Canadian Bulletin of Medical History最新文献

Advocates of homeopathic vaccines, also known as nosodes, reimagined the risks and benefits of vaccination from 1999 to 2015 by comparing "risky" vaccines to "risk-free" nosodes. I argue that nosodes allowed for a complementary argument to anti-vaccine discourse, fundamentally altering what had been framed as a choice between the risks of vaccination and the risks of vaccine-preventable disease. Despite evidence of their efficacy being flawed, advocates presented nosodes as an alternative to vaccines and a middle ground between anti-vaccination and vaccination. While a campaign from 2013 to 2015 tried to expose nosodes as ineffective, I argue that the campaign was unsuccessful. Instead, the mainstream media brought more attention to nosodes. The history of nosodes further complicates the history of vaccines and alternative medicine in Canada by adding vaccine alternatives to the growing literature on vaccine hesitancy.

In early modern Europe, the global dimensions of the drug trade and the introduction of new substances contributed to the development of new cultures of intoxication. This process was particularly evident in England, where a new intoxication culture emerged from the recognition of how different substances produced similar reactions. Medical travel literature provides a critical source for examining alternative methods of drug consumption in the non-Western world in this period: culturally embedded practices like Turkish opium eating or Native American tobacco smoking became significant benchmarks for comparing with Western habits of alcohol consumption. This article argues that the early modern Western medical community relied on comparisons of intoxication in other contexts in an effort to describe its own culturally embedded practices of alcohol intoxication.

This is a tale in three parts. It begins with an exploration of the story of Princess Tsahai, daughter of Haile Selassie, and the highly successful British campaign led by suffragette E. Sylvia Pankhurst to bring British-style nursing and medicine to Ethiopia in the 1940s and 1950s. Second, it examines the role of foreign women, most notably Swedish missionary nurses, in building health services and nursing capacity in the country. Finally, it examines the way in which nursing brought together gendered notions of expertise and geopolitical pressures to redefine expectations for Ethiopian women as citizens of the new nation-state.

Narrative-based physician records contain much more than observerless data and diagnoses. Indeed, a "case," the basic currency of medical communication, can be seen as a literary genre, much like a novel or a poem, and given close readings for author voice, tradition, and influences. In this article, I describe my initial encounter with Dr. Wilfred Grenfell's casebooks in a hospital basement in St. Anthony, Newfoundland and Labrador, and my subsequent engagement with them as both a physician and a poet. Adopting Bleakley and Marshall's definition of medical lyricism as the impulse that "draws our attention to delicacy, tenderness and the joyous, and to verve, desire, eroticism, the fecund, abundance and generation," I argue that Grenfell's approach to medicine in early 20^th-century Newfoundland and Labrador was both a product of his scientific training and his enculturation at the end of the Victorian period.

In 1906 Dr. Wilfred Grenfell, founder and head of the Grenfell medical mission of northern Newfoundland and southeastern Labrador, published a short article in Putnam's Monthly about a nine-year-old boy named Clem Richards, who had shot himself in the knee while hunting seabirds. The boy's identity was disclosed in full, with Grenfell including his name and image as well as a detailed description of his living conditions. The "story" of the boy's injury and recovery became a favourite of Grenfell's, and it was modified and republished in a number of magazines and books between 1906 and 1923. This article explores the appeal that Richards' accident held for Grenfell and argues that his dramatic mid-winter rescue of the boy helped Grenfell promote his mission and construct a public image of himself that would appeal to American readers and donors. By comparing published accounts with Richards' medical case record, however, we also see how much Grenfell distorted the incident to heighten its drama and reader appeal. The article also considers how the mission's dominance over northern Newfoundland and southeastern Labrador enabled Grenfell to use Richards' name and image for mission publicity with no consideration of patient consent.

This article examines the history of diphtheria in the Yukon and the Mackenzie district of the Northwest Territories in the first half of the 20^th century. This analysis follows the traces of this now largely forgotten disease and its treatment to illuminate the constraints - intrinsic and constructed - on the provision of health care commensurate with the expectations and needs of northern Indigenous peoples. While diphtheria was never the most serious infectious disease, nor a major cause of death compared with tuberculosis or influenza at this time, examining its history offers significant insight into the creation of medical and public health infrastructures in Canada's northern territories, and the ways in which those infrastructures served, and failed to serve, different northern populations.

Since the end of 1970, the World Health Organization has encouraged the development of public policies that expand the approach to care and the therapeutic possibilities offered by its member states beyond technoscientific health care. In Brazil, the institutionalization of this approach is related to the promotion of popular and traditional knowledge associated with the usage of medicinal plants. With this convergence as an argumentative horizon, in this ethnography we examine the institutionalization of pharmaceutical services that have become known in Brazilian public health policy as living pharmacies. This term has been mobilized throughout the history of phytotherapy in Brazil and refers to the possibility of instituting the use of medications that expand care approaches and problem resolution possibilities beyond the domain of the biomedical sciences, evoking alliances with so-called traditional and popular knowledge and practices. For this, we propose and discuss the concept of neo-traditional medicines as a comprehensive-interpretative category, verifying the approximation and distancing points assigned to it in contemporaneous anthropological literature. Beyond the domain of science over other fields of knowledge, we argue in favour of this category in order to present new arrangements and social dynamics that define Brazil's medication policies.

In contemporaneous and retrospective publications, British physician Donald McI. Johnson wrote about medical cases in 1928-29 for the organization founded by Wilfred Grenfell in Newfoundland and Labrador. The availability of one physician's cases in published and institutional forms allows consideration of discursive representations of patients for general and clinical readers in the two decades of Johnson's writing. This study places these cases within the context of Johnson's medical background and his escape to rural practice in a remote locale, one that emphasized emergency operations in Labrador and hospital care in the organization's main hospital in St. Anthony. In this way, it broadens knowledge of medical care provided by visiting physicians and considers ways in which such physicians represented local patients in publications for the general reader. Although it determines that Johnson was unique, it indicates the value of the fuller study of publications by other physicians associated with the Grenfell organization.

In this article I argue that the scarcity of painkillers in the Global South is driven by a central asymmetry in which the health of developed countries is valued over that of the much poorer countries that comprise the rest of the world. To elucidate this point, I argue that by examining the history of various legal institutions and specific events, like the opioid crisis, that have shaped the global production of opium and production in India, one will be able to see the genealogy of the imbalance and inequality that has always affected care. I turn to the state of Kerala to explore instances in which these legal inflections live within the contemporary guidelines for palliative care, and thus constantly affect the supply and delivery of care. This also ties in with the much longer history of opium control for the growth of the global pharmaceutical industry, within which India has been uniquely placed.