Medical History最新文献

IF 0.9 2区哲学

Medical History Pub Date : 2025-07-18 DOI: 10.1017/mdh.2025.10019

Ilari Virtanen, Kalle Kananoja

{"title":"Popular health guides and their reception in Finland, 1890s-1970s.","authors":"Ilari Virtanen, Kalle Kananoja","doi":"10.1017/mdh.2025.10019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/mdh.2025.10019","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the cultivation of medical knowledge via popular health guides among the Finnish lay populace from the 1890s to the 1970s. By using written reminiscences and newspaper articles as source material, the article discusses the relevance, popularity, and practical use of various printed health guides and manuals throughout Finland. We place particular focus on the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century as the period that experienced a high increase in lay education and literacy. By focusing on individual readers and their experiences of popular health guides, the article examines lay medical and health practices as the number of medical manuals dramatically increased from the late nineteenth century onwards. It also investigates the reception of medical, popular and irregular health movements, such as hygienism, nature cure, and Couéist autosuggestion, and the change in medical culture brought about by the appearance of patent medicines. As the information discovered in popular health guides tended to fluctuate between official and irregular medical theory, we analyse the relationship between learned, alternative, and vernacular medicine through the views and opinions expressed by people who engaged with health literature. Through these materials, we provide a novel understanding of the accessibility of medical knowledge, the spread and impact of health guides, and attitudes towards different medical practices among the Finnish reading public.","PeriodicalId":18275,"journal":{"name":"Medical History","volume":" ","pages":"1-19"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2025-07-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144659597","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Contraceptive sterilisation: private practice, tubal ligation and vasectomy in twentieth-century Australia. 避孕绝育：私人执业，输卵管结扎和输精管切除术在20世纪的澳大利亚。

IF 0.9 2区哲学

Medical History Pub Date : 2025-07-18 DOI: 10.1017/mdh.2025.10015

Tiarne Barratt-Young, Alison Bashford

引用次数: 0

The fixed idea of sex and the dawn of theoretical gender medicine. 固定的性别观念和理论性别医学的曙光。

IF 0.9 2区哲学

Medical History Pub Date : 2025-07-18 DOI: 10.1017/mdh.2025.10017

Diederik Janssen

{"title":"The fixed idea of sex and the dawn of theoretical gender medicine.","authors":"Diederik Janssen","doi":"10.1017/mdh.2025.10017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/mdh.2025.10017","url":null,"abstract":"Cross-gender behaviour gradually entered the spheres of aetiology and diagnosis during the eighteenth century with reference to scattered instances of male cross-dressing. But well into the nineteenth century, \"gender identity\" (a mid-twentieth-century term) remained a poorly theorised instance of medicalisation. Late eighteenth-century concepts of \"dynamic hermaphroditism\" accounted for gender-nonconforming behaviours and aspirations, but could not account for the observed heterogeneity in disparities between sexed body and mind. Increasingly substantive contributions to aetiology were seen during the late 1870s and 1880s, particularly in response to Carl Westphal's convoluted, 1869 concept of \"contrary sexual feeling\" (conträre Sexualempfindung). Richard von Krafft-Ebing's notion of metamorphosis sexualis paranoica provided one of the most authoritative approaches to the question of gender identification in \"sexual inversion\". The notion, which took the first seven German editions of his Psychopathis sexualis to achieve a definitive formulation, needs to be seen in light of Krafft-Ebing's earlier conceptions of sexual delusion, which straddled the realms of the experienced sexual body and sense of self. Moreover, Krafft-Ebing was not the first to outline a theory of non-cisgender identity, as demonstrated by the mid-1880s work of Théodule-Armand Ribot and Rudolph Arndt, as well as various significantly earlier approaches to what had been considered the \"monomania of sexual transformation\".","PeriodicalId":18275,"journal":{"name":"Medical History","volume":" ","pages":"1-23"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2025-07-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144659598","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Defective data: statistics, disability, and eugenic sterilisation in interwar Britain. 有缺陷的数据：统计，残疾和优生绝育在两次世界大战之间的英国。

