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.
{"title":"Confronting Medical Diploma Mills: State Licensing Boards, Legislatures, and the Limits of Medical Authority in the 1920s.","authors":"Toby A Appel","doi":"10.1093/jhmas/jrae012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jhmas/jrae012","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>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.</p>","PeriodicalId":49998,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2024-07-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141581358","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The image of dazed, plague-infected rats coming out of their nests and performing a pirouette in front of the surprised eyes of humans before dying is one well-known to us through Albert Camus’s The Plague (1947). This article examines the historical roots of this image and its emergence in French missionary narratives about plague outbreaks in the Chinese province of Yunnan in the 1870s on the eve of the Third Plague Pandemic. Showing that accounts of the “staggering rat” were not meant as naturalist observations of a zoonotic disease, as is generally assumed by historians, but as a cosmological, end-of-the-world narrative with a colonial agenda, the article argues for an approach to historical accounts of epidemics that does not succumb to the current trend of “virus hunting” in the archive, but rather takes colonial outbreak narratives ethnographically seriously.
{"title":"The Figure of the Staggering Rat: Reading Colonial Outbreak Narratives Against the Grain of “Virus Hunting”","authors":"Christos Lynteris","doi":"10.1093/jhmas/jrae004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jhmas/jrae004","url":null,"abstract":"The image of dazed, plague-infected rats coming out of their nests and performing a pirouette in front of the surprised eyes of humans before dying is one well-known to us through Albert Camus’s The Plague (1947). This article examines the historical roots of this image and its emergence in French missionary narratives about plague outbreaks in the Chinese province of Yunnan in the 1870s on the eve of the Third Plague Pandemic. Showing that accounts of the “staggering rat” were not meant as naturalist observations of a zoonotic disease, as is generally assumed by historians, but as a cosmological, end-of-the-world narrative with a colonial agenda, the article argues for an approach to historical accounts of epidemics that does not succumb to the current trend of “virus hunting” in the archive, but rather takes colonial outbreak narratives ethnographically seriously.","PeriodicalId":49998,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-05-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140834053","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Narrative structures, though invisible to the naked eye, guide our understanding of pandemics. Like curves and graphs, we can plot them, identify their patterns and organizing principles. These structures act upon our understanding of social and biological events just as much as the rhythms of viral replication and mutation. They order not only themselves but also social and health outcomes. This essay uses narrative precision to expand beyond Charles Rosenberg’s influential dramaturgic model and develops new pandemic forms, scaled from the level of an individual line break to the multi-part series: Arc, a form of sequence. Cycle, a form of repetition. Sequel, a form of elongation. Caesura, a form of break. It investigates the potentialities and limitations of these forms, how they intersect, collide, and contradict, and how analysis of these interactions contributes to a deeper understanding of pandemics, their effects, and the diverse perspectives defining their structures. In doing so, it prototypes how literary methods offer conceptual frameworks for pandemic historiography and how a transdisciplinary, medical humanities analysis produces novel understandings at the intersection of health, culture, and society.
{"title":"Pandemic Forms","authors":"Lakshmi Krishnan","doi":"10.1093/jhmas/jrae003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jhmas/jrae003","url":null,"abstract":"Narrative structures, though invisible to the naked eye, guide our understanding of pandemics. Like curves and graphs, we can plot them, identify their patterns and organizing principles. These structures act upon our understanding of social and biological events just as much as the rhythms of viral replication and mutation. They order not only themselves but also social and health outcomes. This essay uses narrative precision to expand beyond Charles Rosenberg’s influential dramaturgic model and develops new pandemic forms, scaled from the level of an individual line break to the multi-part series: Arc, a form of sequence. Cycle, a form of repetition. Sequel, a form of elongation. Caesura, a form of break. It investigates the potentialities and limitations of these forms, how they intersect, collide, and contradict, and how analysis of these interactions contributes to a deeper understanding of pandemics, their effects, and the diverse perspectives defining their structures. In doing so, it prototypes how literary methods offer conceptual frameworks for pandemic historiography and how a transdisciplinary, medical humanities analysis produces novel understandings at the intersection of health, culture, and society.","PeriodicalId":49998,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-05-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140834054","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article examines the political history of tobacco control policy in South Africa from 1948 to 2018 by drawing on available historical documents, media reports, published books and articles, the grey literature, and face-to-face interviews with key policy actors. Tracing the historical evolution of tobacco control policies in South Africa reveals how embedded opposition from vested interest groups at every stage of the policy process complicates responses to the tobacco issue. This case study demonstrates how, despite such embedded difficulties, a confluence of regime change, evidence-based messaging, political will, policy entrepreneurs, and advocacy coalitions have led to the gradual transformation of tobacco control policy in South Africa over time. Understanding the historical evolution of tobacco control policy in South Africa opens up space for an in-depth inquiry that allows researchers to trace the policy-making process over the last seven decades, and to understand how those processes have facilitated a shift in the orientation of policy makers over time.
