process, had managed to clinically and institutionally subordinate neurosurgery to neurology. As the demand for neurosurgical patient care grew, the neurosurgeons began to challenge this hegemonic relationship. The neurologists, however, were unwilling to give up their control, fearing that they would be bypassed in the diagnosis of patients eligible to neurosurgery. These conflicting aims and interests resulted in an intricate demarcation battle, in which the boundary work between neurologists and neurosurgeons was directly played out at the local workplace and at the meetings of the Study Club for Neuro-Surgery, and indirectly at various other sites of contestation, such as medical journals and academic lecture halls, as both parties sought to rally external stakeholders to their cause. During these negotiations, local, national, and international forces increasingly intertwined to shape the particular organization of Dutch neurosurgery in the middle of the twentieth century. By analyzing this multilayered demarcation process, this article draws attention to the complexity of medical boundary work, and to the way in which, despite pervasive international influences, specialist practice was ultimately negotiated at the local and national levels.

The American Association for the History of Medicine endeavors to represent the entire field and all those interested in the subject. Over time, its core membership has shifted from mostly amateur clinician historians to professionals with a PhD, resulting in a corresponding change in content and culture. In an effort to foster interest among both younger clinicians and historians, the organization sponsors multiple essay contests. Tracking the number of winners who ultimately publish their essays, where such publications reside, from which institutions they herald, and how long they remain members reveals that medical students are by far the least likely to publish and almost never retain their membership. Graduate students in history and early career scholars are far more likely to publish their work and remain a part of the organization. This paper proposes several strategies to try to recruit and retain more amateur clinician-historians.

This article examines how American physical culture entrepreneurs between 1880 and 1918 transformed ideas of health and success by merging commercial ambition with claims to scientific authority. Figures such as Eugen Sandow, Bernarr Macfadden, and Alan Calvert redefined bodily achievement through measurement, photography, and visible transformation, translating market-based ideals of progress and self-mastery into corporeal form. These frameworks privileged the disciplined White male body as both moral exemplar and racial ideal. Drawing on magazines including Physical Culture and Strength, as well as reader testimonials and transformation photographs, the article traces how entrepreneurs constructed what I term a "physical culture treadmill," a cycle of perpetual self-improvement that demanded ongoing investment in new products, routines, and expert advice. By promising quantifiable results rather than medical treatment, physical culturists positioned themselves within the contested medical marketplace, asserting a commercial-scientific authority that rivalled professional medicine. In doing so, they embedded capitalist logic into everyday health practices and reimagined success as a visible, measurable state of being. The article contributes to histories of medicine and fitness by showing how these early entrepreneurs established enduring templates for today's fitness culture, where transformation, quantification, and personal responsibility remain the dominant markers of bodily success.

During the Great Plague of Marseille (1720-1722), several prints of a masked plague doctor appeared that feature the name of François Chicoyneau, the then-chancellor of the medical faculty at the University of Montpellier who was sent to the afflicted city to report on the situation to the Royal Court. These images became a famous visual symbol of the epidemic, but their meaning and significance have not yet been examined in the context of their connection with Chicoyneau. This article provides that context, noting that Chicoyneau opposed any form of protective equipment. His views on the nature of the epidemic encountered much resistance, but his elevated position and connections gave his opinions significant weight and dissuaded contemporaries from challenging him directly. These prints were intended, therefore, to ridicule Chicoyneau rather than to document actual worn outfits. This analysis challenges the assumption that full-body outfits, including beak masks, were commonly used as protection against the plague in history; the equipment was considered as risible then as it is now.

This article explores framings of life, death, health, and invasion on an English chalk stream. It focuses on the ways in which these notions have been put to work in recent history, in relation to each other, and in relation to particular species and spaces. By 2019, narratives of a chalk stream in South-East England as a dead river expanded beyond retort to intermittent waterlessness. The river's death came to be framed as part of a wider ecology of chalk stream (ill)health, influenced by twenty-first century biodiversity conservation narratives and hauntological effects, which rendered deathly chalk stream futures present and requiring of human-action now. These narratives and effects conditioned a powerful sense of which non-human life belonged and counted, and which non-human life did not. Absent flagship chalk stream species, water voles, and efforts to resurrect them, were made synonymous with restoring the river itself to life and health. Contrarily, the ongoing presence of "invasive" American mink served as a continued reminder of the river's demise and death as a chalk stream. The resurrection of chalk streams to health relied on their being dispatched. Once considered to belong as extracted "lively capital" dominating the fur industry and later tolerated as feral escapees in the wild of the UK, American mink had been resituated and their history progressively obscured. Humans became manager-come-saviors of chalk streams, whose lost health was agreed and rendered visible through the ghostly image of the water vole that must be saved from the invasive foe, American mink.