Medical HistoryPub Date : 2022-07-01DOI: 10.1017/mdh.2022.21
Swapnil Chaudhary
{"title":"Shilpi Rajpal, Curing Madness? A Social and Cultural History of Insanity in Colonial North India, 1800–1950s (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2021), pp. xiv + 295, ₹1295, hardback, ISBN: 0-19-012801-1.","authors":"Swapnil Chaudhary","doi":"10.1017/mdh.2022.21","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/mdh.2022.21","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":18275,"journal":{"name":"Medical History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91036664","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 : 2022-07-01DOI: 10.1017/mdh.2022.19
Christos Lynteris
{"title":"In search of lost fleas: reconsidering Paul-Louis Simond’s contribution to the study of the propagation of plague","authors":"Christos Lynteris","doi":"10.1017/mdh.2022.19","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/mdh.2022.19","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Paul-Louis Simond’s 1898 experiment demonstrating fleas as the vector of plague is today recognised as one of the breakthrough moments in modern epidemiology, as it established the insect-borne transmission of plague. Providing the first exhaustive examination of primary sources from the Institut Pasteur’s 1897–98 ‘India Mission’, including Simond’s notebooks, experiment carnets and correspondence, and cross-examining this material with colonial medical sources from the first years of the third plague pandemic in British India, the article demonstrates that Simond’s engagement with the question of the propagation of plague was much more complex and ambiguous than the teleological story reproduced in established historical works suggests. On the one hand, the article reveals that the famous 1898 experiment was botched, and that Simond’s misreported its ambiguous findings for the Annales de l’Institut Pasteur. On the other hand, the article shows that, in the course of his ‘India Mission’, Simond framed rats as involved in the propagation of plague irreducibly in their relation to other potential sources of infection and not simply in terms of a parasitological mechanism. The article illuminates Simond’s complex epidemiological reasoning about plague transmission, situating it within its proper colonial and epistemological context, and argues for a new historical gaze on the rat as an ‘epidemiological dividual’, which highlights the relational and contingent nature of epidemiological framings of the animal during the third plague pandemic.","PeriodicalId":18275,"journal":{"name":"Medical History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84747529","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}
{"title":"Axel Fliethmann and Christiane Weller (eds), Anatomy of the Medical Image: Knowledge Production and Transfiguration from the Renaissance to Today (Leiden, The Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill, 2021), pp. xv + 311, €127.00, hardback, ISBN: 9789004406759.","authors":"Lauren Jane Barnett","doi":"10.1017/mdh.2022.8","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/mdh.2022.8","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":18275,"journal":{"name":"Medical History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73993734","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 : 2022-04-01DOI: 10.1017/mdh.2022.10
Tillmann Taape
{"title":"Alisha Rankin, The Poison Trials: Wonder Drugs, Experiment, and the Battle for Authority in Renaissance Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), pp. 312, $35, paperback, ISBN: 9780226744858.","authors":"Tillmann Taape","doi":"10.1017/mdh.2022.10","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/mdh.2022.10","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":18275,"journal":{"name":"Medical History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90858654","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}
{"title":"Pain, medicine and the monitoring of war violence: the case of rifle bullets (1868–1918)","authors":"Taline Garibian","doi":"10.1017/mdh.2022.4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/mdh.2022.4","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The St Petersburg declaration, signed in 1868, is a milestone in the history of warfare and humanitarian law, as it prohibits the use of explosive bullets, which are considered to cause unnecessary suffering. As this article shows, the framing of this declaration that put suffering at its centre, as well as the development of the humanitarian movement, favoured the birth of a new field of expertise: wound ballistics. The wars that broke out after the declaration was signed are the subject of intense scrutiny, while the advances in weaponry, and notably, the creation by the British of a new expansive bullet, provided physicians with new fields of investigation. Numerous experiments have attempted to reproduce the effects of bullets on different materials, including corpses. Based on numerous medical reports and publications, as well as military archives from France and the United Kingdom, this investigation critically examines the notion of pain, its assessment and its use in the monitoring of war violence. It argues that, paradoxically, the greater attention paid to suffering has resulted in a need to objectify pain. This rationalisation and the quest for the quantification of suffering have not been without bias and have shifted attention away from care and treatment.","PeriodicalId":18275,"journal":{"name":"Medical History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89321412","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}