{"title":"Advocacy Coalitions, Policy Entrepreneurs, and Windows of Opportunity: Tobacco Control in South Africa, 1948-2018.","authors":"Owuraku Kusi-Ampofo","doi":"10.1093/jhmas/jrae002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jhmas/jrae002","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the political history of tobacco control policy in South Africa from 1948 to 2018 by drawing on available historical documents, media reports, published books and articles, the grey literature, and face-to-face interviews with key policy actors. Tracing the historical evolution of tobacco control policies in South Africa reveals how embedded opposition from vested interest groups at every stage of the policy process complicates responses to the tobacco issue. This case study demonstrates how, despite such embedded difficulties, a confluence of regime change, evidence-based messaging, political will, policy entrepreneurs, and advocacy coalitions have led to the gradual transformation of tobacco control policy in South Africa over time. Understanding the historical evolution of tobacco control policy in South Africa opens up space for an in-depth inquiry that allows researchers to trace the policy-making process over the last seven decades, and to understand how those processes have facilitated a shift in the orientation of policy makers over time.","PeriodicalId":49998,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-04-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140708100","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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.
解放后的医学和社会科学学者对黑人易患病、易生病和易死亡进行了广泛的理论研究。对十九世纪末有关种族与疾病关系的医学观点的大多数研究都强调了将黑人身体虚弱与易患疾病联系起来的医学观念的构建。本研究提出了另一种说法,即某些疾病--哮喘和花粉热--反映了对疾病的相反的种族化理解,而这种理解的核心是白人的虚弱。基于对乔治-米勒-比尔德(George Miller Beard)在世纪之交撰写的哮喘和花粉热医学文献、美国花粉热协会的专业化、1884 年第一例记录在案的非裔美国人哮喘病例的发表和驳回的研究,本文认为,19 世纪晚期的哮喘和花粉热医生(他们自己也常常患有这种疾病)根据种族界限定义典型的哮喘患者,以保护他们自己的专业和社会身份的排他性。因此,黑人社区的哮喘和花粉症,尤其是哮喘和花粉症学者主要生活和工作的北方地区的哮喘和花粉症,直到二十世纪中叶仍被掩盖,得不到治疗。
{"title":"Convenient Frailty: Medical Contestations of Asthma and Hay Fever in African Americans in Late Nineteenth-Century America.","authors":"Ijeoma B Kola","doi":"10.1093/jhmas/jrad045","DOIUrl":"10.1093/jhmas/jrad045","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>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.</p>","PeriodicalId":49998,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-04-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"9974141","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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.
{"title":"\"A Much Wider Field in Which to Operate\": Early Black Women Physicians in Public Health.","authors":"Margaret Vigil-Fowler, Sukumar Desai","doi":"10.1093/jhmas/jrad048","DOIUrl":"10.1093/jhmas/jrad048","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>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.</p>","PeriodicalId":49998,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-04-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"9990992","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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.
本文对美国整形外科医生、诺贝尔奖获得者约瑟夫-穆雷(Joseph E. Murray)的肾移植手术进行了历史分析。继 1954 年首次在单卵双胞胎之间成功进行肾脏移植后,他又在 X 射线和免疫抑制剂作用下在不同基因的人之间进行了肾脏移植。然而,在取得这些成就的同时,莫里也遇到了无数次失败,他认为这些失败与每个病人的生理和病理个体性密切相关。当他把自己在整形外科方面的专长用于肾脏移植时,这种个体性就成了他在努力避免失败时必须应对的一个重要问题。在他看来,肾脏移植可能会失败,因为每个人的免疫屏障或体质奇异,可能会产生意想不到的并发症。虽然他无法解释也无法控制其中的许多失败,但我认为,他的不成功工作和病人的个性在塑造他作为整形外科医生的手术中发挥了多重作用。这些因素构建了他的外科研究之路,让他的研究更有意义,使他免受批评,并形成了他展示具有免疫学意义的工作成果的方式。因此,默里在没有接受过什么科学训练的情况下,阐明了与临床有关的免疫耐受的一个重要方面。
{"title":"Joseph E. Murray's Struggle to Transplant Kidneys: Failure, Individuality, and Plastic Surgery, 1950-1965.","authors":"Hyung Wook Park","doi":"10.1093/jhmas/jrad042","DOIUrl":"10.1093/jhmas/jrad042","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>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.</p>","PeriodicalId":49998,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-04-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"10045346","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In September 1975, Frank Moss, an eighteen-year veteran of the Senate from Utah, donned the scruffiest clothes he could find and walked into a small clinic in New York that catered to Medicaid patients. Using a phony Medicaid card supplied to him by a New York District Attorney, he posed as a patient with symptoms he feigned to assess the quality of care he would receive. Appalled by what he experienced, he and a team of staffers from his office embarked on a four-state tour of what he termed "Medicaid mills," visiting more than 200 clinics in an undercover investigation that exposed alarming levels of provider fraud and abuse of the government health insurance system. This dramatic expose was covered by CBS's widely watched Sunday-night news program 60 Minutes. The subsequent Senate hearings were a media sensation, leading to accusations that the Senator was "grandstanding." This article looks at the political climate in which the congressional sting operation, the media attention it garnered, and the subsequent legislation enacted sought to address a persistent, growing problem of fraud and abuse in Medicare and Medicaid. The article argues that Moss's effort was an example of entrepreneurial politics, as defined by Craig Volden and Alan Wiseman in 2016, and something more as well. Moss was reacting to a political setting in which the legitimate authority of political institutions, including Congress, had been called into question by the Watergate scandal and other revelations. At the same time, organized medicine in America was dealing with its own version of this challenge to its authority. The result was a dramatic episode that focused on fraud and abuse in the ten-year-old Medicare program and that raised wider questions about changes in cultural authority in politics and medicine.
