Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences - recent issues

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

A Thing Patented is a Thing Divulged: Francis E. Stewart, George S. Davis, and the Legitimization of Intellectual Property Rights in Pharmaceutical Manufacturing, 1879-1911

Gabriel, J. M. — 2009-02-25

This article examines the efforts of pharmacist and physician Francis E. Stewart to legitimize the commercial introduction of new drugs by reinterpreting the ethical status of patent rights in pharmaceutical manufacturing. I argue that patents had long been understood by the orthodox medical community as an unethical form of medical monopoly and that, as a result, drug companies that marketed their goods primarily to physicians in the years immediately following the Civil War had little room to develop or introduce new products. In collaboration with George S. Davis and the pharmaceutical manufacturing firm Parke, Davis, & Company, Stewart worked to redefine patents as an ethical means of encouraging scientific and commercial innovation. In doing so, he sought to reconcile medical science and commerce so that they were mutually beneficial to one another. However, I also suggest that his efforts had an ironic effect in that they helped legitimatize a form of patent protection that Stewart himself came to believe to be unethical in nature.

"A Fine New Child": The Lafargue Mental Hygiene Clinic and Harlem's African American Communities, 1946-1958

Doyle, D. — 2009-02-25

In 1946, the Lafargue Mental Hygiene Clinic, a small outpatient facility run by volunteers, opened in Central Harlem. Lafargue lasted for almost thirteen years, providing the underserved black Harlemites with what might be later termed community mental health care. This article explores what the clinic meant to the African Americans who created, supported, and made use of its community-based services. While white humanitarianism often played a large role in creating such institutions, this clinic would not have existed without the help and support of both Harlem's black left and the increasingly activist African American church of the "long civil rights era." Not only did St. Philip's Church provide a physical home for the clinic, it also helped to integrate it into black Harlem, creating a patient community. The article concludes with a lengthy examination of these patients' clinical experiences. Relying upon patient case files, the article provides a unique snapshot of the psychologization of postwar American culture. Not only does the author detail the ways in which the largely working class patient community used this facility clinic, he also explores how the patients engaged with modern psychodynamic concepts in forming their own complex understandings of selfhood and mental health.

Physiological Optics, Cognition and Emotion: A Novel Look at the Early Work of Wilhelm Wundt

Wassmann, C. — 2009-02-25

The German physiologist Wilhelm Wundt, who later founded experimental psychology, arguably developed the first modern scientific conception of emotion. In the first edition of Vorlesungen über die Menschen- und Thierseele (Lectures on human and animal psychology), which was published in 1863, Wundt tried to establish that emotions were essential parts of rational thought. In fact, he considered them unconscious steps of decision-making that were implied in all processes of conscious thought. His early work deserves attention not only because it is the attempt to conceptualize cognition and emotion strictly from a neural point of view but also because it represents the very foundation of the debate about the nature of emotion that revolved around William James' theory of emotion during the 1890s. However, this aspect of his work is little known because scholars who have analyzed Wundt's work focused on his late career. Furthermore, historical analysis interpreted Wundt's work within a philosophical framework, rather than placing it in the context of German medical and physiological research in which it belongs. In addition, Wundt's early works are hardly available to an English speaking audience because they were never translated.

Plague and the End of Antiquity: The Pandemic of 541-750

Riddle, J. — 2009-02-25

Maimonides: Medical Aphorisms Treatises 6-9

Macfarlane, P. — 2009-02-25

Herman Boerhaave: The Man and His Work

Williams, E. A. — 2009-02-25

Smallpox and the Literary Imagination 1660-1820

Rusnock, A. — 2009-02-25

Popular Medicines, an Illustrated History

Sonnedecker, G. — 2009-02-25

Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse: A Life in Medicine and Public Service (1754-1846)

Parker, B. R. — 2009-02-25

Birthing a Slave: Motherhood and Medicine in the Antebellum South

Wall, L. L. — 2009-02-25

Blood and Homeland: Eugenics and Racial Nationalism in Central and Southeast Europe, 1900-1940

