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

In the 1950s, the Soviet psychoprophylactic method (PPM) of childbirth was introduced to the People's Republic of China, eliciting widespread enthusiasm. It was promoted through a top-down approach, and underwent a degree of localization intertwined with the concurrent acupuncture fever (zhenjiure) that characterized China's medical and cultural landscape during this period. PPM's spread can be understood as a result of ideology, political discourse, international politics, and specific healthcare demand, including the institutionalization of childbirth. Notably, the Soviet PPM also spread to the United States via France. Within the context of rising feminism, de-medicalization, and commercialism in American society, it became known as the Lamaze method, named after the French doctor and stripped of its Soviet associations. In the late 1970s, the so-called Lamaze method re-entered China quietly, but met with a lukewarm reception in the context of China's market-oriented healthcare reform. Compared to caesarean sections and obstetrics anaesthesia, the Lamaze method was less favourable in terms of performance and cost-effectiveness. This article examines why the Soviet PPM and the American Lamaze method showed divergent diffusion paths and outcomes, despite their shared underlying principles and historical origins. By situating these developments within international and Chinese political and sociocultural contexts, it explores how medical technologies are reinterpreted across cultures.

This article provides a comparative analysis of the treatment of disabled First World War veterans in 1920s Britain and the simultaneous care of Imperial Pensioners residing in Australia and South Africa via the detailed administrative reports of a British civil servant, G.F. Gilbert. Imperial Pensioners were disabled veteran migrants of the British Army residing overseas. A study of these veteran populations in Australia and South Africa provides two primary insights into the broader historiography of disabled veterans. Firstly, a comparative case study helps to show the way in which cultural notions of disability were part of broader ideas of nation-building overseas. Secondly, the specific disability diagnosis category chosen as a more in-depth case study can further complicate and contradict broader assessments of national responses. This article attempts to build upon recent transnational histories of veterans by transcending national boundaries and homogenous veteran profiles with an extension in methodological scope by providing an intra-national case study via the Imperial Pensioner.

One of the most catastrophic pandemics in human history was the repeated spread of cholera in the nineteenth century. In spite of its historical significance, few scholars have studied cholera's influence in East Asia. This paper illustrates how cholera was considered, conceptualized, and treated by Korean people prior to contact with North American medical missionaries in 1885. In particular, the article compares the government-ordered public health measures during the Joseon dynasty, focusing on the "ghost rite" performed during outbreaks of epidemic disease with the work of medical missionaries in the late nineteenth century. This study finds that even after the introduction of Western biomedicine, the Korean people persisted with a religious-based etiology of cholera and other infectious diseases until the twentieth century.

Modern scholarship on the early modern European anatomy theater has long argued that public dissections were theatrical, carnivalesque affairs characterized by viewers' fascination with the material exposure of the dissected body. This essay builds from the recent work on early modern public dissections to argue against such monolithic presentations of the early modern anatomy. To this end, the essay examines three principal source materials connected with public dissections in early modern London to more specifically argue that public dissections in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century London were solemn events focused on promoting the status of London's barber-surgeons' guild, the Royal College of Physicians, and the education and knowledge of their respective members. In this regard, the essay further suggests that there was no single, dominant perception of dissection and anatomy at the time, but that dissection was utilized as a tool for different individual, occupational, and institutional purposes.

In the early- to mid-nineteenth century, European mortality rates in West Africa were the highest in the world. Mortality estimates included nine missionaries sent from the Basel Mission (established in what is now Switzerland) to the Gold Coast (present-day Ghana), eight of whom died between 1828 and 1840, mostly from "fevers." In response to high mortality rates, the Basel Mission recruited several Afro-West Indians to work as Christian missionaries in the Gold Coast, mostly based on the presumption that individuals of African descent would better survive the environment. The decision to recruit Afro-West Indians to evangelize on the Gold Coast seemed to the mission to be a rational decision, one not in need of further justification or an overarching theory of race, environment, and disease. Surprisingly, the Basel Mission did not justify this position Biblically either. Once arrived, the West Indian Christian missionaries mostly lived in the Akwapem hills above Accra at an elevation that would have provided some protection against malaria; subsequently, their mortality rates were significantly lower than the European missionaries. After quinine came to be used as a prophylactic against malaria after 1850, thus lowering European missionary mortality rates, no more Afro-West Indians were recruited by the Basel Mission.