{"title":"The Senator and the Sting Operation: Politics, the Media, and Frank Moss's Exposé of \"Medicaid Mills\".","authors":"Brian Dolan, Stephen Beitler, Antoine Johnson","doi":"10.1093/jhmas/jrad041","DOIUrl":"10.1093/jhmas/jrad041","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In September 1975, Frank Moss, an eighteen-year veteran of the Senate from Utah, donned the scruffiest clothes he could find and walked into a small clinic in New York that catered to Medicaid patients. Using a phony Medicaid card supplied to him by a New York District Attorney, he posed as a patient with symptoms he feigned to assess the quality of care he would receive. Appalled by what he experienced, he and a team of staffers from his office embarked on a four-state tour of what he termed \"Medicaid mills,\" visiting more than 200 clinics in an undercover investigation that exposed alarming levels of provider fraud and abuse of the government health insurance system. This dramatic expose was covered by CBS's widely watched Sunday-night news program 60 Minutes. The subsequent Senate hearings were a media sensation, leading to accusations that the Senator was \"grandstanding.\" This article looks at the political climate in which the congressional sting operation, the media attention it garnered, and the subsequent legislation enacted sought to address a persistent, growing problem of fraud and abuse in Medicare and Medicaid. The article argues that Moss's effort was an example of entrepreneurial politics, as defined by Craig Volden and Alan Wiseman in 2016, and something more as well. Moss was reacting to a political setting in which the legitimate authority of political institutions, including Congress, had been called into question by the Watergate scandal and other revelations. At the same time, organized medicine in America was dealing with its own version of this challenge to its authority. The result was a dramatic episode that focused on fraud and abuse in the ten-year-old Medicare program and that raised wider questions about changes in cultural authority in politics and medicine.</p>","PeriodicalId":49998,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-04-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"9781666","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The numerous votive uteri found across the central Italian peninsula from the fourth to first centuries BCE are puzzlingly evocative of the human simplex uterus, which is visually distinct from the bicornuate uteri characteristic of most other mammals. However, human dissection is not attested for this time and place, while animal butchery was common. This article uses modern veterinary anatomical imagery to argue that animal uteri - specifically as they appear when pregnant - were indeed models underlying the votive depictions. Some of the variant forms of the votives are highly evocative of various features of the pregnant bicornuate uterus. Further, medical views on the human uterus throughout classical antiquity were informed by animal uteri. Taken together, the visual and textual evidence indicate that animal models were inextricably integrated into ancient conceptions of the human uterus across the classical world, including in the production of the Italic votives in question.
{"title":"Ancient Conceptions of the Human Uterus: Italic Votives and Animal Wombs.","authors":"Claire Bubb","doi":"10.1093/jhmas/jrad038","DOIUrl":"10.1093/jhmas/jrad038","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The numerous votive uteri found across the central Italian peninsula from the fourth to first centuries BCE are puzzlingly evocative of the human simplex uterus, which is visually distinct from the bicornuate uteri characteristic of most other mammals. However, human dissection is not attested for this time and place, while animal butchery was common. This article uses modern veterinary anatomical imagery to argue that animal uteri - specifically as they appear when pregnant - were indeed models underlying the votive depictions. Some of the variant forms of the votives are highly evocative of various features of the pregnant bicornuate uterus. Further, medical views on the human uterus throughout classical antiquity were informed by animal uteri. Taken together, the visual and textual evidence indicate that animal models were inextricably integrated into ancient conceptions of the human uterus across the classical world, including in the production of the Italic votives in question.</p>","PeriodicalId":49998,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-04-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"9991718","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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.
{"title":"Mr. Gilbert's World Tour: Rethinking Disabled Veterans Across British Imperial Spaces.","authors":"Michael Robinson","doi":"10.1093/jhmas/jrad084","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jhmas/jrad084","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>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.</p>","PeriodicalId":49998,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-03-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140186179","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}