Bulletin of the History of Medicine最新文献

Psychiatric epidemiology has significantly influenced public health policies all around the world. This article discusses how Finnish epidemiologists reacted to local needs, which were born in specific circumstances and were controlled by science policy and funding opportunities. The development between the 1900s and 1990s is divided into three stages. The first Finnish studies in the field focused on the prevalence of mental illnesses in the country. The focus was to gain information for service planning, most of all to estimate the need for new hospitals and to set up the national social insurance system. After the Second World War, structural changes and social engineering fueled epidemiological interest. From the 1960s until the late 1980s, psychiatric epidemiology was interconnected with social psychiatry, which held a strong position in Finland. Since the 1990s, Finnish psychiatric epidemiology has been integrated with international epidemiology by using shared methodologies and through participation in transnational studies.

This article situates the emergence of sensationalized news reports of "infant addicts" and the concurrently evolving study of neonatal drug withdrawal within the context of the expansion of methadone maintenance treatment (MMT) in the United States. It details how, in the early 1970s, concerns about pregnant narcotic addicts and their infants became part of the politically charged debate over methadone maintenance. The popular press amplified the apprehensions of a vocal group of pediatricians who saw in infants' withdrawal an indication of methadone's inherent harmfulness and potential toxicity. Increased access to MMT and its presumed normalizing effects on reproductive functions augmented these concerns. The ensuing controversy led clinical researchers to define, measure, and systematically study "neonatal abstinence syndrome," whereas the emerging media trope of the infant drug addict effectively undermined the claims made by MMT's proponents about the drug's therapeutic utility.

The emergence of obstetric anesthesia in the second half of the nineteenth century was preceded by a transformation in the medical conceptualization of women's pain. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, physicians described pain in physiological terms as natural and unproblematic, but in the second half of the nineteenth century they adopted a newly emotional language that emphasized women's subjective experiences of suffering. Middle-class and elite white women shaped this transition by insisting that their physical and emotional anguish was extreme. Women's attitudes, combined with a growing perception that sensibility to pain was a marker of "civilization," pushed physicians to view suffering as real and problematic. As they began to depict pain relief as an urgent medical concern, physicians envisioned refined white women as the primary beneficiaries of their new technology; this perspective paved the way for the increasingly routine use of anesthesia for middle-class and elite white women.

This article explores a poorly understood smallpox vaccination campaign targeting Native Americans in the 1830s. While previous scholars have addressed the motivations of U.S. officials in launching the campaign, the author focuses on Indigenous people's interest in disease prevention and their reception of American physicians and vaccine technology across a broad swath of North America. Resistance to vaccination was not uncommon among Native people, yet many were open to the new form of preventive medicine, including some who sought it out and others who demanded it from the government. Departing from a scholarly consensus, the author argues, first, that the federal vaccination program should be viewed as a successful public health intervention in Indian Country and, second, that this success owed to Indigenous nations' desire for protection against a singularly destructive pathogen.