Medical HistoryPub Date : 2025-03-14DOI: 10.1017/mdh.2024.26
Maebh Long
{"title":"Immunity for sale: depictions of immunity in British newspaper advertising, 1890-1940.","authors":"Maebh Long","doi":"10.1017/mdh.2024.26","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/mdh.2024.26","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article analyses the depictions of immunity and immunological functions employed in proprietary medical advertising in British newspapers between 1890 and 1940. Using marketing copy to gain insights into the ways immunity was presented to the public and normalised outside of medical institutions and publications, I offer four main areas of discussion. First, I present an analysis of the ways advertisements evoked both natural and artificial immunity in their marketing copy, thereby affording us insights into the ways immunity was made palatable both to those supportive of and opposed to vaccinations. I then unpack the ways in which this advertising copy often emphasised immunity rather than the immunological, that is, presented immunity as resistance to infection achieved by purchasing particular brands, rather than as part of a defensive process taking place at a cellular level. Third, I examine the ways in which advertisements engaged with futurity and drew on a narrative of social exclusion that pitted created communities of the immune against the non-immune. Finally, I analyse the ways in which immunity was used to connect the biological and the psychological, looking particularly at the ways immunity against worry was sold to the public.</p>","PeriodicalId":18275,"journal":{"name":"Medical History","volume":" ","pages":"1-20"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2025-03-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143625272","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}
Medical HistoryPub Date : 2025-03-11DOI: 10.1017/mdh.2024.45
Jutta Bolt, Jeanne Cilliers
{"title":"The Expansion of Colonial State Healthcare in Twentieth-Century British Africa.","authors":"Jutta Bolt, Jeanne Cilliers","doi":"10.1017/mdh.2024.45","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/mdh.2024.45","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>We chart and assess the scope and utilisation of state-supplied hospital infrastructure in British Africa, c. 1900-60. Using archival sources, we examine the heterogeneity in colonial administrations' investment into curative healthcare provision across various regions of British Africa. Our research highlights significant disparities in healthcare provision during the colonial period. These disparities were shaped by a range of observable factors, including differences in colonial policies, budgets, investment priorities, and the availability of medical personnel. We test stylised facts about public goods provision derived from previous literature and highlight the importance of understanding the historical context in shaping healthcare systems in Africa today.</p>","PeriodicalId":18275,"journal":{"name":"Medical History","volume":" ","pages":"1-47"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2025-03-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143597263","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}
Medical HistoryPub Date : 2025-03-07DOI: 10.1017/mdh.2024.27
Carles Brasó Broggi, Hana Bortlová-Vondráková
{"title":"Internationalist Blood: Karel Holubec and the Diffusion of Duran Jordà's Method of Blood Transfusion to Czechoslovakia, 1930s-50s.","authors":"Carles Brasó Broggi, Hana Bortlová-Vondráková","doi":"10.1017/mdh.2024.27","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/mdh.2024.27","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In the first months of the Spanish Civil War, the Spanish doctor Frederic Duran Jordà developed a new method of blood transfusion which overcame the era of direct arm-to-arm transfusions. While Duran was experimenting in Barcelona and the Aragon front, hundreds of foreign doctors came to Spain with the help of internationalist associations and offered their services to the Republican government. The Czechoslovak Dr Karel Holubec entered Spain in May 1937 and practiced in a mobile hospital funded by the Czechoslovak Committee to Aid Democratic Spain, receiving blood from Duran's laboratory. This article aims to study how Duran and Holubec transferred the method of blood transfusion to Czechoslovakia through interpersonal contact, conferences, and performances. This paper argues that while individual actors played a crucial role in the diffusion of medical practices, this circulation was determined by a unique historical and socio-political framework. The Spanish Civil War, the International Brigades, and the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Nazi Germany were not only the historical context of medical innovation but an integral part of it.</p>","PeriodicalId":18275,"journal":{"name":"Medical History","volume":" ","pages":"1-22"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2025-03-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143572994","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}
Medical HistoryPub Date : 2025-02-21DOI: 10.1017/mdh.2024.28
Matthew L Newsom Kerr
{"title":"An 'arsenal for the supply of ammunition for the defence of vaccination': the Jenner Society and anti-anti-vaccinationism in England, 1896-1906.","authors":"Matthew L Newsom Kerr","doi":"10.1017/mdh.2024.28","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/mdh.2024.28","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Although historians have given close attention to the anti-vaccination movement that gripped late-Victorian England, relatively little scholarship explores how doctors and health officials responded or asks what strategies and assumptions structured how they might oppose the vaccine opponents. This article traces the advent and actions of the Jenner Society, a smallpox vaccination advocacy group founded in 1896 by Dr. Francis Bond. His goal was to publicly confront the leading anti-vaccinationists and to effectively conduct an <i>anti-anti-vaccination</i> campaign. The Jenner Society appeared amidst disputes over how and even whether vaccination should be publicly debated - disputes shaped both by long-standing attitudes toward professional propriety and also by indecision about what