Dowbiggin, I. — 2009-02-25

A Strange and Formidable Weapon: British Responses to World War I Poison Gas

Reznick, J. S. — 2009-02-25

The Sterilization Movement and Global Fertility in the Twentieth Century

Weikart, R. — 2009-02-25

Causation and Cleanliness: George Callender, Wounds, and the Debates over Listerism

Kernahan, P. J. — 2008-11-19

This article reexamines the surgical and historiographic debate over antisepsis and the germ theory through the work of the prominent London surgeon George W. Callender (1830–1879) and the statistical records of St. Bartholomew's Hospital. Surgeons in the mid-nineteenth century faced a rising incidence of wound infection and its systemic complications. Examining mortality and complication rates by type of wound, however, suggests that the extent of this crisis is often overstated. Callender himself occupied a frequently overlooked middle ground in the debate over Listerism. On the one hand, his program of cleanliness, which antedated Lister's work and extended from the wound to the ward, produced excellent and influential results. On the other, while he was never an explicit critic of the germ theory, his writings demonstrate why Lister's collapse of causation into a single etiologic agent was so difficult for surgeons to accept.

Learning from Mistakes: Early Twentieth-Century Surgical Practice

Wilde, S., Hirst, G. — 2008-11-19

Archibald Watson was an Australian anatomist and surgeon who kept operating theater diaries. He made detailed notes on the work of surgeons that he observed in Britain and North America, as well as in Australia. Watson's diaries provide significant evidence that early twentieth-century surgeons did not just apply scientific knowledge produced somewhere else. They generated new surgical knowledge themselves and worked within a culture that valued innovation. Some of the surgeons observed by Watson practiced in academic centers and regularly engaged in laboratory research, but most did not. Nevertheless, it is clear that whether in Australia, Britain, or North America, the active search for improved techniques was a routine feature of the practice of full-time surgeons. In the process, they often made mistakes—or rather, they often did things with which at least some of their colleagues did not agree. Much of surgical practice was contestable. Doing things the "right" way and finding better ways to do things were overlapping categories; but it is often difficult or impossible to draw any distinction at all between doing things the "wrong" way and failed attempts at finding a better way to perform an operation. This article examines some aspects of the relationship between scientific ideas, clinical experience, contestable errors, and the generation of new knowledge through surgical practice.

"God Bless General Peron": DDT and the Endgame of Malaria Eradication in Argentina in the 1940s

Carter, E. D. — 2008-11-19

This article explores the politics of malaria eradication in Argentina during the first government of Juan D. Perón. The article develops the theme of historical convergence to understand the rapid mobilization and success of the climactic battle against malaria in Northwest Argentina. The nearly complete eradication of malaria in Argentina resulted from a combination of three factors. First, Carlos Alvarado, the director of Argentina's Malaria Service, had already developed a solid but flexible organizational base that allowed a dramatic change in control strategy. Second, an infusion of new technologies, especially DDT but also motor vehicles, was instrumental. Lastly, a radical reorientation of national public health policy in the 1940s, under the direction of Perón and his health minister, Ramón Carrillo, encouraged eradication. These figures embraced and refashioned long-standing organicist ideologies that hitched the strength of the nation-state to the health and vigor of its ordinary citizens. This ideological orientation was reflected in bold, populist political strategies that showcased swift, massive, and expensive public health campaigns, including malaria eradication. In the conclusion, the article explores the ambiguous connections between malaria eradication and an ecological perspective on the disease.

A Philosophical Path for Paracelsian Medicine: The Ideas, Intellectual Context, and Influence of Petrus Severinus (1540/2-1602)

Nance, B. — 2008-11-19

Menstruation: A Cultural History

Apple, R. D. — 2008-11-19

Intensely Human: The Health of the Black Soldier in the American Civil War

Craig, S. C. — 2008-11-19

Jailed for Possession: Illegal Drug Use, Regulation, and Power in Canada, 1920-1961

Erlen, J. — 2008-11-19

Books of Secrets: Natural Philosophy in England, 1550-1600

Greenberg, S. J. — 2008-11-19