{"title":"Making the medical mask: surgery, bacteriology, and the control of infection (1870s–1920s)","authors":"T. Schlich, B. Strasser","doi":"10.1017/mdh.2022.5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/mdh.2022.5","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article examines the introduction of the medical mask in the late nineteenth century at the intersection of surgery, bacteriology and infection control. During this important episode in the longer history of the medical mask, respiratory protection became a tool of targeted germ control. In 1897, the surgeon Johannes Mikulicz at the University of Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland), drawing on the bacteriological experiments of his colleague Carl Flügge, used a piece of gauze in front of his nose and mouth as a barrier against microorganisms moving from him to his patients. This article explores the social, cultural and medical contexts of this particular use of the mask, in connection with germ theory and surgeons’ struggle with wound infection. It explores the alignment of the new aseptic surgery with the emerging field of bacteriology in a local milieu that favoured interdisciplinary cooperation. The account also follows the uptake of the mask outside of surgery for other anti-infectious purposes and shows how the new type of anti-infectious mask spread simultaneously in operating rooms as well as in hospitals and sanatoria, and eventually in epidemic contexts.","PeriodicalId":18275,"journal":{"name":"Medical History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80892407","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}
{"title":"Ole J. Benedictow, The Complete History of the Black Death, 2nd edn (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2021), pp. 1058, £ 143, hardback, ISBN: 9781783275168.","authors":"F. Touati","doi":"10.1017/mdh.2022.6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/mdh.2022.6","url":null,"abstract":"[...]it is impossible to master everything in such a considerable mass of documentation on a global scale (covering Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia): this poses a real challenge, according to the author’s own introduction! With J.F.D. Shrewsbury on the Bubonic plague in the British Isles (1971), or the documentary trails produced by Philip Ziegler (1969) or Rosemary Horrox (1994), David Herlihy (1965–91), Élisabeth Carpentier (1963) and M. Livi Bacci for Italy (1978), Marie-Hélène Congourdeau for the Byzantine territory (1988–98) or Michael Dols (1974–82) and Mohammed Melhaoui (Paris, 2005, not cited) for the Arabic world (Egypt and North Africa) provide a base of capital data. The main purpose is to trace the outbreak and spread of the pandemic: its origin, its modes of diffusion, the epidemic progress, in order to better understand the epidemiological mechanism, its nature, and to evaluate its incidence of lethality and mortality. While the first evidence from the genetic examination of dental pulp dates the origins of the plague back to around 5,100–4,900 years ago in Sweden (p. 98), the emergence of research in palaeobiology, in particular on DNA (Hinnebusch, 2002–17, Bos, Holmes, Callaway, in Nature, 2011, Wagner, Lancet, 2014), has provided a very supportive context for knowledge renewal: a ‘molecular history’ (McCormick, 2007) is open!","PeriodicalId":18275,"journal":{"name":"Medical History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81394581","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}
B. Baylac-Paouly, Maria V Caballero, María-Isabel Porras
{"title":"Mobilising through vaccination: the case of polio in France (1950–60s)","authors":"B. Baylac-Paouly, Maria V Caballero, María-Isabel Porras","doi":"10.1017/mdh.2022.3","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/mdh.2022.3","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Poliomyelitis is a disease whose incidence steadily increased during the second half of the twentieth century on both sides of the Atlantic. If in the United States the epidemics which afflicted young children each summer became a major public health issue, in France, polio was considered less pressing than other diseases. This article, based on original archives from the Pasteur and Mérieux institutes, analyses the polio control strategies and policies implemented by France from the mid-1950s to the end of the 1960s. The article examines the role of two key actors and institutions that mobilised the French health authorities against the disease: Pierre Lépine and the Institut Pasteur as well as Charles Mérieux and the Institut Mérieux. Lépine developed an effective injected polio vaccine which was first used before being supplemented with the oral polio vaccine. If the two main protagonists and their institutions worked together, they each implemented different actions and manoeuvres, at different times with the aim to raise awareness of the fight against the disease. The national and international relations of the key French actors were decisive in the development and production of the polio vaccines and their application. This work contributes to understanding processes of polio vaccines choice at the level of national institutions and analyses the political and scientific networks built in support of polio vaccination, to finally move towards compulsory vaccination. Ultimately, this study describes the historical processes by which this disease became conflated with a biotechnology of collective protection in France.","PeriodicalId":18275,"journal":{"name":"Medical History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84898914","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}
