Medical History

During the interwar period, France put unprecedented efforts into public health measures targeting the colonised populations of sub-Saharan Africa. This investment in health was seen as crucial to ensuring the renewal of the African labour force needed for the economic development of the colonies. Syphilis, although less deadly than other endemic or epidemic diseases such as yellow fever, sleeping sickness and bubonic plague, was one of the most widespread infections in France's sub-Saharan colonies. This article demonstrates the contradictory nature of the colonial medicine approach to this disease during the interwar years...

Though the Hippocratic text On the Heart has garnered significant attention in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries from classicists, physicians and historians of medicine alike, no commentary on this important work currently exists. There remain, however, central questions of interpretation concerning a number of important points: in particular, how the author understands the structure and functioning of the heart.The significance of this text for the history of cardiovascular medicine can be found first in its position as being radically advanced in its portrayal of the inner structure of the heart when compared with any other Hippocratic text...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

John A. Ryle was Britain's first professor of Social Medicine. In the 1930s and 1940s, at the peak of his influence, he was a vigorous proponent of social medicine, then a relatively new, if contested, field. This article examines Ryle's views and activities under three broad headings: What was social medicine? What were Ryle's politics? Why prioritise medical education? We conclude with the apparent failure of the social medicine project, at least as envisioned by Ryle.

Imagery is an overarching feature of Maximus of Tyre's Orations which has never been the subject of systematic investigation. This paper provides a starting point by focusing exclusively on medical imagery, one of the most pervasive and instrumental types of imagery in Maximus' work that has gone entirely unnoticed in the literature to date. This paper shows that Maximus uses medicine (especially its scientific basis and historical development), the physician (e.g. his skill, provision and sensitivity towards the patient), the body (its physiology and workings) and notions of health and disease with considerable diversity and creativity, in ways that make his examples stand out in relation to earlier (Platonic) or contemporary applications of the medical parallel...

In contrast to the well-known stories of the embryotoxic drug, thalidomide, in countries where it was responsible for large numbers of birth defects, there is limited information on its history in India. Its presence before 2002, when the country issued the first marketing licence for a thalidomide-containing preparation, is assumed to be negligible. This article challenges this view by showing that the drug entered the Indian subcontinent through the former Portuguese territory of Goa around 1960. We examine the subsequent development of its distribution, use and regulation in India from the mid-1960s up to the present situation...

This article advances historical understandings of health, veterinary medicine and livestock agriculture by examining how, in mid-twentieth-century Britain, the diseases of livestock were made collectively knowable. During this period, the state extended its gaze beyond a few, highly impactful notifiable diseases to a host of other threats to livestock health. The prime mechanism through which this was achieved was the disease survey. Paralleling wider developments in survey practices, it grew from small interwar beginnings into a hugely expensive, wide-ranging state veterinary project that created a new conception of the nation's livestock as a geographical aggregation of animals in varying states of health...

The late eighteenth and early nineteenth century witnessed a dramatic increase in the number of pauper lunatics being admitted to institutions and many mentally-ill paupers found their way into workhouses. The range of options existing for the admission of paupers, who at the time were described as lunatics or insane, included private madhouses, charitable asylums, public asylums as well as workhouses. Legislation relating to transfer from a workhouse to a one of these other institutions was ambiguous and depended on the concept of dangerousness and whether a workhouse inmate was manageable, rather than the nature of their illness...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

Nineteenth-century physicians increasingly favoured leeching - the placing of a live leech onto a patient's skin to stimulate or limit blood flow - as a cure for numerous ailments. As conviction in their therapeutic properties spread, leech therapy dominated European medicine; France imported over fifty million leeches in one year. Demand soon outpaced supply, spawning a lucrative global trade. Over-collection and farming eventually destroyed leech habitats, wreaked environmental havoc and forced European merchants to seek new supply sources...

Guinea worm disease (dracunculiasis) is a debilitating waterborne disease. Once widespread, it is now on the brink of eradication. However, the Guinea Worm Eradication Programme (GWEP), like guinea worm itself, has been under-studied by historians. The GWEP demonstrates an unusual model of eradication, one focused on primary healthcare (PHC), community participation, health education and behavioural change (safe drinking). The PHC movement collided with a waterborne disease, which required rapid but straightforward treatment to prevent transmission, creating a historical space for the emergence of village-based volunteer health workers, as local actors realigned global health policy on a local level...

The theory that the people of the early modern period slept in well-defined segments of 'first' and 'second' sleeps has been highly influential in both scholarly literature and mainstream media over the past twenty years. Based on a combination of scientific, anthropological and textual evidence, the segmented sleep theory has been used to illuminate discussions regarding important aspects of early modern nocturnal culture; mainstream media reports, meanwhile, have proposed segmented sleep as a potentially 'natural' and healthier alternative to consolidated blocks of sleep...

The fear of the malingering soldier or veteran has existed in Australia since its first nationwide military venture in South Africa. The establishment of the Repatriation Department in 1917 saw the medical, military and political fields work collectively, to some extent, to support hundreds of thousands of men who returned from their military service wounded or ill. Over the next decades the medical profession occasionally criticised the Repatriation Department's alleged laxness towards soldier recipients of military pensions, particularly those with less visible war-related psychiatric conditions...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

This article examines the presence and influence of the work of Swiss psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger and existential analysis ( Daseinsanalyse ) in Spanish psychiatry in the central decades of the 20th century. First, and drawing on various printed and archival sources, it reconstructs the important personal and professional ties that Binswanger maintained with numerous Spanish colleagues and describes the notable dissemination of his work in Spain through bibliographical reviews, scientific events, academic reports, university lectures and translations...

In February and March 1953, a WHO Visiting Team of Medical Scientists worked in India, collaborating with local medical students and professionals. This article studies the complexities of early postcolonial international health work and the relations between the young WHO and the newly independent countries, from the position of the team's vice chairman, Norwegian doctor Karl Evang. While the WHO aimed to create dialogue and interaction, also learning from the host country, the article finds that an equal exchange of views between visitors and hosts was not achieved...

This article investigates how World Health Organisation (WHO) Director-General Halfdan Mahler's views on health care were formed by his experience in India between 1951 and 1961. Mahler spent a large part of the 1950s in India assigned as WHO medical officer to tuberculosis control projects. It argues that Mahler took inspiration from the official endorsement of the doctrine of social medicine that prevailed in India; even if it was challenged by an increasing preference for vertical, techno-centric campaigns...

Intermittent fever is a historical diagnosis with a contested meaning. Historians have associated it with both benign malaria and severe epidemics during the Early Modern Era and early nineteenth century. Where other older medical diagnoses perished under changing medical paradigms, intermittent fever 'survived' into the twentieth century. This article studies the development in how intermittent fever was framed in Denmark between 1826 and 1886 through terminology, clinical symptoms and aetiology. In the 1820s and 1830s, intermittent fever was a broad disease category, which the diagnosis 'koldfeber'...

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Our contributions examine the Norwegian Karl Evang's (1901-1981) and the Dane Halfdan Mahler's (1923-2016) participation in international health co-operation facilitated by the World Health Organization (WHO) in India in the 1950s. While Evang's was a hectic, but relatively short visit as part of a WHO visiting team of medical scientists in 1953, Mahler's spanned the entire decade on assignments as WHO medical officer to tuberculosis control projects. Mahler's name should be familiar to researchers of international health as the Director-General of the WHO 1973-88, and for his promotion of primary health care through the 1978 Alma-Ata Declaration...