IF 0.9 2区哲学

Medical History Pub Date : 2025-07-18 DOI: 10.1017/mdh.2025.10014

Alex Aylward, Coreen McGuire

{"title":"Defective data: statistics, disability, and eugenic sterilisation in interwar Britain.","authors":"Alex Aylward, Coreen McGuire","doi":"10.1017/mdh.2025.10014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/mdh.2025.10014","url":null,"abstract":"This article is concerned with the history of eugenic sterilisation in Britain through the 1920s and 1930s. In this period, the Eugenics Society mounted an active but ultimately unsuccessful campaign to legalise the voluntary surgical sterilisation of various categories of people, including those deemed 'mentally deficient' or 'defective'. We take as our explicit focus the propaganda produced and disseminated by the Eugenics Society as part of this campaign, and especially the various kinds of data mobilised therein. The parliamentary defeat of the Society's Sterilisation Bill in July 1931 marks, we argue, a significant shift in the tactics of the campaign. Before this, the Eugenics Society framed sterilisation as a promising method for eradicating, or at least significantly reducing the incidence of, inherited 'mental defect'. Subsequently, they came to emphasise the inequality of access to sterilisation between rich and poor, (re)positioning theirs as an egalitarian campaign aimed at extending a form of reproductive agency to the disadvantaged. These distinct phases of the campaign were each supported by different kinds of propaganda material, which in turn centred on very different types of data. As the campaign evolved, the numbers and quantitative rhetoric which typified earlier propaganda materials gave way to a more qualitative approach, which notably included the selective incorporation of the voices of people living with hereditary 'defects'. In addition to exposing a rupture in the Eugenics Society's propagandistic data practices, this episode underscores the need to further incorporate disabled dialogues and perspectives into our histories of eugenics.","PeriodicalId":18275,"journal":{"name":"Medical History","volume":" ","pages":"1-16"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2025-07-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144659596","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

The Plague of Provence (1720-2) and debates in Britain on the cross-species transmission of disease. 普罗旺斯瘟疫（1720- 1702）和英国关于疾病跨物种传播的争论。

IF 0.9 2区哲学

Medical History Pub Date : 2025-07-14 DOI: 10.1017/mdh.2025.10013

Neil Murphy

{"title":"The Plague of Provence (1720-2) and debates in Britain on the cross-species transmission of disease.","authors":"Neil Murphy","doi":"10.1017/mdh.2025.10013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/mdh.2025.10013","url":null,"abstract":"While the plague of Provence is the most studied outbreak of the disease in early modern Europe, there is little in the extensive historiography on this topic about fears of the cross-species transmission of disease which re-emerged in the early eighteenth century because of events in southwestern France. Concerns about the interplay between cattle murrains and human plague resurfaced in the early eighteenth century because the plague of Provence followed an outbreak of cattle disease which swept across Europe and killed tens of thousands of animals. This article focuses on the debate about the spread of contagious diseases between species which occurred in Britain during this time. Links between the health of animals and that of humans became objects of heated discussion especially following the issuing of the 1721 Quarantine Act, which was designed to prevent the plague currently ravaging southwestern France from taking hold in Britain. It then considers the different beliefs regarding contagion and the transmission of diseases between different species during the plague of Provence. While focusing on the richly documented and highly revealing discussions in early eighteenth-century Britain about the interplay between plague in cattle and plague in humans, it also utilises materials from earlier centuries to examine more fully how early modern populations understood the relationship between plague in humans and cattle murrains.","PeriodicalId":18275,"journal":{"name":"Medical History","volume":" ","pages":"1-18"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2025-07-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144626607","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Networks of exchange: East German kidney transplantation in European context, 1965-1990. 交换网络：1965-1990年欧洲背景下的东德肾移植。

IF 0.9 2区哲学

Medical History Pub Date : 2025-06-09 DOI: 10.1017/mdh.2025.2

Alexa Geisthövel

{"title":"Networks of exchange: East German kidney transplantation in European context, 1965-1990.","authors":"Alexa Geisthövel","doi":"10.1017/mdh.2025.2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/mdh.2025.2","url":null,"abstract":"When kidney transplantation evolved from an experimental into a clinical treatment of end-stage renal disease (ESRD) in the 1960s, it was conceptualised as a collaborative therapy. Before specific immunosuppressants were introduced in the 1980s, the best chances for patient and graft survival were expected from finding 'good' matches between donor and recipient tissues. Therefore, the pioneers of clinical transplantation in Europe started to recombine their growing patient pools. They created trans-border organ exchange organisations such as Eurotransplant and Intertransplant, based on shared patient databases.The article traces international and transnational co-operation in kidney exchange using the example of state-socialist Germany. How did the German Democratic Republic (GDR) get involved with the interconnected networks of knowledge, data, and organ exchange in ESRD treatment? In what ways did the domestic system of kidney transplantation depend on intra- and trans-bloc exchange? How did the GDR profit, and what did it have to offer on an international scale, both in the First and the Second World? The article sheds light on the under-explored transplantation history of the socialist East and thereby investigates the possibilities and limits of trans-bloc collaboration in Cold War Europe.","PeriodicalId":18275,"journal":{"name":"Medical History","volume":" ","pages":"1-18"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2025-06-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144248603","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Convulsions as a cause of infant death: New insights into its meaning based on evidence from four European cities (1800-1955). 痉挛作为婴儿死亡的原因：基于四个欧洲城市的证据对其意义的新见解（1800-1955）。

