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

In the second half of the nineteenth century, scientific and technological developments in surgery permitted safer procedures to be carried out. Theoretically, therefore, children whose lives would otherwise have been blighted by disease could be saved by timely operative interference. The reality was more complicated, however, as this article shows. Through an exploration of British and American surgical textbooks and an in-depth analysis of the child surgical patient base at one London general hospital, the tensions between the possibilities and the actualities of surgery on children can be examined for the first time. Hearing the child's voice through case notes allows both a restoration of these complex patients to the history of medicine and a questioning of the wider application of science and technology to working-class bodies, situations, and environments which resist such treatment.

This paper examines the creation and development of an international social network between physiologists in Denmark and the United States in the period 1907-1939. At the center of the network was the Danish physiologist and 1920 Nobel Laureate August Krogh and his Zoophysiological Laboratory at the University of Copenhagen. In total, sixteen Americans were visiting researchers at the Zoophysiological Laboratory until 1939, and more than half of them were at some point in their career affiliated with Harvard University. For many of them, their visit would be the start of a long-term connection with Krogh and the broader network. This paper shows how the American visitors, Krogh, and the Zoophysiological Laboratory benefitted from being part of this network of top researchers in physiology and medicine. The visits themselves provided the Zoophysiological Laboratory with intellectual stimulus and more manpower for its research, while the American visitors received training and developed research ideas. Beyond the visits, the network gave the members, especially the central figures such as August Krogh, access to advice, job offers, funding and travel opportunities.

During the sixteenth century, Italian scholars revised their conception of the field of history so that its purposes went beyond providing political and morally edifying narratives. These scholars contended that history must also account for culture and nature in an encyclopedic fashion. In the same years, numerous newly available texts from antiquity, the Byzantine empire, and the Middle Ages provided insight into the character of earlier outbreaks of plague. Italian physicians, embracing new visions of the field of history, the culture of humanism, and an inductivist epistemology, used these texts to argue that there were continuities among ancient, medieval, and Renaissance epidemics. They catalogued plague and formed historical categories based on severity and perceived origins, leading to the rejection of the conclusions of fourteenth-century western Europeans who viewed the plague of 1347-1353 as unprecedented. These erudite physicians saw medieval plague to be one example of the extreme epidemics that have regularly occurred throughout history.

This paper examines anesthesiologist Henry K. Beecher's funding relationship with pharmaceutical manufacturer Edward Mallinckrodt, Jr. Beecher is a familiar figure to both medical ethicists and historians of medicine for his role in the bioethics revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. In particular, his 1966 article "Ethics and Clinical Research" is widely considered a turning point in the post-World War II debate about informed consent. We argue that Beecher's scientific interests should be understood in the context of his funding relationship with Mallinckrodt and that this relationship shaped the direction of his work in important ways. We also argue that Beecher's views on research ethics reflected his assumption that collaboration with industry was a normal part of how academic science is conducted. In the conclusion of the paper we suggest that Beecher's failure to consider his relationship with Mallinckrodt as worthy of ethical deliberation has important lessons for academic researchers who collaborate with industry today.

Aimed at clinical educators, this article reports on the use of a single skill-based session that introduces learners in Health Professions Education (HPE) to basic techniques from the discipline of history. The premise of the teaching method is a correspondence between medicine's social determinants of health (SDH) and categories of analysis commonly used by historians. At the center are eight categories, or "tools": social, cultural, intellectual, technological, political, economic, racial/ethnic, and gendered. Like the direct and specific implications of many diagnostic signs, each of these adjectives indicate to historians specific types of factors, or determinants. The intervention employs the demonstration-performance teaching method (explanation, demonstration, supervised practice, and evaluation). After the session, learners are able to: use "history's toolbox" as a systematic method for evaluating socio-cultural phenomena inherent in SDH; differentiate eight types of determinants in a historical case study that represents socio-cultural complexity; recognize how categorization simultaneously enhances some determinants while obscuring others, and how the use of constructed social categories in medicine can function to help and harm patients and populations. The intervention described is rooted in scholarship and theoretical questions belonging to the discipline of history, but these are not discussed. Neither the historical content nor the teaching method described here is appropriate for research or teaching in the discipline of history.

Drawing on my experience working as a postdoctoral research and engagement fellow on the Wellcome Trust-funded project, Surgery & Emotion, this article reflects on this innovative model of historical research and professional engagement, explores the challenges posed by crossing disciplinary boundaries, and interrogates the practical and theoretical utility of bringing historical research into the operating theatre. How do surgeons specifically engage with the history of their profession? What can the history of emotions offer to the training of medical students and surgeons? What obstacles interfere in this type of cross-disciplinary engagement? What peculiar opportunities and challenges do the United Kingdom higher education system and National Health Service pose to the teaching of medical history in clinical settings? Bringing Clio into the operating theatre provides surgeons with an alternative narrative to that which they have come to expect about the emotions they ought to feel and express in their work. It allows them to explore the high feelings of their professional lives at a remove and offers an array of possible solutions to the current emotional health crisis in British medicine. History allows surgeons to imagine an alternative world: one where the pervasive and persistent models of emotional detachment - damaging to both patient experience and professional wellbeing - dissolve.