Bulletin of the History of Medicine最新文献

In 1954 Emanuel Friedman created a new dimension for measuring labor-change in dilatation rate over time-allowing the birthing body to participate in defining what it meant for labor to be "arrested." Yet in constructing a "normal" standard curve of dilatation-over-time for guiding labor decisions and constructing a measuring instrument (the "cervimeter") to evidence the shape of this curve, Friedman unintentionally enabled a new dimension of labor to emerge: centimeters of dilation, today read as the state of labor progress. This article examines an oral interview with Friedman, the raw data from his first study, and his published research to show how the cervimeter reified centimeters as an "objectively" measurable interval-scale unit (rather than representing an ordinal approximation felt by hand) and enabled the transformation of Fried-man's curve from a graphical tool meant to conform to women into a tool used to conform them.

Many people now take knowledge of the fetal heartbeat for granted. Despite this, it wasn't until 1818, following the invention of the stethoscope and popularization of the technique of auscultation, that the fetal heartbeat was first discovered. Listening to the fetal heartbeat enabled practitioners to confirm the existence of pregnancy, gain information on the internal positions of the fetus and the placenta, and determine the life or death of the fetus in utero. Additionally, signs from the stethoscope provided guidance for practitioners when dealing with long or difficult labors. This article examines the work and writings of the early key players in this story, emphasizing the impact of enthusiastic stethoscope advocacy on Irish obstetric practitioners' uptake of the instrument and how the changes in practice that stemmed from these changes went on to impact practitioners in Scotland.

In this article, the author relies on oral histories from vayattatis who worked in southwestern India over the course of the twentieth century and on archival research to examine the techniques and technologies that have been and continue to be a part of both pre- and postpartum care in southern India. The author tracks the wider social contexts and histories of this figure and examines how they came to learn, develop, and adapt their techniques of care for women and children through the generations. The author also examines how they constructed their corpus of authoritative knowledge as a necessary antidote to what they perceived as both the inaccessibility and technicism of biomedicine. The article also presents the vayattatis' own critique of technoscientific modernities and the toll they took on women's bodies. The article also examines how the vayattatis used unique local techniques including massage to facilitate postpartum healing and recovery.

By the mid-nineteenth century, plantation enslavers in Louisiana and Cuba had developed a new form of plantation management. Clock-time discipline, hierarchical divisions of labor, and the scientific authority of numbers, as filtered through accounting technologies like the plantation ledger, helped planters see enslaved people's health in seemingly precise terms of time, productivity, and race. In this cruelly meticulous system, some elite physicians saw a potential scientific foundation for medicine. Using plantation business records, agricultural trade periodicals, physician correspondence, medical publications, and memoirs, this article examines plantation management of enslaved health; physician appreciation of its quantitative, supposedly rigorous methods; and the intersections of management science and racial science in physician writing, where there were noticeable differences between Louisiana and Cuba. Physicians in both places believed that, under judicious management, Black people's bodies were naturally inclined to productivity, but in Cuba, there were different degrees of Blackness that needed to be taken into consideration.

This article presents a close look at the material and visual culture of obstetrical training in the late nineteenth-century North Atlantic world, focusing on the obstetrical machines employed in contemporary midwifery courses. Created during a time of growing interest in public health, widespread anxiety over rising infant mortality, and emerging pronatalist policies, these widely produced pedagogical objects provided an interactive, mechanistic, and process-oriented simulacrum of the birthing body. By the late nineteenth century, obstetrical machines, once purpose-built by individual midwives, were mass-produced using durable commercial materials. This article focuses on the Budin-Pinard manikin, a widely used obstetrical manikin designed in France by renowned obstetricians Pierre Budin and Adolphe Pinard, to illustrate that objects used in obstetrical teaching in this period sought to provide a consistent structure, and through that a framework of method and of practice, within which the unexpected could be accommodated, managed, and made to signify.

This article centers the methods and materials of illegal abortion in South Carolina from criminalization (1883) to Roe v. Wade (1973) as they appeared in criminal trial records, coroners' reports, newspaper accounts, oral histories, and contemporary medical literature. The authors explore abortion techniques and technologies by analyzing the objects used in criminal abortion attempts. In particular, they focus on the common objects and substances that could be found in homes or local shops, such as herbs and emmenagogues, turpentine, and rubber tubing, which are medical technologies and obstetrical objects. The analysis of illegal abortions in pre-Roe South Carolina demonstrates that abortion providers, and especially Black laywomen providers, not only depended on but actively nurtured centuries of intergenerational knowledge of abortion techniques and tools. Furthermore, they innovated with everyday objects and professional instruments alike to provide abortions to Black and white women.

The lack of investment in noninfectious diseases by international health organizations after World War II is an understudied topic. By examining the global trajectory of hereditary and congenital disorders within and beyond the WHO, the authors provide insight into the reasons for this failure to invest in noncommunicable diseases management. In the 1970s, a network of geneticists, physicians, and WHO officials aimed to address the most frequent hereditary disorders, notably thalassemia, by putting them on the organization's agenda. However, despite significant epidemiological stakes, community genetics did not expand globally. The paper examines how Global South instantiations have reshaped aspirations for Southern alternatives to medical genetics as it had developed in the Global North. It also emphasizes the importance of analyzing new discursive activities in the field of global health and the characteristics and practical implications of these global aspirations, such as program funding, design, and operation.

This article examines the usage of alternative therapies such as AL-721 and metaphysical healing by gay men and AIDS patients during the HIV/AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s. The usage of alternative therapies during the epidemic has usually been framed by scholars as a foil to more well-studied areas of palliative care. Instead, this article argues that these alternative therapies and lifestyle regimens are worthy of greater discussion as this alternative medical marketplace offered patients a meaningful choice in managing their illness. Furthermore, this alternative medical marketplace was a patient-regulated one, where the patients themselves decided who was and who was not a legitimate medical practitioner. Gay publications in Texas became a major hub for information and discussion about alternative treatments, which indicates that medical pluralism flourished even outside of AIDS organizations in New York and Los Angeles.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Iraq was visited by two influenza pandemics-one in 1889-1893 (the so-called Russian flu), the other in 1918-1920 (the so-called Spanish flu). These pandemics occurred during two completely different political contexts in the history of Iraq-that of the Ottoman Empire, which ruled Iraq since the sixteenth century, and that of the British wartime occupation, which brought an end to Ottoman rule in the region during World War I. The different political contexts in which influenza appeared in Iraq produced significant differences in how Ottoman and British authorities responded to the disease. Specifically, while influenza was widespread across Iraq during both pandemics, the Ottomans largely ignored the disease, whereas the British tracked and studied it. Despite these differences, however, there were certain similarities across both pandemics. For one, there were subsequent outbreaks of influenza following the worst of each pandemic, but these did not meaningfully shape Ottoman or British public health priorities. Second, in both cases, there was uncertainty about the nature of influenza, much as there was elsewhere in the world. As this article demonstrates, the history of influenza in late Ottoman and British occupied Iraq was one marked by continuity and change.