Bulletin of the History of Medicine最新文献

This article is a microhistorical examination of a settler medical technology in an Indigenous community: Umonhon leader Joseph La Flesche's artificial leg, which he wore from the early 1860s until his death in 1888. This case study illustrates how La Flesche's disability and prosthesis were deeply entangled with Euro-American challenges to Umonhon ways of life, including relational care, land use, and spiritual practices. Although the artificial limb, from a Euro-American perspective, was a medical technology to resolve disability, from the perspective of some Umonhon the limb represented unwanted changes to their land and culture, changes that also compromised crucial community rituals and engendered new forms of "spiritual disablement." The medical technology's significance cannot be removed from the larger context of settler colonialism and its ableist assessment of Indigenous bodyminds, lands, beliefs, and ways of life.

This essay examines historical case literature on "monstrous births," revealing how childbearing women both participated in and were excluded from processes of medical knowledge-making. In the nineteenth-century United States, physicians studied newborns with major anatomical differences as "medical specimens of monstrosity," asserting a singular authority over knowledge of bodies and reproduction. However, this essay shows that in practice medical knowledge-making entailed an interactive, socially embedded process that intimately engaged laywomen's perceptions, ideas, and understanding. By narrating and interpreting their lived experiences of pregnancy, women participated in determining the causes and meanings of anomalous births-even as hierarchies of gender, race, class, and citizenship conditioned and constrained this participation. Through an imaginative reading of case reports, this essay foregrounds the significance of diverse laywomen's social, affective, and embodied lives in historical practices of medical meaning-making. At the same time, it offers insight into how predominantly white male medical professionals increasingly sought to establish authority over women's reproduction.

This article investigates the history of Sir Richard Carew's warming stone. Through examination of handwritten notebooks, letters, and printed medical pamphlets, it recovers the theoretical framework shaping the stone's design as a cure, the creation and launch of medical business in early modern London, the use of cheap print in promoting medical services, and the place of cure testimonials in the marketing of early modern health technologies. It also showcases the dynamism inherent in the design, production, and marketing of the early modern health devices. The article extends histories of early modern therapeutics beyond pharmacy to include medical devices and shines light on new historical actors, knowledge practices, and commercial ventures in early modern health care. It also demonstrates the utility of adopting history of technology frameworks to study early modern health objects and posits that further study of everyday health technologies can enrich histories of medicine.

The author traces the evolution of Seoul National University Hospital (SNUH) and its predecessors, focusing on their transformation from the 1960s to the 1980s. Starting as an impoverished governmental hospital of a postcolonial country, it grew into a major South Korean biomedical corporation with many faculty members with American training, a new main building with the latest technologies, and a larger independent budget supported by the National Health Insurance (NHI). However, this evolution accompanied multiple issues stemming from overcrowding, which resulted in short and skimpy consultations, a poor environment, staff exploitation, and various minor crimes. Yet the crowds in the hospital assisted young doctors' training and some faculty members' research. The author explains this complexity by analyzing the American aid's legacy alongside the NHI's roles. This explains the limitations to the U.S. attempt to shape Korea's medicine amid its state-driven industrialization and health insurance evolution under a military dictatorship, which partly reflected the colonial heritage.

Developed in the United States in the late 1950s and 1960s, the electronic fetal monitor (EFM) was increasingly used in obstetric practice throughout North America by the 1970s. In identifying and delineating the "normal" fetal heart rate, EFM played a central role in defining obstetric risk and, in the eyes of many practitioners, quickly became an essential tool of "modern" and "safe" hospitalized birth. Focusing on one specific settler-colonial context, this article explores the relationship between obstetric technologies including the EFM and the childbirth "choices" available to mothers giving birth in late twentieth-century Canada. As smaller hospitals, health centers, and nursing stations, particularly in rural, remote, and northern areas, lacked access to what were framed as essential technologies, obstetric services were withdrawn from many communities, a shift that continues to disproportionately affect Indigenous mothers who are routinely evacuated out to give birth in provincial hospitals.

At the turn of the twentieth century, in the midst of a shift in obstetrical research toward physiology, German obstetrician Hugo Sellheim (1871-1936) embarked upon a research project on the laws of birth mechanics. In a comprehensive experimental program, centering on the internal rotation of fetuses during birth, he tried to find out what kind of mechanical and expulsive forces were at work in the birthing process. From these experiments emerged a wealth of objects such as anatomical models, mechanical dolls, measuring devices, new physical instruments, and also birthing machines. By paying close attention to these objects and the sociomaterial practices associated with them, this article identifies, tracks, and characterizes the shift to physiology in obstetrics. By adopting a historical-praxiographic method, the article reveals the entanglement between the social and the material and renders visible a new and wider set of actors and relationships that, in turn, adds a novel dimension to the historiography of obstetrics.

This special issue traces the material "stuff"-the instruments and other material objects-that constitutes the uneven tapestries of power, authority, and knowledge making around human reproduction. To reevaluate our definition of what counts as a reproductive object, this collection recasts familiar objects, introduces new ones, and juxtaposes mundane things side-by-side with high-tech instruments. It also brings together various methodological approaches to highlight the myriad and multifaceted ways objects are enmeshed in sociomaterial webs. The resulting view of reproductive health care is thus contingent, fluid, and, fundamentally, material.

As an immediate target of post-Unification legislation, Italian midwives were subject to national efforts to standardize educational and professional practices. As a material emblem of these initiatives, the midwife's bag signified both a recognizable marker of midwives' new professional status and a mechanism for the increased surveillance directed toward them. Drawing on the material feminism of scholars like Donna Haraway and Karen Barad, the author considers three objects contained within the midwife's bag-syringes, stethoscopes, and birth registers-and the associated technologies of asepsis, auscultation, and statistical enumeration. In physical birthing rooms and on the pages of midwifery's new professional journals, the embodied practices associated with, rationale for, and impacts of novel obstetrical objects were negotiated. These technologies were part of the ongoing production of particular kinds of birthing and fetal bodies, ones that were both known and increasingly defined by technologically derived data and measurement.

As AIDS activists voiced their demands for "drugs into bodies" in the late 1980s, American scientists injected drugs into the body of a highly controversial research animal-the chimpanzee. This paper examines the controversy over the use of chimpanzees in U.S. HIV/AIDS research that led to the decline of chimpanzees as laboratory animals. The author suggests that the AIDS epidemic raised the public profile of laboratory chimpanzee research, heightening its pre-existing financial and ethical problems. The scientific and lay debate sparked by chimpanzee AIDS research demonstrates the intersection of ethics and economics in shaping laboratory research practices and disease politics in the late twentieth century. As animal advocates constructed laboratory chimpanzees as close human relatives, innocent of the imagined sins of people with AIDS, researchers working with chimpanzees confronted their ambiguity as an HIV animal model and the long-term costs of maintaining HIV-infected animals. By the late 1990s, an animal that had been a promising AIDS model became a public relations headache and a major expense for biomedical research. The pushback to the use of chimpanzees in AIDS research helps scholars understand how American scientists, activists, and animal advocates have made sense of the enmeshed concerns of human and animal welfare in a time of epidemiological crisis.