From the time of Classical Greek medicine through Early Modernity, sadness was considered both a mood and a diagnosable disease. Sadness was closely related to the physiological condition of melancholia, as both sadness and melancholia stemmed from a common etiology (excess of black bile), and both conditions could result in death. Sadness and melancholia had a symbiotic relationship; either one of the two could trigger the other. Because sadness was melancholia's foremost symptom and catalyst, medieval physicians often referred to melancholia and sadness as interchangeable notions and sometimes as synonyms. Influenced by Hippocratic-Galenic systems of thought that dominated the discipline of medicine well after the Renaissance, premodern doctors and natural philosophers conceived the idea that excessive sorrow greatly harmed the human body. They believed that sadness was more than a mood. This paper probes the physiological dimensions of sadness, arguing that from ancient Greek medicine to the Early Modern period, some physicians and natural philosophers believed that because of its inherent relationship with the caustic and cold substance of black bile, sadness had the power to physically shrink the heart. To support my argument, I analyze the medical traditions that developed from the Hippocratic-Galenic system of humorism, zeroing in on the humor of black bile as the main agent of corrosion and contraction. Because the shrinking-heart theory transcended the discipline of medicine, I also investigate this principle in the disciplines of theology, philosophy, and amatory literature in order to demonstrate the impact that the theory of the shrinking heart had on the European imaginary from the Middle Ages to Early Modernity.

Following the Holocaust, many women rejoiced when able to reproduce; children represented a return to normalcy, a stake in futurity, and even reproductive revenge against the Nazi regime. The consequent baby boom in Displaced Persons camps demonstrably reaffirmed this return to life and resignification of values. In the following decades, however, this demonstrated fertility was cast aside in favor of reparation politics. Though amenorrhea (cessation of women's menstrual cycles) was a common occurrence during wartime, the discourse around infertility became a symbolic way to articulate a range of claims about gendered, bodily damage stemming from Nazi persecution. Concerned with national indemnification and national repopulation, physicians in the formerly occupied countries leaned into new roles as political-medical actors in varying degrees and contexts. Between 1946-1951, physicians from marginalized identities and formerly occupied countries opposed those who had been affiliated with the Nazi party, claiming that amenorrhea was a war-related condition worthy of compensation. From 1952-1967, sympathetic physicians seeking to counter West German rejections linked amenorrhea with psychic trauma - the latter of which the government denied as grounds for reparations. The last group of studies, 1963-1978, stemming exclusively from Poland, demanded reparations for the Polish people - research that gradually dovetailed with Poland's modernization efforts of the 1970s. None of the studies pointed to any singular consensus. This article seeks to illuminate how points of contention in the history of German reparations were met by physicians whose role, by virtue of West German reparations processes, was charged politically and whose findings, by virtue of this political valence, took definitive stances.

Alcohol consumption was a prominent biopolitical issue in the early Soviet Union that was shaped by various factors, including ideological dictates, health-policy objectives, economic constraints, and strong popular demand for alcohol. While the Bolshevik purists around Trotsky preached that alcohol and socialism were incompatible, amongst the party leadership there were also advocates of moderate alcohol consumption. The Soviet elite nevertheless agreed that a profound transformation of national culture was necessary to tackle the rampant alcoholism that plagued the country. Various measures were deployed to enlighten and educate the masses, one of which was anti-alcohol theatrical propaganda. The article aims to trace the changing discourse on alcohol in the early Soviet Union based on the texts of sanitary theatrical productions as well as archival documents of the Moscow Theatre for Sanitary Culture. It will show how malleable this form of art and propaganda was in communicating the changing political agendas of the 1920s and 1930s. Anti-alcohol trials and plays, acting on an emotional level, could clearly explain to the audience in an accessible and entertaining way the reasons for prohibition or the norms of alcohol consumption. Thus, the article also addresses aspects of emotional experience and shifts in society's emotional standards.

In 1966, the sexual murder of an eleven-year-old in Prague occupied the media and broader public, reinforcing expert debates about child sex offenders. In this article, we trace changes in medical experts' understanding of child sex offenders in socialist Czechoslovakia between the late 1950s and mid-1970s. We show that psychiatrists and sexologists discussed forensic evaluation and the need for specialized treatment years before the 1966 case, but therapeutic practices lagged behind. As the networks of expertise shifted after this key crime, medical experts made up new kinds of people - deviant and non-deviant sex offenders - and gradually standardized treatment procedures. We argue that in addition to experts, the media and the lay public represented key agents who contributed to the establishment of a complex system of sexological protective treatment in Czechoslovakia. This system has remained almost unchanged to this day.

In the second half of the twentieth century, concerns about problems in the doctor-patient relationship gave way to a new medical discourse on suffering, owed largely to the work of American physician Eric Cassell. This article tracks the development of his theory of suffering and its global success in transforming tragic medical experiences into diagnosable clinical entities. Beginning with his intellectual development in the 1960s, this article traces Cassell's initial interest in suffering first to his early research on truth-telling and autonomy, followed by his pioneering work in bioethics. Although closely aligned with philosophy, much of the institutional success of bioethics came from American law, which affected Cassell's theorizing. At the same time, doctors experienced a growth in medical malpractice lawsuits, driven in large part by costly "pain and suffering" awards, which the medical community sought to curb by encouraging legislatures to codify informed consent. The success of these efforts mandated that doctors disclose previously withheld bad news capable of causing suffering. The cultural changes that followed these disclosures became Cassell's impetus, while legal pain and suffering supplied much of his theory's language and concepts.