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Anatomy of the Medical Image is an edited collection seeking to explore "the role images play in knowledge formation" (p. 8). The editors note that "even in medical knowledge formations there is not one body but many" (p. 8), and the thirteen chapters that make up the volume consider, among other themes, "the anatomical, pathological, gendered, imagined, and consumed body" (p. 8).
The volume is relatively broad in its geographical scope, a welcome approach, and thematically arranged into three parts. A variety of media are covered, from paintings (Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson) to photographs (for example, those exchanged between Charles Darwin and psychiatrist James Crichton-Browne during the research for Darwin's 1872 Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals). Other chapters cover physical culture and classical beauty ideals in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Germany, nineteenth- and twentieth-century medical portraiture, German fin-de-siècle public health posters, microscopy in the Weimar Republic, psychiatric art collections, graphic medicine, and zombie TV drama. An especially interesting chapter is that by Axel Fliethmann on sixteenth-and seventeenth-century accounts of "pathologies of imagination" (p. 58). It is an intriguing chapter, and although it would have benefitted from a greater word count to properly explore the medical and epistemological frameworks of the period under discussion, it is an innovative exploration of images and the conceptualization of the "visual" in medicine.
Some of the strongest chapters are those that focus on discrete networks of production, or individual artists and makers who have been relatively overlooked in the historiography to date. Elizabeth Stephens's chapter on obstetric models is a fascinating exploration of female wax modelers such as Anna Morandi, whose self-portrait in wax (ca. 1760)—depicting her in the process of dissecting a brain—was "explicitly designed to reposition the female body in anatomical research and practice" (p. 80). The striking and aesthetically pleasing waxes of male artists like Clemente Susini—whose reclining "anatomical Venus" models were adorned with jewelry, their hair carefully arranged on plush pillows—have, Stephens argues, eclipsed the more functional models used in anatomical teaching, such as the eighteenth-century birthing machine of Angélique de Coudray.
Carolyn Lau's chapter is wor
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In Africanizing Oncology, Marissa Mika provides an engaging and thought-provoking history of the Uganda Center Institute (UCI), a unit of the Mulago Hospital at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda. The book is more than just a narrow institutional history or a medical history of a single disease, as she tells the story of how Uganda Africanized oncology. At the center of those efforts, and her story, are African experts, institute employees, and Ugandan patients. Throughout the book, Mika presents examples of Ugandans resourcefully providing care despite material constraints, political instability, and social challenges. She persuasively argues that oncology developed at the UCI through Ugandans adapting research, resources, infrastructures, and techniques to fit their unique (often challenging) circumstances. Africanizing Oncology is a creative, interdisciplinary work that serves as a model for how the history of medicine, science and technology studies (STS), and the history of science can be in productive conversation with African studies.
The book is well researched and carefully put together. Mika draws on a combination of historical and anthropological sources and methods, including UCI archival sources, months of ethnographic fieldwork at the UCI, forty formal oral histories with prominent individuals in the history of cancer in Uganda, twenty interviews with patient caregivers, and interviews with international colleagues based at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. The book is organized into six chapters and a moving final epilogue. Chapters 1 through 4 offer a chronological history of cancer care and research in Uganda, starting with early colonial cancer research and the founding of the UCI in 1967. In these chapters readers see how physicians and researchers responded creatively during times of crisis. Mika describes how the UCI often operated under conditions of "normal [End Page 525] emergency" and had to continue care during times when "drugs were missing, gloves were rarely in stock, and blood was only to be found in the veins of relatives willing to donate" (pp. 101–2). Chapters 5 and 6 explore international partnerships and new investments by institutions such as the Fred Hutchinson Center.
Mika's work responds to and builds on Julie Livingston's groundbreaking 2012 book, Improvising Medicine: An African Oncology Ward in an Emerging Cancer Epidemic. Africanizing Oncology contributes much-needed geographical context from the east
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This article contrasts women's auxiliaries as volunteers and fundraisers at a voluntary sanatorium and a community hospital in metropolitan Phoenix. Their experience highlights the rising importance of private investors in nonprofit health care. Nonprofit community hospitals depended on volunteer labor from women's auxiliaries to keep their doors open in the mid-twentieth-century United States. However, their position became subordinate to financial demands from bondholders—these (and other) financial influences eroded the social capital created by charitable labor. At Maryvale Hospital, one of the "eight-percenter" mortgage bond hospitals built across the Sun Belt during the early sixties, bondholders assumed much of the fundraising and advocacy activities reserved for women's auxiliaries. Once bondholders assumed the duties of women's auxiliaries, their profitability became the determinant for success in nonprofit health care. Their rise reflects a shift from the social capital associated with charitable volunteers to the bond markets necessary for modern metropolitan development.
