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

This essay builds on the exciting trove of disaster social science research surfacing since the earliest days of the COVID-19 pandemic. It tracks the ways that both practitioners of medicine and public health, and their social science analogues, have approached the pandemic, explicitly considering the ways they reached for new concepts to explain the temporal phenomena presented by COVID-19 and its global course. The essay highlights a series of interviews conducted in the first two years of the pandemic as part of the COVIDCalls podcast. COVID is the moment for a scholarly convergence that was missed after September 11, and again after Hurricane Katrina, and should not be missed again. Accordingly, this essay explores themes where medicine/health studies and disaster studies seem to offer great help to one another in making sense of our COVID times: the origins of disaster, disasters in combination, and the end of a disaster.

The primary claim of this essay is that historical fluency is required for effective work in crafting legal and policy interventions as a part of public health emergency preparedness and response (PHEPR). At a broad level, public health law is explicitly recognized as a key systems-level component of PHEPR practice.1 This essay therefore focuses on the extent to which historical fluency is necessary or at least useful to all aspects of PHEPR that draw on or deploy legal and policy mechanisms (e.g., design, planning, implementation, dissemination, monitoring and evaluation, etc.). The essay collectively refers to these legal and policy mechanisms as epidemic law and policy response (ELAPR). Part I explains the concept of historical fluency. Part II explores the foundations of public health law both as a way of highlighting key structural features of ELAPR and in supporting the claim that historical fluency is critical for ELAPR. Part III applies the previous arguments to a specific case study to highlight the promise and power of historical fluency - the outbreak of bubonic plague in San Francisco in 1900. Tracking this essay's pragmatic focus, part IV offers several recommendations for how specifically historical fluency in public health law and ethics can be operationalized in PHEPR practice and policy. Part V summarizes and concludes.

Many accounts, autobiographical and scholarly, emphasize how volunteers portrayed their work in the mission established for fishers by British physician Wilfred Grenfell in Newfoundland and Labrador: as escapist adventure. Scholars have not studied women physicians or their motivations to volunteer, however. This oversight derives from their small number combined with lack of knowledge about this mission's distinction from the foreign medical missions and domestic frontier missions that drew many women physicians to permanent positions. This study therefore discusses two American physicians, Alfreda B. Withington (1860-1951) and Emma E. Musson (1862-1913), who volunteered for summer service with this mission in 1907 and 1909, respectively. Through their publications, biographical sources, and clinical accounts, it reveals the appeal to them of such temporary, accessible volunteer service as a working vacation that rejuvenated. Importantly, it counters the skewed perspective of contemporary accounts in which the connection of Withington and Musson to an international celebrity, Wilfred Grenfell, overrode fuller considerations of their own lives, careers, and experiences. Finally, this examination suggests possible differences in their volunteerism between women physicians and their male counterparts: along with other women professionals, medical women often incorporated volunteer vacation experience into a continuum of similar endeavors in their careers.

Contagious diseases were among the most vexing problems in ancient theories of health, which could not easily account for how a corruption of one person's humors could cause a similar corruption in another's. One useful explanatory concept for Renaissance doctors tackling this theoretical gap was the phenomenon of resonance or "sympathetic vibration" - where one stationary string begins to vibrate spontaneously when a similarly tuned string is plucked nearby - as both resonance and contagion involved some mysterious, insensible action at a distance between an agent and a patient. Tracing the writings of Marsilio Ficino, Girolamo Fracastoro, and Girolamo Cardano, this essay explores the relationships between the writers' accounts of sympathetic vibrations and their contagion theories. It argues that different conceptions of the acoustic phenomenon - either as a manifestation of a Neo-Platonic World-Soul that underpinned the universe or else as a physical effect - revealed the writers' cosmological views that, in turn, informed their accounts of the human body and disease.

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.

This paper reexamines the public memory of Canadian surgeon Norman Bethune. In 1938, Bethune traveled to China to serve at the communist front and to treat soldiers fighting against the invading Japanese army. Throughout China, Bethune is a household name and a communist icon. Back in Canada, however, his name does not evoke the same ubiquity. While Canadians remembered Bethune through biographies, a film, statues, and a small museum, his story in the Anglophone world is confined primarily to the telling of distant history. To explain Bethune's greater notoriety and public presence in China, this essay first turns our attention to Chinese sources that mythologized Bethune's death in 1939. The essay then revisits Chinese propaganda that established Bethune as a lasting political symbol during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s. These national efforts show how a volunteer surgeon such as Bethune became such an important figure in a remote foreign country. China's Communist Party turned Bethune's death into a political event to rally support for their war of resistance against Japan. Later, during the tumultuous period of the Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedong used Bethune to symbolize unwavering service and loyalty to leader and party. This essay utilizes primary materials in McGill's Osler Library and commentary from the field of memory studies to contextualize Bethune and to situate him within the broader narrative of political education that arose in China during the Cultural Revolution. A layered interpretation of Bethune - as doctor, martyr, and symbolic hero - slowly emerges. Political forces in China transformed his memory into legacy and carry this complicated figure into the present day.