sorts of political advocacy were suitable for medical practitioners. Vaccination was shifting toward a more voluntary administration, and the Jenner Society represents how civil society, the popular press, and the modern tools of persuasion were becoming increasingly central to public health governance. The Jenner Society encapsulated the profession's disdainful attitude toward populist medical dissent, and this essay argues that the tone and deportment of anti-anti-vaccinationism had the effect of encouraging doctors to overlook and neglect other, probably more significant, sources of vaccine skepticism. Preoccupied with rebutting and attacking vaccination's enemies, public \"controversialists\" like Bond waged the first true large-scale pro-vaccination propaganda campaign, but they ultimately were unable to address the underlying dynamics of vaccine evasion. This history holds important lessons today for those interested in constructing more effective ways to effectively counteract medical misinformation and anti-vaccinationist beliefs.</p>","PeriodicalId":18275,"journal":{"name":"Medical History","volume":" ","pages":"1-23"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2025-02-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143468484","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}
Medical HistoryPub Date : 2025-02-17DOI: 10.1017/mdh.2024.29
Monica H Green, Nahyan Fancy
{"title":"Plague history, Mongol history, and the processes of focalisation leading up to the Black Death: a response to Brack <i>et al.</i>","authors":"Monica H Green, Nahyan Fancy","doi":"10.1017/mdh.2024.29","DOIUrl":"10.1017/mdh.2024.29","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This essay responds to Brack <i>et al</i>., 'Plague and the Mongol Conquest of Baghdad (1258)? A reevaluation of the sources', which is a critique of our 2021 essay in this journal, 'Plague and the Fall of Baghdad (1258)'. We argue that Brack and colleagues have misunderstood our investigation as an attempt to pinpoint the exact timing of the outbreak of plague connected with the Mongol siege of Baghdad, and so believe that an altered timeframe invalidates our suggestion that plague was involved. Taking this opportunity to revisit the state of plague historiography in western Asia, we address four issues: (1) why Mongol historiography has, until recently, avoided the question of plague's late mediaeval resurgence within the Mongol Empire and why the 'new genetics' of plague now makes the question unavoidable; (2) why reconstruction of the biological processes of 'focalisation' is now the most urgent question in plague historiography since it constitutes what we call the prodromal stage of the Black Death pandemic; (3) how a newly informed biological perspective on disease history can allow a more sensitive reading of past observers' reports of epidemics; and finally, (4) what a plausible scenario might look like for plague's presence in western Asia and the eastern Mediterranean region in the late-thirteenth and early-fourteenth centuries as an emerging <i>zoonotic</i> disease with occasional epizootic and human outbreaks, before the more catastrophic outbreaks of the 1340s commonly referred to as 'the Black Death'.</p>","PeriodicalId":18275,"journal":{"name":"Medical History","volume":" ","pages":"1-25"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2025-02-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11949646/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143433469","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}
Medical HistoryPub Date : 2025-02-17DOI: 10.1017/mdh.2024.41
Katherine M Venables
{"title":"Doctors in Japanese prisoner-of-war camps in Taiwan in the Second World War and their personal accounts of captivity.","authors":"Katherine M Venables","doi":"10.1017/mdh.2024.41","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/mdh.2024.41","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Taiwan became a Japanese colony in 1895 and in the Second World War was geographically central in Japan's wartime possessions and strategically important, with military airfields, ports, and a copper mine. Its sixteen prisoner-of-war camps included four labour camps. Taiwan was also the first place to which senior officers and colonial officials were dispersed after the Allied surrenders in Hong Kong, Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines. Forty-five doctors from the British, Australian, Dutch and American forces were identified who spent at least part of their captivity on Taiwan. This article uses their personal accounts, official documents and secondary sources to describe them and their work. Although the oldest had experience in the First World War and some had practised in the region, others were young, recently-qualified generalists. Most were transferred between several camps, with one consequence that few contemporaneous medical records survive. Doctors shared the risks and hardships of all prisoners: they lost weight and had the same nutritional disorders, infections and infestations as their patients. Two died. They became significant, scrutinised figures in the camps. Their patients valued their work and understood that they lacked resources for fully effective medical practice.</p>","PeriodicalId":18275,"journal":{"name":"Medical History","volume":" ","pages":"1-28"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2025-02-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143433465","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}
Medical HistoryPub Date : 2025-02-05DOI: 10.1017/mdh.2024.38
Urs Leo Gantenbein
