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

When asked why nearly all doctors refer their breech cases to surgery, despite non-surgical breech birth being permitted throughout the United States, an obstetrician will likely cite the Term Breech Trial (TBT). This study, conducted in 2000, decisively concluded that planned cesarean delivery is safer than vaginal breech delivery. However, a review of the literature suggests that the decline of vaginal breech deliveries was a long time in the making. From the 1950s, once the perceived risks of breech births were accepted as a fact, numerous studies advocated more liberal use of cesarean delivery for breech babies and suggested strategies to limit vaginal breech births. By the late 1970s, as the majority of breech patients underwent surgery, a vicious cycle of collective forgetting began. Hospitals and medical training programs abandoned the non-surgical option, leaving younger generations of unskilled doctors reluctant to perform the complex procedure. As health organizations criticized the overuse of cesarean sections in the ensuing decades, obstetricians faced a growing dilemma in breech management, continuing to perform surgeries even while questioning their benefits. The 2000 study sanctioned this existing state of practice, which had been evolving over decades and in which collective forgetting played a crucial part.

From the 1830s onward, Euro-American medicine began addressing opium addiction among the Chinese population. Drawing upon records from medical missionaries, medical journals, and related Chinese sources, this article examines the transformation of opium addiction treatment in late Qing China (1830-1910). Despite their pioneering efforts, medical missionaries encountered various challenges in gaining cooperation from patients and Chinese authorities. In contrast, Chinese medical practitioners, particularly elite scholar-physicians, enjoyed favor with the Qing government throughout much of the nineteenth century. By the turn of the twentieth century, the scientific knowledge introduced by the missionaries had gained greater acceptance in the country. By creatively translating this knowledge, Chinese medical practitioners began to recognize new theories for addressing the opium problem.

This paper provides a case study of one medical experiment conducted in 1915 by the United States Public Health Service in collaboration with the Mississippi State Penitentiary. The experiment was non-therapeutic and its objective was to induce pellagra (a vitamin deficiency disease) in twelve healthy White male prisoners to confirm its etiology. Extant archival records produced by the convict participants, state politicians, and health researchers underscore that the men selected for the pellagra experiment were unique among incarcerated people in Mississippi at the time: they were White, wealthy, and politically well-connected. This paper contends that the convict participants leveraged a wide range of social and political connections to secure their participation in the pellagra experiment as an expeditious pathway to pre-arranged executive pardon, a phenomenon that I term medical clemency. By situating the 1915 pellagra prison experiment amid the broader landscape of incarceration, public health research, and systems of political patronage in Mississippi, this paper highlights the ways in which penal systems are embedded in broader social and political contexts. Not only did the experiment exacerbate pre-existing social inequalities behind bars, it also had lasting consequences for those involved in prison medical research - namely, the power to determine which kinds of convicts could ultimately re-enter the social order.

In the 1930s, a series of bubonic plague outbreaks among humans cropped up in several villages at the border of Angola and Namibia. These outbreaks provoked deep concern, laying bare social and political tensions amongst neighboring imperial powers and Indigenous people within the region. Despite the appearance of this disease in what was then considered a recondite place, its spread sparked debate in transnational forums, such as the League of Nations and the Office International d'Hygiène Publique. Drawing upon archival records in Namibia, South Africa, Portugal, the United States, and the United Kingdom, this article argues that concerns over the spread of plague across land borders led to the development of a nascent invasive species framework which indicted border-crossing "migrant" South African gerbils for the international spread of the disease. It follows the transnational political and scientific dynamics created by the plague "invasion" and discusses how these, like the gerbils, crossed numerous borders and scales. Ultimately, this article shows how localized inter-species and inter-imperial encounters can provide empirical insights into the feasibilities of a micro-global history of science in which more-than-human actors take on an important role.

While most are aware of the Tuskegee syphilis experiments in which African American syphilis patients went untreated, less is known about experiments with malaria fever therapy conducted upon syphilis patients during the same period by the Unites States Public Health Service at the Williams Laboratory on the grounds of the South Carolina State Hospital (SCSH) in Columbia, SC. Over a twenty-year period, physicians maintained patients as malaria reservoirs for patient-to-patient inoculation and subjected patients to extreme fevers and thousands upon thousands of insect bites as part of a program in which one disease was tested as therapy for another. Using extant administrative files, medical journals from the period, and a database created from SCSH annual reports, this paper considers the ethics of malaria fever therapy experiments while exposing the conditions under which patients suffered the intersecting oppressions of race, class, and mental illness. It illuminates the prevalent scientific racism of the period that enabled pseudo-medical assumptions about African Americans' perceived penchant for poverty, deviant sex, and pain tolerance, which combined to enable a culture of experimentation that influenced events at Stateville Penitentiary and continued long after penicillin became widely available.

