Social History of Medicine : the Journal of the Society for the Social History of Medicine

Leagues of Friends are charities that provide 'personal service to patients' and 'supply hospitals with equipment not likely to come from the budgeting of authorities'. Hundreds continue to exist, and many trace their origins to before the NHS's foundation in 1948. Despite the rich and growing historiographies of voluntarism and the NHS, Leagues have received little attention. This article uses case studies of Leagues in the English West Midlands to show how 'friendship' symbolised the relationship between local NHS institutions and the communities they served...

This study examines the initiation and administration of Mercy Hospital in Republican Shanghai. It explains the protracted negotiations that underpinned the collaboration between the Chinese founder Lu Bohong, the Shanghai Municipal Council (SMC) of the International Settlement and the Municipal Administration (FMA) of the French Concession. Despite mutual needs for a psychiatric hospital, the collaboration was undermined by disputes over funding shares and administrative direction. While Lu expected a symbolic modern philanthropy, the SMC and FMA saw it as an economic tool to relieve the responsibility of regulating refugees and the increasing mental patients...

The worldwide 'Spanish' influenza pandemic of 1918-19, which extended into the 1920s, infected more than a third of the world's population and killed an estimated 50-100 million people, more than the civilian and military casualties of World War I. Present-day medical scholars, journalists, and other commentators have often ignored, downplayed or treated with scepticism the role of bacterial vaccines in reducing mortality during the pandemic. There have been repeated claims in this century that these vaccines were 'useless', 'concocted', and possibly harmful...

Australian troops travelling to South Africa in 1899 to join Britain in fighting the Boers left behind communities consumed with the conflict. The colonies that would form the Australian nation in 1901 organised parades, concerts and eagerly awaited news from the battlefield. This article analyses these cultural responses to the South African War alongside the experiences of institutionalised delusional men. It traces ways the conflict penetrated the walls of Australian asylums, and the minds of the insane within them, as well as the sane existing in society...

During the Second World War, the Hadfield Spears ambulance took care of around 22,000 wounded and/or sick patients across three continents. This article analyses how military attacks and instances of violence impacted on the psychological, emotional and physical health of those attending the wounded within this mobile unit. While historiography of allied medicine develops apace, analysis of the Free French health service remains rare. Yet the history of the Hadfield Spears ambulance provides a fascinating window into the neglected issue of attacks on healthcare in wartime, as well as a fresh scope for combining macro and micro perspectives...

This article examines the links between mental illness and the Finnish Civil War of 1918. Based on the study of patient records from a large state mental hospital, the article discusses the mental wounds of both servicemen and civilians and focuses on fear as an essential component in the onset of mental disorder. An examination of patient records reveals how civil war affected the mental health of ordinary people and created a collective psychological atmosphere of fear and anxiety. What this article also demonstrates is that, during and after the war, patients who were mentally scarred by the atrocities were neither categorised nor diagnosed any differently from other mental patients...

Psychedelic-assisted therapy has attracted considerable clinical attention in the past decade for its ability to bring therapeutic benefits to patients in treatment-resistant categories. In contradistinction from other psychopharmaco-therapies, contemporary psychedelic therapists, like their predecessors, paid close attention to the 'set and setting', and argued that the mind-set of the subject and the conditions or environment of the session was as influential as the pharmacological reaction itself. In this paper, we examine how religious sounds and music were both incorporated into and strategically avoided in the early psychedelic therapeutic sessions in an effort to achieve spiritual epiphanies at peak experiences...

The music of the nineteenth-century English asylum provides a rare insight into the place of music within the structure of a medical institution during this period. Yet with archives literally 'silent', how far can the sound and experience of music be retrieved and reconstructed? Drawing on critical archive theory and the idea of the soundscape as well as musicological and historical practice, this article questions how we can investigate asylum soundscapes through the silences of the archive, and how we can use the resulting processes to deepen our relationship with the archive and enrichen other aspects of historical and archive studies...

Like most developed nations, the Soviet Union faced an unprecedented demographic shift during the latter half of the twentieth century, as its population aged and life expectancies grew significantly. Facing similar challenges as the USA or the UK, this article argues, the USSR reacted similarly and equally ad hoc, allowing biological gerontology and geriatrics to develop as sciences and medical specialisations with little central direction. When political attention was focused on ageing, moreover, the Soviet response remained largely comparable to the West's, with geriatric medicine slowly overtaking research into the foundations of ageing and yet remaining sorely underfunded and underpromoted...