IF 0.9 2区哲学

Medical History Pub Date : 2025-06-02 DOI: 10.1017/mdh.2025.7

Karin Wienholts, Mayra Murkens, Michail Raftakis, Michael Mühlichen

{"title":"Convulsions as a cause of infant death: New insights into its meaning based on evidence from four European cities (1800-1955).","authors":"Karin Wienholts, Mayra Murkens, Michail Raftakis, Michael Mühlichen","doi":"10.1017/mdh.2025.7","DOIUrl":"10.1017/mdh.2025.7","url":null,"abstract":"In recent years, the digitisation of historical data containing cause-of-death information has significantly increased. However, these data show considerable variations in diagnostic practices and nosology over time and place. Examining vague historical causes of death, often denoting symptoms rather than specific diseases, is a particular challenge. Infantile convulsions are an example of a common yet problematic cause of death. To improve our understanding of infantile convulsions, we propose an innovative mixed-methods, comparative approach. This study combines qualitative analyses of historical medical thinking on infantile convulsions with quantitative analyses of individual-level death records from four European cities: Amsterdam, Hermoupolis, Maastricht, and Rostock, covering different periods between 1800 and 1955. Our findings reveal that infant deaths attributed to convulsions encompass a multitude of causes from different disease categories. Significant differences emerged in the patterns of convulsions across time, age groups, and locations, even within the same country. The decline in convulsions mortality seems to be more related to the introduction of uniform registration regulations and systems, and advancements in medical knowledge than to the decline in overall infant mortality. This study's outcome serves as a cautionary note that challenges the prevailing attitude towards convulsions and emphasises the complexity of interpreting deaths from convulsions. These were highly dependent on historical context, especially local medical culture and the variable accuracy of cause-of-death registration. These findings have implications for studies on infant mortality even when the main interest of such studies is not convulsions mortality.","PeriodicalId":18275,"journal":{"name":"Medical History","volume":" ","pages":"1-22"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2025-06-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12170937/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144199528","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

'[M]ercy is justice…and should not be denied': Lord Dawson, the British medico-legal community, and the Infanticide Act, 1938. “仁慈就是正义……不应该被剥夺”：道森勋爵，英国医学法律界，以及1938年的《杀婴法》。

IF 0.9 2区哲学

Medical History Pub Date : 2025-05-15 DOI: 10.1017/mdh.2025.3

Kelly-Ann Couzens

{"title":"'[M]ercy is justice…and should not be denied': Lord Dawson, the British medico-legal community, and the Infanticide Act, 1938.","authors":"Kelly-Ann Couzens","doi":"10.1017/mdh.2025.3","DOIUrl":"10.1017/mdh.2025.3","url":null,"abstract":"In December 1937, influential physician and politician Lord Dawson of Penn introduced an Infanticide Bill into the House of Lords. Seven months later, following minor amendments, Dawson's Bill passed into law as the Infanticide Act, 1938. This legislation significantly altered the earlier provisions of the Infanticide Act, 1922, which introduced the offence of infanticide into English and Welsh courtrooms for the first time. Under Dawson's reforms, a woman could be found guilty of infanticide rather than capital murder if the killing of her child, aged no more than one year old, could be attributed to a disturbance in the balance of the mother's mind following childbirth or from lactation. Although the language and implications of the 1938 Act have ignited significant debate within legal scholarship, the creation of Dawson's Bill and the leading role medical practitioners played in its enactment have received limited attention from historians. This article helps to address this gap by analyzing the critical response of the inter-war British medical profession to the question of infanticide reform against a backdrop of growing psychiatric ambivalence about a causal link between insanity and female reproductive states. Crucially, this paper contends that ancillary concerns over citizenship, motherhood, and the health of the nation informed Dawson's motivations and justification for infanticide reform during the 1930s. It also seeks to foreground the physician's distinct contribution to the birth of the 1938 Act by underscoring his efforts in devising and promoting the Bill within Parliament and among inter-war medical and legal communities.","PeriodicalId":18275,"journal":{"name":"Medical History","volume":" ","pages":"1-21"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2025-05-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12170933/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144078891","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Romantic racism: A reassessment of Carl Gustav Carus's writings on race and human inequality. 浪漫的种族主义：卡尔·古斯塔夫·卡鲁斯关于种族和人类不平等的著作的再评价。