{"title":"Pierre-Yves Donzé, Medtech. The Formation and Growth of a Global Industry, 1960–2020 (Singapore: Palgrave MacMillan, 2022), pp. 230, £99.99, hardback, ISBN: 9789811671739.","authors":"P. F. Pérez","doi":"10.1017/mdh.2022.7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/mdh.2022.7","url":null,"abstract":"Medtech. The Formation and Growth of a Global Industry, 1960–2020, by Pierre-Yves Donzé, is an ambitious new book from one of the best experts in the world on the business history of health of the twenty-first century. Once again, after a series of recent books and articles about the dynamics of the industry of medical equipment in Japan, Switzerland and Germany, Donzé opens the box for a new analysis, with new data, about the dynamics of such an industry in other regions of the world like the United States, France and China. Donzé acknowledges his intellectual debts: to authors who have recently appealed for the need to go beyond national approaches, and to efforts to establish international comparisons as was done in the recent book The Emergence of Modern Hospital Management and Organisation in theWorld.1 Donzé is a great specialist inmedical equipment, andwe knew fromhis work about the expansion of German equipment in the world in the last century. But now, Donzé goes beyond his expertise on X-rays and includes an identification of the main industrial players in the world over the last six decades, and the supply and demand factors that explain their success. The book starts with three general chapters about the dynamics of the global medtech industry, the dominance by big multinationals, the coexistence with clusters of smalland mid-sized enterprises and spin-off chains, as well as with themore personal networks of doctors and firms. He covers regulation by the state, the identity of the largest medtech players, the global trade of products of a very diversified industry and the wave of mergers and acquisitions that created a huge concentration of big players. All of this is important, not just to understand the endogenous features of the industry in a dynamic long-term perspective, but also to understand the directions of research and production in the industry. These are not always correlated with the directions that public health needs have had in history and today, reflected in the difficulties that states (and therefore, we) have had in regulating prices and access to the products of this industry. Anyone who needs to understand the rigidities faced by patients and consumers who need to access life-saving products and devices may find some clear answers and facts in these three chapters. A second group of six chapters approach from a national perspective the relationship between leading medtech corporations (exploring strategies of innovation and strategies of growth) and the market (mainly through foreign trade statistics). Onemisses somewhat in these chapters the role of the state and how public policies have allowed the creation of giants with an impressive capacity to impose: 1) research into certain illnesses, 2) production of some drugs and equipment over others, 3) prices and 4) investment in employment at the local level (or its financial outsourcing abroad unbalancing potential taxes they could pay at home with their outward di","PeriodicalId":18275,"journal":{"name":"Medical History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74749480","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 : 2022-04-01DOI: 10.1017/mdh.2022.11
A. Bay
{"title":"Total prevention: a history of schistosomiasis in Japan","authors":"A. Bay","doi":"10.1017/mdh.2022.11","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/mdh.2022.11","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In Japan, schistosomiasis was endemic in Yamanashi Prefecture and a few other hotspot areas where the Miya’iri snail lived. The parasite’s lifecycle relied on the intermediary Miya’iri snail as well as the human host. Parasite eggs passed into the agrarian environment through untreated night soil used as fertiliser or through the culture of open defecation in rural Japan. Manmade rice fields and irrigation ditches, night soil covered paddies and highly refined growing seasons put people in flooded rice paddies to intensively work the land in the spring and summer. The disease was equally dependent on human intervention in the natural world as it was on the natural world intervening in the human body. It is important to stress the role of both the environment and culture in disease causation. This study posits that we view the pre- and post-war national mobilisation to remake the environmental and reform the culture of the rural sector to align with public health mandates and notions of hygienic modernity as a case of total prevention.","PeriodicalId":18275,"journal":{"name":"Medical History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81692142","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}