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

This article analyzes the history of immunization against tick-borne encephalitis (TBE) and specifically the processes that led to the creation and application of TBE vaccines in the Soviet Union and Austria. Rather than presenting the development of TBE vaccines from the perspective of national scientific schools, the article investigates their history as a transnational project, focusing on the connections among the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Austria, the United States, and the United Kingdom. It argues that biomedical research on TBE was profoundly intertwined with political and military agendas and depended on civil international cooperation as well as Soviet, American, and British military concerns, infrastructures and funding. The article consists of four parts that discuss (1) the identification of the TBE virus and the creation of the first TBE vaccine in the Soviet Union in the 1930s; (2) the internationalization of TBE research and vaccine development in the 1940s-1960s; (3) the history of TBE research and virology in Austria in the 1930s-1960s and the role of the US military funding; and (4) the cooperation of Austrian virologist Christian Kunz with the Microbiological Research Establishment Porton Down in the UK leading to the development of the Austrian/British vaccine against TBE in the 1970s.

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.

Penitentiary systems serve as breeding grounds for all kinds of diseases. Drawing upon new archival materials, this article examines the history of the management and reporting of epidemics in the Russian prison system from the late Imperial period to the present day. We use the case studies of cholera (1892-1893), typhus (1932-1933), and pulmonary tuberculosis (the 1990s) to examine how the general political and social conjuncture at different times affected the response of prison authorities to epidemics to show that, notwithstanding major shifts in society and polity, there was continuity in the management of epidemics by prison authorities in the long twentieth century. However, there were fundamental discrepancies in the way late Imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet Russia reported epidemiological emergencies in prisons. We argue that Russia's tumultuous past has reinforced the tendency among the Russian penal administration towards a lack of transparency that has persisted to the present day, in relation to the latest, COVID-19, epidemic.

This study explores the troubling and unintended consequences of public health efforts to address the problem of juvenile delinquency and feeblemindedness. Health care professionals, superintendents, and other authority figures equated undesirable juvenile behaviors such as keeping "bad company" or "falling in with the wrong crowd," truancy, and petty theft with poor breeding, low intelligence, and inheritable criminal tendencies. This article interrogates historical documentation culled from the Kansas State Historical Society (KSHS) and focuses on a few specific cases to reveal the ways a patriarchal political and medical state system both protected and alienated young woman accused of a myriad of behavior issues including delinquency, incorrigibility, and feeblemindedness. I highlight the lives of juvenile women sentenced to the Beloit Industrial School for Girls not simply to better understand an isolated period in United States history but also reproduction. The broader implications of the narratives of girls housed at the Beloit Industrial School for Girls throughout the first half of the twentieth century in Kansas reveal troubling and unintended consequences of public health efforts to fix the problems of delinquency, contagion, and the generational inheritance of undesirable characteristics.

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.

Post-Emancipation medical and social science scholars extensively theorized Black susceptibility to illness, disease, and death. Most studies of late nineteenth-century medical ideas about the relationship between race and disease have highlighted the construction of medical beliefs that associated Black physical weakness with a proclivity to ill health. This study presents an alternate narrative, one where certain diseases - asthma and hay fever - reflected an opposing racialized understanding of disease that instead centered on White frailty. Based on an examination of turn-of-the-century asthma and hay fever medical literature produced by George Miller Beard, the professionalization of the United States Hay Fever Association, and the publication and dismissal of the first recorded case of asthma in an African American man in 1884, this article argues that late nineteenth-century asthma and hay fever physicians, who themselves often suffered from the conditions, defined the typical asthma patient along racial lines to protect the exclusivity of their own professional and social identities. As a result, asthma and hay fever in Black communities, particularly in the North, where asthma and hay fever scholars primarily lived and worked, remained obscured and untreated until the mid-twentieth century.

In a profession shaped by Whiteness and masculinity, the few Black women physicians who earned medical degrees prior to the Second World War found some of their rare professional opportunities in public health. Though their choices were often constrained by racism and sexism, they embraced public health work as a means of carrying out their "mission" in marginalized communities and as a way of practicing medicine with a more expansive definition than treating individual patients or illnesses. Black women physicians shaped public health by creating unique programming to meet the needs of the communities they served, including mobile health clinics and community health weeks. The first Black women physicians who worked in public health in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries applied the new tool of public health "vital" statistics to Black lives and questioned the limits of their utility when created by White practitioners with racial biases. In the 1930s, some Black women physicians began earning some of the first master's degrees in public health, just as the field was beginning to professionalize. Throughout the twentieth century, Black women physicians pioneered community health programming and, though born from exclusionary policies that limited where they could practice, experimented with alternative clinical spaces, even as the hospital and laboratory became the primary sites of medicine for White clinicians. By embracing public health, Black women physicians shaped the field and used it as a tool to address racial health disparities in the communities they served, acting on their belief that Black health could be improved, thereby contesting notions of biological inferiority.

This paper offers a historical analysis of the American plastic surgeon and Nobel laureate Joseph E. Murray's kidney transplantation. After succeeding in the first kidney transplantation between monozygotic twins in 1954, he transplanted kidneys between genetically distinct people after X-radiation and immunosuppressants. Amid these achievements, however, Murray encountered numerous failures, which he thought were closely intertwined with each patient's physiological and pathological individuality. As he appropriated his expertise in plastic surgery for kidney transplantation, this individuality became a major issue that he had to cope with in his efforts to avoid failures. To him, kidney transplantation could fail because of each individual's immunological barrier or constitutional singularity that could engender unexpected complications. Although he could neither explain nor control many of these failures, I argue that his unsuccessful work and patient individuality played multiple roles in shaping his operations as a plastic surgeon. They structured the path of his surgical research, made sense of it, defended him from criticism, and formed the way that he presented the results of his work with an immunological implication. Consequently, Murray, with little scientific training, articulated an important dimension of immunological tolerance relevant to clinical settings.