{"title":"The poet Ulrich von Hutten (1488-1523) and the French disease: the records and human remains of a probable yaws patient.","authors":"Urs Leo Gantenbein","doi":"10.1017/mdh.2024.38","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/mdh.2024.38","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Ulrich von Hutten (1488-1523), a renowned sixteenth-century German humanist, documented the symptoms of the epidemic that swept through Europe starting around 1495, commonly known as the French Disease. While it has traditionally been associated with venereal syphilis, Dutch tropical physician Willem F. R. Essed proposed in 1933, largely unnoticed to this day, that this new disease might instead be tropical yaws. This study establishes a clear link between Hutten's reported symptoms and yaws, especially in its secondary and tertiary stages. The skeleton discovered in 1968 on Ufnau Island in Lake Zurich where Hutten died and was buried, exhibits distinct bone manifestations of ancient treponematosis with a pattern more consistent with yaws than syphilis. Furthermore, the correspondence between Hutten's main symptoms and the lesions observable on the 1968 skeleton further confirms the identification of these human remains. The historical evidence of yaws significantly contributes to our understanding of this early modern epidemic.</p>","PeriodicalId":18275,"journal":{"name":"Medical History","volume":" ","pages":"1-21"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2025-02-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143189843","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}
Medical HistoryPub Date : 2025-02-05DOI: 10.1017/mdh.2024.43
Sonia Wigh
{"title":"William Bynum Prize 2023: Highly Commended Overcoming Childlessness: Narratives of Conception in Early Modern North India.","authors":"Sonia Wigh","doi":"10.1017/mdh.2024.43","DOIUrl":"10.1017/mdh.2024.43","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article discusses early modern North Indian ways of expressing how barrenness could be mapped onto a woman's maternal identity. Scholars have engaged with the historical evolution of women's identities, focusing overwhelmingly on their economic and political potential. This article is the first to use medical and erotological sources from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to study women as procreative agents, and the socio-sexual anxieties prompted by infertile female bodies. Through a critical study of a wide range of medical material, I demonstrate that by the eighteenth century, several transformations in medical discourses can be mapped onto textual transmissions from Sanskrit (and Braj Bhasha) to Persian, as well as between competing but conterminously flourishing medical paradigms, Ayurveda and Yunani. While cures for childlessness have a much longer history, a new genre of 'anonymous' sources, particularly focused on the sexual diseases of men and women emerged in early modern North India. Lastly, my comparative methodological approach to different textual genres will complicate our understanding of early modern medical episteme and its intended audience.</p>","PeriodicalId":18275,"journal":{"name":"Medical History","volume":" ","pages":"1-17"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2025-02-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11949643/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143189845","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}
Medical HistoryPub Date : 2025-01-17DOI: 10.1017/mdh.2024.39
Vanessa Heggie
{"title":"Germs, infections, and the erratic 'natural laboratory' of Antarctica: from Operation Snuffles to the Killer Kleenex.","authors":"Vanessa Heggie","doi":"10.1017/mdh.2024.39","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/mdh.2024.39","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Historians have written copiously about the shift to 'germ theories' of disease around the turn of the twentieth century, but in these accounts an entire continent has been left out: Antarctica. This article begins to rebalance our historiography by bringing cold climates back into the story of environmental medicine and germ theory. It suggests three periods of Antarctic (human) microbial research - heroic sampling, systematic studies, and viral space analogue - and examines underlying ideas about 'purity' and infection, the realities of fieldwork, and the use of models in biomedicine. It reveals Antarctica not as an isolated space but as a deeply complex, international, well-networked node in global science ranging from the first international consensus on pandemic-naming through to space flight.</p>","PeriodicalId":18275,"journal":{"name":"Medical History","volume":" ","pages":"1-22"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2025-01-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143008059","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}
Medical HistoryPub Date : 2025-01-13DOI: 10.1017/mdh.2024.44
Elliott Bowen
{"title":"'Suffering for the Sins of Others': Lucius D. Bulkley, <i>Syphilis Insontium</i>, and Disease Destigmatisation in the Progressive Era United States.","authors":"Elliott Bowen","doi":"10.1017/mdh.2024.44","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/mdh.2024.44","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Historical research on efforts to reduce the stigma associated with venereal disease (VD) generally dates these campaigns back to the 1930s. Within the United States, one of the earliest attempts to detach VD from its traditional association with sexual immorality occurred during the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century, when the New York City dermatologist Lucius Bulkley coined the term <i>syphilis insontium</i> ('syphilis of the innocent') in the hopes of demonstrating that many of those who contracted this disease did so through non-sexual contact. Gaining widespread acceptance within the medical community, Bulkley's ideas served as the intellectual foundation for a discursive assault on the prevailing belief that syphilis constituted the 'wages of sin'-one designed to destigmatise the disease and to promote more scientific responses to it. However, the effects of this anti-stigma rhetoric were often counterproductive. Encouraging doctors to discern 'innocence' or 'guilt' through assessments of a patient's character, <i>syphilis insontium</i> often amplified the disease's association with immorality. With the passage of time, physicians became increasingly aware of these problems, and in the 1910s, a backlash against Bulkley's ideas emerged within the American medical community. Yet even with the resultant demise of his destigmatisation campaign, discourses of 'innocent syphilis' continued to circulate, casting a long shadow over subsequent stigma reduction efforts.</p>","PeriodicalId":18275,"journal":{"name":"Medical History","volume":" ","pages":"1-17"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2025-01-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142971605","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}