Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences

This paper examines anesthesiologist Henry K. Beecher's funding relationship with pharmaceutical manufacturer Edward Mallinckrodt, Jr. Beecher is a familiar figure to both medical ethicists and historians of medicine for his role in the bioethics revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. In particular, his 1966 article "Ethics and Clinical Research" is widely considered a turning point in the post-World War II debate about informed consent. We argue that Beecher's scientific interests should be understood in the context of his funding relationship with Mallinckrodt and that this relationship shaped the direction of his work in important ways...

In the second half of the nineteenth century, scientific and technological developments in surgery permitted safer procedures to be carried out. Theoretically, therefore, children whose lives would otherwise have been blighted by disease could be saved by timely operative interference. The reality was more complicated, however, as this article shows. Through an exploration of British and American surgical textbooks and an in-depth analysis of the child surgical patient base at one London general hospital, the tensions between the possibilities and the actualities of surgery on children can be examined for the first time...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

History can be a powerful tool for teaching health policy. Particularly in the United States, with its complex system of public and private payers and providers of health services, understanding the historical origins of policies, programs, and institutions makes the system's contours legible. Historical analysis may also help health care providers to navigate this system and to advocate for changes within it. The US Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE) and the Accreditation Council on Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) have curricular standards for students to understand specific aspects of health policy and "systems-based practice," and historians working within the curricular structures of US medical education may find reference to these standards useful in explaining and justifying their role in preparing medical students and resident physicians for practice...

Questions of how to sustain interest in the history of medicine and broader health sciences (HOM/HS) in a changing institutional environment, and how to collaborate with stakeholders to offer activities to do so, are on the radar for many academic health sciences centers and their libraries. This essay is an initial exploratory study of non-curricular HOM/HS efforts at United States medical schools ranked in the top thirty in primary care or research. In 2019, we collected public information pertinent to any presence of an on-campus HOM/HS community and the group's structure, including funding, activities, and the library's involvement with the group...

This article examines the pedagogical significance of history workshops as part of the mandatory medical curriculum in Hong Kong. At the University of Hong Kong, year one medical students must take a three-hour long history workshop at the Hong Kong Museum of Medical Sciences. We argue that by immersing experiential museum learning into the official medical curriculum, students can grow interest in Hong Kong's local medical history and discover its spatial relevance to their future practice. Moreover, students are equipped with analytical skills to tackle important agendas, such as historical contingency, multicausality of diseases, and perspectivism in dealing with conflicting narratives...

Medical historians and educators have long lamented that the integration of the study of the history of medicine into the educational curricula of medical schools and clinic-based teaching has been protractedly troubled. Employing the development of the history of medicine program at the University of Calgary as a case study, this article emphasizes the importance of integrating medical history with teaching schedules to further students' insights into changing health care settings, the social contingency of disease concepts, and socio-economic dependences of medical decision-making...

Since the early twentieth century, a number of physicians and professional historians have argued for the integration of the history of medicine into both medical education and clinical practice. After the supplanting of the humoral model of medicine in favor of the germ theory of disease in the late nineteenth century, medical school administrators have repeatedly asked medical historians for their rationale for studying "outdated science" in medical training programs beyond antiquarianism and knowledge for knowledge's sake...

The history of medicine has only unevenly been integrated into medical education. Previous attempts to incorporate the subject have focused either on the first year, with its already over-subscribed curriculum, or the fourth year in the form of electives that reach a small minority of students. Duke University provides an alternative model for other universities to consider. At our institution we have overcome many of the curricular limitations by including history during the mandatory third year clerkships...

Historians and physicians have struggled to incorporate history into American medical education for over a century. Most efforts focus on local initiatives targeting a narrow audience. We describe a novel method involving the American College of Surgeons, a national organization with tens of thousands of members. Capitalizing on its infrastructure and influence over the field, we have implemented a variety of ventures that include panel sessions at meetings, poster competitions, travel grants, themed breakfasts, online communities, and other such projects...

