Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences - current issue

The Maudsley Hospital and the Rockefeller Foundation: The Impact of Philanthropy on Research and Training

Jones, E., Rahman, S. — 2009-05-29

Opened in February 1923 to raise the status of academic psychiatry in the UK, the Maudsley Hospital struggled to secure grant income. Without a track record of published research and lacking internationally recognized clinicians, it failed to impress the British Medical Research Council. To challenge leading U.S. and German departments of neuropsychiatry, Edward Mapother, the medical superintendent, looked overseas for investment in an "institute of psychiatry." Intense lobbying and a modified strategy for research and training designed to meet the Rockefeller Foundation's prioritization of psychiatry and medical specialization ultimately led to a significant endowment. Alan Gregg and Daniel O'Brien at the Foundation played a pivotal role in re-defining the Maudsley's programs of research and teaching. Pressure on Mapother to attract funding was matched by that on administrators required to show that their philanthropy had yielded tangible gains in public health. While wealthy charities, like the Rockefeller, often had a vision of the direction that they wished to pull medical science, and they provided much needed income, the impact of their policy agenda was not without drawbacks. Institutions unwilling to embrace a charity's philosophy were unlikely to secure grants, while those that did might find themselves drawn into less optimal areas.

Honor, Brotherhood, and the Corporate Ethos of London's Barber-Surgeons' Company, 1570-1640

Chamberland, C. — 2009-05-29

As the largest and most civically active body of medical practitioners in the late Tudor and early Stuart period, surgeons played a vital role in London's urban landscape, but remained precariously vulnerable to abasement due to the regular contact with death and disease necessitated by their work. Based on an analysis of guild records, printed surgical manuals, and conduct literature, this study explores the emergent corporate ethos of London's Barber-Surgeons' Company and addresses the identity formation of surgeons in the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries. By implementing codes of conduct and uniform standards of practice, punishing transgressions of propriety, and developing legislation to limit the activities of unlicensed and foreign practitioners, Company officers ardently sought social and occupational legitimacy within a milieu characterized by a tremendous emphasis on status and hierarchy. Rooted in methodology drawn from the social history of medicine and cultural anthropology, this study argues that in response to the persistent stigma associated with their work and London's increasingly prevalent culture of credit, surgeons, like other artisanal groups, sought to enhance their social legitimacy and occupational respectability by manipulating contemporary social rituals, reinforcing the honorable associations of their work, and preserving the veneer of brotherhood and camaraderie.

Necessary Torture? Vivisection, Suffragette Force-Feeding, and Responses to Scientific Medicine in Britain c. 1870-1920

Miller, I. — 2009-05-29

One of the primary aims of late nineteenth-century laboratory experimentation was to ground understandings of illness and disease within new regimes of science. It was also hoped that clinical practice would become increasingly complemented by discoveries and technologies accrued from emergent forms of modern medical enquiry, and that, ultimately, this would lead to improved diagnostic and therapeutic procedures that could be applied to a wide variety of medical complaints. This met with resistance in Britain. So far, analyses of the British reception to forms of scientific medicine have focused on a science versus intuition dichotomy. This article aims to address other aspects intertwined in the debate through an exploration of alternative representations of the medical scientist available and the relation of this to perceptions of clinical practice. Using new technologies of the stomach as a case study, I shall examine how physiologists approached digestion in the laboratory, the responses of antivivisectionists to this, the application of gastric innovations at the clinical level, and the impact of the use of the stomach tube in the suffragette force-feeding controversy.

Origins of American Health Insurance: A History of Industrial Sickness Funds

Rothstein, W. G. — 2009-05-29

The Tropical World of Samuel Taylor Darling: Parasites, Pathology, and Philanthropy

Craig, S. C. — 2009-05-29

Heroes of Pharmacy: Professional Leadership in Times of Change

Zebroski, B. — 2009-05-29

The Politics of Madness: The State, Insanity and Society in England, 1845-1914

Grob, G. N. — 2009-05-29

Murder after Death: Literature and Anatomy in Early Modern England

Furdell, E. L. — 2009-05-29

Making Women's Medicine Masculine: The Rise of Male Authority in Pre-Modern Gynaecology

Turner, W. J. — 2009-05-29

Renovating Russia: The Human Sciences and the Fate of Liberal Modernity, 1880-1980

Conroy, M. S. — 2009-05-29

Our Present Complaint: American Medicine Then and Now

Huddle, T. S. — 2009-05-29

Is Arsenic an Aphrodisiac? The Sociochemistry of an Element

Parascandola, J. — 2009-05-29

The Ambulance: A History

Haller, J. S. — 2009-05-29

Dropsy, Dialysis, Transplant: A Short History of Failing Kidneys

Diethelm, A. G. — 2009-05-29

Mental Illness and Learning Disability since 1850: Finding a Place for Mental Disorder in the United Kingdom

Greenfeld, L. — 2009-05-29

Call for Papers: 2010 Annual Meeting of the American Association for the History of Medicine

2009-05-29