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This article considers the establishment of the category of "hormone-dependent cancers," identified around the middle of the twentieth century as cancers sustained by particular hormones. A comparison of hormonal treatments for prostate cancer and those for breast cancer reveals that the genesis of "hormone-dependent cancer" as a biomedical category relied upon assumptions that cast androgens and estrogens as opposing ends of a gendered hormonal binary of health and disease. In the 1930s, cancer researchers claimed "female sex hormones" (estrogens) exacerbated breast cancer and "male sex hormones" (androgens) prevented it. In the early 1940s, Dr. Charles Huggins applied the opposite logic to the treatment of human prostate cancer, which he determined to be "hormone-dependent." As "hormone dependency" was also recognized in human breast cancer over the subsequent decades, estrogen claimed a prominent place in discussions of breast cancer's causation, diagnosis, and treatment. This close association between estrogen and breast cancer contributed to reinterpretations of both biomedical categories.
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The Soviet Union was one of the word's main producers and consumers of tobacco products, competing in this widespread habit and unhealthy business, although not quite reaching the levels achieved by the United States. As a basic social phenomenon, smoking did not know political and ideological boundaries, but was not independent from them either. Tricia Starks accumulated a very rich, diverse, and culturally revealing body of sources explaining how the different patterns of manufacturing, selling, and opposing the use of tobacco developed over the seven decades of Soviet history.
Tobacco came to Russia via Western Europe in the seventeenth century, defying initial bans on religious grounds. It was fully legalized by Peter the Great, and by 1900 the country was fully affected by the global epidemic of smoking, which spread wider during World War I. Soldiers and workers whose mass action made the revolution of 1917 filled the halls and streets with the smell of cheap tobacco, but Lenin personally hated smoking and tried to ban it during Bolshevik meetings. In 1920, Commissar of Public Health Nikolai Semashko launched the public propaganda campaign against smoking as damaging to health, but this internationally pathbreaking effort by the first socialist state competed against economic interests of other governmental agencies that wanted to restore tobacco production decimated by the war, provide jobs, and satisfy the demand of revolutionary masses. While health officials and doctors were inventing pioneering methods to encourage and assist cessation, the semicapitalist New Economic Policy economy designed artistically innovative commercials for the booming tobacco factories.
Stalinist industrialization prioritized increased mass production to meet the growing demand. Cessation efforts and sales commercials became less visible, with emphasis more on cultured consumption and quality improvement or the shift from cottage-industry-style cheap tobacco (makhorka) toward industrially made papirosen and cigarettes. While consumers were overwhelmingly male, females constituted the bulk of the labor force in the tobacco economy, which achieved [End Page 518] great strides in approaching the "equal pay for equal work" goal and promoting women to responsible positions, such as director of the most prestigious Iava factory, Maria Ivanova. While the government message that nicotine was bad for health remained valid, especially for schoolkids, it was not very effective when the same government worshiped St
*The Bulletin reserves freedom of decision as to the publications to be included in this section. Items received, other than those reviewed, are ultimately incorporated into the collection of the Institute of the History of Medicine. [End Page 527]
Allan V. Horwitz. Personality Disorders: A Short History of Narcissistic, Borderline, Antisocial, and Other Types. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023. xii + 228 pp. $35.00 (978-1-4214-4610-3). Guian A. McKee. Hospital City, Health Care Nation: Race, Capital, and the Costs of American Health Care. Politics and Culture in Modern America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023. x + 382 pp. Ill. $45.00 (978-1-5128-2393-6). Kevin McQueeney. A City Withoutsummary:
This paper explores the experiences of working-class patients treated for tertiary syphilis at the Neurology Dispensary of the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and the Infirmary for Nervous Disease of the Philadelphia Orthopedic Hospital from 1878 to 1917. Using the twin lenses of medical history and disability history, it foregrounds the struggles of individuals whose physical condition cannot be reversed.
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The phrase "disease of civilization" and concomitant lexicons, such as "pathologies of modernization," frequently surface across public and global health discourses. This is particularly the case within the framework of cancer research in Africa. In this article, the authors trace the emergence of these grammars of progress at the beginning of the twentieth century as a biomedical lens through which to analyze and frame cancer in Africa. Arguing with Ann Stoler for a recursive understanding of colonial and postcolonial history, the authors follow in detail the lexical shifts and recursions across the twentieth century, as these grammars move from diseases of civilization to development and modernization. In tracing these lexical shifts, they place them within the broader understandings of Africa and the African body as an other against which Euro-America frames itself.
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