The University of Kansas School of Medicine recently confronted challenging questions about commemorative naming. Every year, the school assigns the incoming medical students to advising groups, called academic societies. There are six societies, each bearing the name of a prominent physician from the school's history. Over the years, as students learned about the society namesakes, controversy developed over the naming of the Wahl Society. In 1938, Dr. Harry Wahl led an effort to preserve the racial segregation of the medical school...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

Aimed at clinical educators, this article reports on the use of a single skill-based session that introduces learners in Health Professions Education (HPE) to basic techniques from the discipline of history. The premise of the teaching method is a correspondence between medicine's social determinants of health (SDH) and categories of analysis commonly used by historians. At the center are eight categories, or "tools": social, cultural, intellectual, technological, political, economic, racial/ethnic, and gendered...

Most studies of how United States cities responded to the first deadly wave of Spanish influenza focus on the ways public health officials and their allies reacted to the crisis. This study expands our understanding of the pandemic by focusing on how members of the public responded to those efforts to contain the flu. It does so through a close look at social and civil life in a small city in the southern Midwest during the thirty-two days the flu was epidemic there. Shifting the focus in this way brings previously obscured gaps in the public health response into the light...

In the era of disability rights, medical schools retained the power to discriminate against applicants in wheelchairs. This article explores how medical schools set boundaries for admission into the profession, remained intransigent in their discrimination, and persuaded courts to side with them. Interviews with physicians in wheelchairs, legal documents, medical journal articles, and white papers demonstrate how medical schools established physical standards for entry into the profession specifically in response to applicants with disabilities...

In spring 1987, British pharmaceutical company Wellcome PLC released azidothymidine (AZT) sold under trade name Retrovir, the first successful treatment for AIDS. In the context of a global public health emergency and with no competing products, Wellcome invested heavily in upfront costs to bring Retrovir to market, reflected in the original launch price of $188 (US dollars), applied to all other markets. Retrovir subsequently faced backlash in the United States for its high cost and Wellcome's profits became a target of debates about prescription drugs in the American healthcare system...

This article charts the popularization of and eventual disengagement with an approach to wound infection control centered on the medical efficacy of living beings (maggots) in 1920s and 1930s America. Baltimore surgeon William Stevenson Baer successfully drew on his wartime experience to promote the use of sterile or "surgical" maggots in the treatment for deep-seated bone infection at this time. This article situates the practices he promoted in the context of President Herbert Hoover's contemporary establishment of the "associative state," thereby drawing out the relevance of the latter to medical governance...

The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) has devastated the United States for forty years. Though there are highly effective treatments for HIV and acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) today, the early years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in New York City (NYC) were filled with uncertainty, fear, and death-not unlike the period we are now experiencing in the COVID-19 era. Existing scholarship captures the political discourse of the HIV/AIDS era and the narratives of physicians who specialized in HIV medicine...

Before 1900, diphtheria was a deadly infection in Canadian children. Clinical trials in Europe demonstrated that "antitoxin" decreased mortality of the disease. Canadian physicians first utilized the new medication in 1894 and found it most efficacious when administered early in the illness. Two factors hindered the widespread application of the new medication. Imported antitoxin was expensive, and physicians frequently purchased it themselves rather than let their patients expire. In 1916, Connaught Laboratories in Toronto began domestic production of antitoxin, and provincial governments eventually provided access to the life-saving medication for all citizens...

Alt.support.depression (ASD) was an online forum for patients with depression that operated in the 1990s on the computer network Usenet. At its peak, the forum had an estimated readership of 57,000 and saw upwards of 500 posts a day. Aligning with recent efforts by historians to deinstitutionalize the history of psychiatry, this study traces the emergence of ASD as a new extramural space for mental health care in the 1990s. Its users created a unique therapeutic milieu informed by the consumer-survivor movement and 1990s cyberculture...