IF 0.9 2区哲学

Medical History Pub Date : 2025-05-15 DOI: 10.1017/mdh.2025.8

Stephan Strunz, Marina Lienert, Florian Bruns

{"title":"Romantic racism: A reassessment of Carl Gustav Carus's writings on race and human inequality.","authors":"Stephan Strunz, Marina Lienert, Florian Bruns","doi":"10.1017/mdh.2025.8","DOIUrl":"10.1017/mdh.2025.8","url":null,"abstract":"This paper aims to provide the first comprehensive evaluation of Carl Gustav Carus's writings on race and human inequality. We demonstrate that Carus, an eminent nineteenth-century physician emblematic of romantic medicine, was deeply engrossed in racial science, exploring anatomical, anthropological, and craniological dimensions of race across no less than twenty-five works spanning three decades. Carus's engagement with race stemmed from naturphilosophisch anatomical and physiological considerations, which evolved into physiognomic and psychological inquiries. While previous research has construed Carus as a precursor of Arthur de Gobineau, we argue that he was intellectually much more closely aligned with the 'American School' of ethnology, represented by figures such as Samuel G. Morton, George R. Gliddon, and Josiah C. Nott. Closely monitoring international discourses of scientific racism, Carus sought to propagate these notions among German readers and position himself within international debates. The international reception, however, was limited by the Romantic framework of Carus's scientific racism, which was unintelligible to contemporaries. While sharing an implicit methodological bias with Morton and his followers, affirming white superiority and legitimising colonisation, the Romantic underpinning of his race treatises made it difficult for mid-nineteenth-century race theorists to fully endorse him. Nonetheless, Carus, often lauded as polymath with a humanistic orientation, besides his achievements, helped to create a theoretical basis for the othering and dehumanisation of large parts of the global population.","PeriodicalId":18275,"journal":{"name":"Medical History","volume":" ","pages":"1-16"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2025-05-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12170926/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144078876","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

The field-ready tea-box adaptometer: colonial nutrition science and/in imperial economies in Malawi. 现成的茶盒适应计：马拉维的殖民营养科学和/在帝国经济中。

IF 0.9 2区哲学

Medical History Pub Date : 2025-05-15 DOI: 10.1017/mdh.2025.4

Cal Biruk

{"title":"The field-ready tea-box adaptometer: colonial nutrition science and/in imperial economies in Malawi.","authors":"Cal Biruk","doi":"10.1017/mdh.2025.4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/mdh.2025.4","url":null,"abstract":"In the late 1930s, children in three Malawian villages were subjected to a peculiar test for vitamin A deficiency devised by Dr. Benjamin Platt, director of the Nyasaland Nutrition Survey and a leading colonial nutrition scientist. Platt constructed a makeshift adaptometer, appropriate for field conditions, that could be placed over a subject's head to measure retinal adaptation to light. He built this contraption from simple materials, including a five-pound tea-box and sticking plaster. This article takes the curious commingling of commodity objects and scientific materials (where a discarded tea-box finds new life as an experimental technology) as an entry point for examining how scientific practices are woven from semiotic and material threads, demonstrating how heterogeneous social and material elements overlap and influence one another. The article first analyses how Platt's tea-box adaptometer - and the discourses and ambitions framing the Survey - imagined a new kind of nutrition research hinged to the space of the field rather than the laboratory. It then proceeds to consider how the tea-box, an incipient manifestation of 'appropriate technology', points us towards the more tacit ways that tea wove itself into the fabric of the Survey and colonial society, as a gustatory discourse steeped in racial anxieties. Attending to the 'stuff' of scientific work cued me to broader imperial circuits and interests that shaped colonial nutrition research.","PeriodicalId":18275,"journal":{"name":"Medical History","volume":" ","pages":"1-16"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2025-05-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144078952","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0