Around the turn of the 1970s, women's magazines began to feature naked female bodies in advertisements for health and beauty products. By the mid-1970s, this nudity had largely disappeared. This article examines the reasons for this spike in nude images, the types of nakedness depicted, and what this tells us about prevalent attitudes to femininity, sexuality and women's 'liberation'. Focusing on representations of naked female bodies allows us to explore definitions and operations of sexual 'knowledge', especially the role of mass media sources in influencing inchoate ideas about sex and sexuality...

This article explores sex and gender patterns in mortality, based on individual-level causes of death (CODs) in two urban communities, obtained from civil and parish registers. By analysing CODs for the period 1880-1910 for Roosendaal (Netherlands) and Trondheim (Norway) we investigate how notions of sex and gender were reflected in cause-specific mortality rates for adults and in the registration of CODs by local authorities. Our findings show (i) excess male mortality among age group 15-70, (ii) airborne infectious diseases were responsible for most deaths in both cities, but did not show a distinct gender pattern, (iii) TB appeared to be more location-specific than gender-specific...

Large-scale historical databases featuring individual-level causes of death offer the potential for longitudinal studies of health and illnesses. There is, however, a risk that the transformation of the primary sources into 'data' may strip them of the very qualities required for proper medical historical analysis. Based on a pilot study of all 11,100 deaths registered in Copenhagen in 1880-1881, we identify, analyse and discuss the challenges of transcribing and coding cause of death sources into a database...

This article focuses on the cases of two British ex-servicemen who contracted malaria during or immediately after the First World War, were charged with murder in the 1920s, and pled insanity due to their malaria and long-term neuropsychiatric complications. One was found 'guilty but insane' and committed to Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum in June 1923, while the other was convicted and hanged in July 1927. It argues that, at a time when the medical community sought out the causes of mental disease in the physical body, medico-legal arguments about malaria and insanity were received inconsistently by inter-war British courts...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

This paper explores processes of urban park creation from the mid-1800s to show how 'green lungs' and 'green liberty' shaped the health geography of the modern city. Tracking this story across a transatlantic canvas (using examples from London, Paris, New York and Montreal), it looks at how ideas around fresh air, exercise and greenery sat within municipal designs for a functional metabolic landscape, what I call somatic urbanism. Plotting the historical contours of the park as a landscape of health has two main uses...

This article examines the extent to which the refusals of British conscientious objectors (COs) to fight during the First World War were pathologised through the lens of physical and mental health, and the ways in which such a pathology impacted their treatment in penal establishments. It argues that the government compromised the physical as well as the mental health of absolutist COs. The article also analyses the effects of the state's pathologising efforts upon objectors, and the methods through which the physical bodies of COs were utilised against, or annexed by, the authorities...

Seen as a crucial historical step in the development of 'modern' institutional healthcare, eighteenth-century British naval medicine has traditionally been studied from the point of view of the state and of physicians and surgeons: naval sailors' attitudes towards health, medicine and their own bodies remain virtually unexplored. Using official and personal sources, this article sketches a 'patient's history' of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century British ratings. Aiming to counterbalance Foucauldian interpretations, it highlights some of the ways in which individuals, even when apparently most powerless, confined in ships far from home, and controlled by rigidly disciplined institutions, could take responsibility for their health, successfully or otherwise, within, against or alongside the system...

The early Soviet period witnessed a number of experiments in 'film psychotherapy'-the attempt to deploy the cinematic medium in hypnotherapeutic treatment. Exploring this pivotal, yet virtually unknown, moment in the history of cinema's intertwinement with medicine, the article seeks to understand Soviet film psychotherapy as a response to transnational anxieties over cinema's 'powers of influence', as well as a distinctively 'Soviet' experiment. An exploration of the project's origins in Soviet psychophysiological studies of spectators and experiments in group hypnotherapeutic treatment is used to demonstrate the unique context that shaped Soviet doctors' emergence as film therapy pioneers...

In Western countries during the post-World War II decades, endemic viral diseases were increasingly important to health. Such diseases have attracted limited historical attention. Due to changing methods of livestock production, they were particularly prevalent on the farm. This article uses a case study of the cattle disease, bovine viral diarrhoea (BVD), to demonstrate their historical significance. Spanning North America, the UK and Australia, it reveals the complex nature of BVD, and how and why its clinical, aetiological, epidemiological and host species identities evolved over time...

Drawing on the changing representations of sunbed consumers within everyday entertainment media and national newspapers from the late 1980s to early 1990s, this article will demonstrate how sunbed use was framed, at first, as an 'immoral' working-class activity, and later as a growing addictive threat to white adolescent women. Medical experts had finally confirmed that sunbeds increased the risk of developing skin cancer, and the media had taken this 'public health' matter into their own hands. As this occurred during a backlash against Thatcherism, their anti-sunbed coverage became entangled with moralised concerns about class, women and consumerism...