This essay uses the unpublished casebook kept by the Tuscan surgeon Giovanbattista Nardi to examine the provision of urgent medical care in sixteenth-century Italian hospitals. Most major hospitals on the peninsula maintained separate therapeutic spaces known as medicherie for this purpose. Written in the 1580s while Nardi worked as a staff surgeon at a Florentine civic hospital, this rare surgical casebook provides insight into the types of institutional resources devoted to acute medical problems; the clientele seeking immediate assistance and the situations that brought them there; the treatments used to achieve short-term "cures"; and the clinical experiences of hospital surgeons who served as frontline healers. A close analysis of the seventy-nine cases recorded sheds new light on everyday surgical treatments for conditions ranging from serious head injuries requiring trephination to syphilitic lesions and genital trauma. Casebook entries also reveal Nardi's deep engagement with the composition and use of topical remedies as both practitioner and experimenter. Intended as a memory aid for future reference, the casebook shows material traces of the author's shifting occupational identity as he matured from hospital surgeon to university-trained physician. Viewed through multiple lenses, this richly layered source expands our understanding of both the practice and profession of early modern surgery.

This article analyses how the French Academy of Sciences assessed Jaime Ferrán's cholera vaccine submitted for the Prix Bréant in the 1880s. Ferrán, a Spanish independent physician, discovered the treatment in 1884 and tried it on thousands of patients during the cholera outbreak in Valencia the following year. His evaluation sparked a controversy in Spain and abroad on the vaccine's efficacy. The Bréant jury did not see any evidence for it in Ferrán's submission, a decision usually interpreted in terms of French scientific nationalism (or simple chauvinism): an outsider from the scientific periphery could not be awarded the Bréant. Drawing on the archival records of the award, we suggest that Ferrán failed instead to provide data that the Academy could consider unbiased, according to the contemporary standards for data presentation. We will illustrate these standards at work in the assessment of another submission from Spain, by Philip Hauser, who received the Bréant for the thoroughness of his statistical endeavour.

Colonial officials remarked disparagingly about the nature of houses and what they presented as congested layouts in Gold Coast communities. Subsequently, drawing on nineteenth-century epidemiological theory that connected diseases and poor health to defective housing and congested settlements, the colonial administration introduced measures to redesign and reorder Gold Coast communities. This article examines the connection between colonial town planning and housing measures and the politics of sanitation and public health in the Gold Coast. It argues that the colonial state's imposition of imported British town planning measures, building techniques, and housing styles in the Gold Coast and their aspiration to compel Gold Coast people to build and pattern their communities along so-called sanitary lines could not be fully realised. Thus, the extent to which colonial town planning and the accompanying transformations in African building styles improved sanitation and consequently, public health, is difficult to determine. Nonetheless, this study reveals that the local population's holistic approaches to spatial designing and planning of their communities and their building styles were somewhat altered by the colonial imposition of eurocentric town planning policies and building styles.

Whether referring to oceanic travel on board of ships or to movement in terra firma, framings of the "migratory rat" formed a key epidemiological component of approaches to the Third Plague Pandemic (1894-1959) as the first pandemic to be understood as caused by a zoonotic disease. In this article, I examine the emergence and development of scientific framings of the migratory rat in the first, explosive years of the third plague pandemic in India (1896-1899). Examining publications and archival sources, I ask how this animal figure came to inform and transform epidemiological reasoning. Going beyond established approaches that have shown how the rat-plague relation was mobilised by colonial doctors to pathologise Indigenous lifeways, I argue that more complex and ambivalent processes were also set in motion by this figure. First, I show how the migratory rat became invested with attributes of invasiveness that assumed ontological qualities in colonial epidemiological reasoning. Second, comparing the migratory rat with the hitherto established "staggering rat," I argue that the former embodied new approaches to both space and time in epidemiology. Third, I show how Indigenous scientists came to mobilise this complex figure to contest colonial approaches to plague.

The papers in this special issue explore the metaphorical realms that inform discourses on disruptive plants and animals. They explore how species movements in the twentieth century were framed and interpreted, and the medical, scientific, legal, and bureaucratic processes that turned a non-native or mobile species into a formally designated "invasive" one. In doing so, they allow insight into the mechanisms of disavowal, how some species were constructed as the cause of disease and ecological change, while others escaped censure.