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

Kudzu, a perennial climbing vine and invasive species to the American South, occupied a unique space in the city of Atlanta, Georgia as a danger to public health from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. This article examines why municipal authorities understood the vine as a threat to public health. Kudzu's ability to smother surfaces allowed it to conceal murdered people and serve as a habitat for rats, snakes, and mosquitos, making it a direct threat to public safety in the eyes of public health authorities. Kudzu also grew extensively in vacant lots where city officials were trying to promote the city as progressive and prosperous. The city council voted in support of an ordinance against extensive growths of the vine, but eradication produced its own challenges: kudzu removal was expensive, and permanent eradication required large investments in time. Unhoused people also relied on the vine for shelter, which meant that eradication directly affected their safety. Examining how municipal authorities framed kudzu as a threat to public health, this article demonstrates that the vine's status as a health risk lay in how it unintentionally clashed with the promoted image of Atlanta as a business-friendly city with harmonious relationships among its citizens.

Bringing together seven papers spanning Southern and Eastern Africa, North America, England, and India, this special issue explores the historically neglected connections between invasive species and health in the long twentieth century. Drawing upon perspectives from medical history, the history of science, environmental history, and environmental as well as medical anthropology, the papers analyze the entanglements of invasive species and zoonotic disease, food security, pesticide, crime, and ecosystem health. This introduction provides an overview of the historiography of invasive species and argues the importance of studying the historical connections between invasives and health. It also historicizes the relations between animal invasions, technoscience, power, and colonialism.

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.

This article tells the history of the management of invasive locust swarms in southern Africa in the 1970s and early 1980s. It examines the threats the pests posed to African livelihoods and the challenges in combating them. The article argues that in the 1970s, postcolonial southern African states' attempts to manage the environment with the help of international organizations were intimately tied to the region's experiences under colonial rule, their commitment to ensure the whole region's independence, and the new realities of their dependence on international donor support. This support entrenched a reliance on techno-chemical interventions at a time when the global environmental movement against pesticides was particularly strong. Southern Africa's international collaborators ultimately ignored this global movement, and locust control in the region continued to depend on the application of organochlorines. However, faith in techno-science failed to address the social, political, and ecological conditions that allowed locusts to flourish. Consequently, the pests remained a threat.

The meningitis (or spotted fever) outbreaks (c.1904-1907) caused worldwide alarm but remain largely forgotten. This article uses these outbreaks as an invaluable case study for understanding early twentieth-century responses (individual and collective) to a mysterious, potentially deadly infection. More specifically, it focuses on the social production of fear until physicians and medical scientists devised new ways of making meningitis more manageable, with reference to a range of actors who shaped public responses and feelings. Ultimately, the article argues that initial attempts to warn and educate about meningitis usually promoted fear and avoidance, but as meningitis became more manageable, emotional responses to its outbreaks altered significantly. Emotions were constructed and experienced in the context of a new medical modernity optimistic about public health and clinical interventions. Exploring the physical and emotional in tandem takes us to the heart of societal and personal experience of disease outbreaks.

During the mid-twentieth century, the Soviet Union developed ambitious hygiene standards for clean air that were grounded in extremely sensitive methods of physiological research. As Western experts sought to develop universal standards for environmental regulation, Soviet hygiene research posed a challenge. This article examines the discussions surrounding the Soviet approach at international conferences on air pollution and industrial hygiene during the mid-twentieth century. The article shows that although the Soviet approach was rejected especially by United States experts, many of its qualities resonated with the ongoing discussions about environmental health in the US. The sensitive and holistic methods of the Soviets were compelling in the effort to reveal the most subtle effects environments had on human health. This article shows how the rejection of Soviet standards stemmed not from different scientific methods but from the differences in the overall ideals of environmental regulation. I argue that Soviet hygiene can be seen as an extreme version of technocratic expertise, and its failure highlights the limits of scientific expertise in managing environmental pollution.

This paper offers the first case study of Phospho-Energon - an early twentieth-century Swedish patent medicine believed to cure nervousness. Using a large dataset of newspaper advertisements, it explores how the product was presented through scientific and medical language, which drew upon a range of visual and verbal rhetoric to convince consumers of its benefits. It finds that pseudoscientific discourse focusing on self-help was regularly used to sell Phospho-Energon, with consumers warned that their nerves were "not allowed to fail" and required "protection" in order to remain healthy. Furthermore, the "science" supporting this discourse gradually shifted over time as neurosis replaced neurasthenia as a diagnostic category and the concept of spring lethargy became popularised. Overall, this study argues that Phospho-Energon stands as an important example of how partial scientific/medical claims can be used as a rhetorical device to sell products to consumers looking for a quick-fix cure for their perceived mental health conditions.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, commercialized reproductive technologies experienced a reputational crisis as news about the hormonal birth control pill's possible side effects reportedly caused 18-30% of women to stop taking it. While secondary literature has followed patients' and legislatures' actions, few histories have focused on physicians' responses. How did physicians manage this public crisis of confidence? This article contributes to existing literature through a backstage look at the work of Elizabeth B. Connell (1925-2018), whose wide-ranging career in medicine, academia, government, industry consulting, and popular writing embroiled her at the center of these controversies. To counter critique from legislatures and consumer reformers, Connell became a mediator for medicine in the public sphere, dispensing select information and arguing for limits on others - for the patient's sake. If legislative inquiry's primary havoc was unleashing information, Connell would help the profession moderate it. Because Connell was a woman doctor whom health feminists who were her contemporaries denied was a feminist doctor, the existing scholarship has occluded her. This article reconstructs the contributions of this important and flawed doctor, illuminating how she contorted herself to suit her various public messages, constrained by her conflicting, dual identities as woman and doctor.

Problems caused by overcrowding and the simple need to breathe represent one of the major consequences of medical racism. With few exceptions, histories of epidemics, disease prevention, and sanitation often focus on municipal reform efforts to clean up gritty urban centers from London to Paris to New York. This article traces how concerns about ventilation emerged during the transatlantic slave trade and continued to be a problem for Black people throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The article emphasizes that Black people were not just the victims of medical racism but initiated many crusades in the United States to promote better ventilation throughout the twentieth century. This article highlights the work of Black reformers, doctors, and thinkers who fought to create healthy living conditions for Black people.