Medical History最新文献

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":"https://doi.org/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":"","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":"","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":"https://doi.org/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":"","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":"","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

Plague history, Mongol history, and the processes of focalisation leading up to the Black Death: a response to Brack et al. 鼠疫历史、蒙古历史和导致黑死病的集中过程：对布拉克等人的回应

IF 0.9 2区哲学

Medical History Pub Date : 2025-02-17 DOI: 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 et al.","authors":"Monica H Green, Nahyan Fancy","doi":"10.1017/mdh.2024.29","DOIUrl":"10.1017/mdh.2024.29","url":null,"abstract":"This essay responds to Brack et al., '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 zoonotic disease with occasional epizootic and human outbreaks, before the more catastrophic outbreaks of the 1340s commonly referred to as 'the Black Death'.","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}

引用次数: 0

Doctors in Japanese prisoner-of-war camps in Taiwan in the Second World War and their personal accounts of captivity. 第二次世界大战期间在台湾日本战俘营的医生和他们被俘的个人叙述。

IF 0.9 2区哲学

Medical History Pub Date : 2025-02-17 DOI: 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":"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.","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}

引用次数: 0

William Bynum Prize 2023: Highly Commended Overcoming Childlessness: Narratives of Conception in Early Modern North India. 威廉拜纳姆奖2023：高度赞扬克服无子女：早期现代北印度的概念叙事。

IF 0.9 2区哲学

Medical History Pub Date : 2025-02-05 DOI: 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":"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.","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}

引用次数: 0

Germs, infections, and the erratic 'natural laboratory' of Antarctica: from Operation Snuffles to the Killer Kleenex. 细菌、感染和南极不稳定的“自然实验室”：从鼻塞行动到杀手面巾纸。

IF 0.9 2区哲学

Medical History Pub Date : 2025-01-17 DOI: 10.1017/mdh.2024.39

Vanessa Heggie

引用次数: 0

'Suffering for the sins of others': Lucius D. Bulkley, Syphilis Insontium, and disease destigmatisation in the progressive era United States. “为他人的罪受苦”：卢修斯·d·巴尔克利、梅毒和美国进步时代的疾病去污名化。

IF 0.9 2区哲学

Medical History Pub Date : 2025-01-01 Epub Date: 2025-01-13 DOI: 10.1017/mdh.2024.44

Elliott Bowen

{"title":"'Suffering for the sins of others': Lucius D. Bulkley, Syphilis Insontium, and disease destigmatisation in the progressive era United States.","authors":"Elliott Bowen","doi":"10.1017/mdh.2024.44","DOIUrl":"10.1017/mdh.2024.44","url":null,"abstract":"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 syphilis insontium ('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, syphilis insontium 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.","PeriodicalId":18275,"journal":{"name":"Medical History","volume":" ","pages":"59-75"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12041333/pdf/","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":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

The expansion of colonial state healthcare in twentieth-century British Africa. 20世纪英属非洲殖民地国家医疗保健的扩张。

IF 0.9 2区哲学

Medical History Pub Date : 2025-01-01 Epub Date: 2025-03-11 DOI: 10.1017/mdh.2024.45

Jutta Bolt, Jeanne Cilliers

引用次数: 0

When filth became dangerous: the miasmatic and contagionistic origins of nineteenth-century cleanliness practices among Swedish provincial doctors. 当污秽变得危险：十九世纪瑞典外省医生洁净做法的瘴气和传染病起源》（When filth became dangerous: the miasmatic and contagionistic origins of the nineteenth-century cleanliness practices among Swedish provincial doctors）。

IF 0.9 2区哲学

Medical History Pub Date : 2025-01-01 Epub Date: 2024-11-25 DOI: 10.1017/mdh.2024.34

Annelie Drakman

{"title":"When filth became dangerous: the miasmatic and contagionistic origins of nineteenth-century cleanliness practices among Swedish provincial doctors.","authors":"Annelie Drakman","doi":"10.1017/mdh.2024.34","DOIUrl":"10.1017/mdh.2024.34","url":null,"abstract":"This investigation sheds light on the social history of pathogenic dirt and its significance for shaping medical practices during the nineteenth century. It consists of an analysis focusing on Swedish medicine, using 8800 yearly reports written 1820-1900 by Swedish provincial doctors for the National Board of Health in Stockholm. The main argument is that the provincial doctors' perceptions of the relationship between dirt and health during this century can be better understood by focusing on similarities in the handling of different kinds of pathological dirt over the course of many decades, rather than seeing interest in cleanliness as something mostly unprecedented. A novel cleanliness regime became dominant during the latter third of the century, meant to counter a new hybrid between everyday dirt - bodily emanations from healthy bodies - and matter believed to have caused miasmatic and contagionistic disease. New ideas about filth and its impact on health played a crucial role in the development of public health and sanitation movements, and were a precondition for everyday dirt becoming a central medical problem around the turn of the twentieth century, but as is shown, they built on old precedents. Thus, the miasmatic and contagionistic approach to disease shaped conceptions of hygiene and cleanliness.","PeriodicalId":18275,"journal":{"name":"Medical History","volume":" ","pages":"22-38"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12041326/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142710524","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