Clemet Askheim, Eivind Engebretsen, Ivar Prydz Gladhaug
{"title":"Decolonising the Present by Colonising the Past? A Case From the History of Physical Anthropology.","authors":"Clemet Askheim, Eivind Engebretsen, Ivar Prydz Gladhaug","doi":"10.1093/shm/hkae013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/hkae013","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Inspired by the current transdisciplinary debate about decolonisation, this article raises the fundamental question of how medicine can manage its own history in a way that safeguards the drive for decolonisation, but without eradicating the traces of previous misconceptions. We will do so by reconsidering a case from the complex records of physical anthropology, more specifically, a selected corpus of texts written by the two Norwegian physicians Kristian Emil Schreiner and Alette Schreiner in the early twentieth century, and their relation to race and racism. By teasing out the conceptual nuances and specificities in these texts, we do not attempt to exonerate the Schreiner couple of accusations of racism. Rather, we argue that it is essential to approach the past with caution, avoiding oversimplification when striving to distance ourselves from past thinking.</p>","PeriodicalId":21922,"journal":{"name":"Social History of Medicine","volume":"38 1","pages":"19-36"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2024-07-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12146254/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144267159","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}
{"title":"Hunting the Royal Navy’s Medical ‘Snark’: Diagnosis, Prevention and Treatment of Tropical Neurosis in British Sailors, 1943–1945","authors":"Frances Houghton","doi":"10.1093/shm/hkae037","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/hkae037","url":null,"abstract":"Summary Between 1943 and 1945, Britain’s Royal Naval Medical Service dispatched urgent missions to investigate physiological and psychological effects suffered by British sailors who were deployed in tropical climates. This article draws on the resulting, previously neglected, medical articles and medical research reports to examine understandings of ‘tropical neurosis’ in the wartime Fleet. Exploring how tropical neurosis was encountered, framed and explained by senior naval medical professionals, this article investigates the condition’s portrayal as a serious health and military risk during the Second World War. This research analyses hitherto unexplored intersections of constructions of race, gender and environment in British naval medical conclusions and recommendations, delivering significant new understandings of the insidious operation of medical racism in Britain’s wartime armed forces. It also establishes, for the first time, how this ambiguous illness was construed as a threat to Britain’s naval war effort, and even the very future of Empire, by the Navy’s medical branch.","PeriodicalId":21922,"journal":{"name":"Social History of Medicine","volume":"34 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141509270","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":"Voluntarism as Resistance to State Control: A Case Study of the Kingston Victoria Hospital and the Fledgling NHS","authors":"Steph Haydon","doi":"10.1093/shm/hkae034","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/hkae034","url":null,"abstract":"Summary With the launching of the National Health Service (NHS) in 1948, this taxpayer-funded, centralised, universal service seemingly negated the need for new voluntary hospitals to be established in Britain. Within 3 years, however, the former doctors of the Kingston and Malden Victoria Hospital (KMVH) announced a new voluntary hospital (the New Victoria) after the KMVH was closed for repurposing in the NHS. Examining this case reveals stakeholder perceptions of the early NHS, including debates over general practitioner (GP) independence, local democracy and state control which predated and permeated the founding of the Service. I argue the New Victoria was founded as a response to and revolt against centralised bureaucracy and an attempt to restore a sense of GP independence and patient control in the local hospital service. Voluntarism, in the form of a voluntary hospital, was the medium through which these debates took place.","PeriodicalId":21922,"journal":{"name":"Social History of Medicine","volume":"5 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-06-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141509272","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":"‘Immune from the germ-laden things’: Immunity and Irish Newspaper Advertising, 1890–1940","authors":"Maebh Long","doi":"10.1093/shm/hkae035","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/hkae035","url":null,"abstract":"Summary From 1890, as advertising in Irish newspapers grew in quantity and sophistication, a discourse of immunity began to circulate. Advertisers drew on advancements in bacteriology and immunology to present their goods as defensive strategies against a range of threats, from major infectious diseases to everyday coughs and colds. Consumers were urged to supplement their bodies’ vulnerabilities by purchasing pills and tonics, with medical products joined by immunity-assuring underwear, coats, cosmetics and cars. From a dataset of every immunity-focused advertisement in the Irish Newspaper Archives and The Irish Times archives between 1890 and 1940, I unpack the ways immunity was presented to the Irish public outside of medical institutions. I show how discourses of immunity intersected with influenza outbreaks, consider the implication of the non-national origins of many advertisements, and trace their rhetoric of protection and resistance across a range of product types.","PeriodicalId":21922,"journal":{"name":"Social History of Medicine","volume":"11 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-06-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141509271","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":"Medical Voluntarism and Orthopaedic Advancements: Lancashire and the Disabled Ex-Servicemen of the First World War.","authors":"Nicola Smith","doi":"10.1093/shm/hkae029","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/hkae029","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article explores the fundamental role of Lancashire's medical voluntarism in providing restorative orthopaedic treatments to the region's First World War, disabled ex-servicemen and assisting in their return to society. It offers a case study of orthopaedic treatments and schemes of rehabilitation provided at Grangethorpe Hospital, Rusholme, between 1914 and 1918. Forming a regional comparison to existing histories of First World War disabled ex-servicemen, which focus primarily on the interwar period, this article traces continuities in pioneering medicine and examples of Lancashire-based medical individuals and institutions. In doing so, this article demonstrates how the region's response to disablement during the Industrial Revolution underpinned the construction of charities and the advancement of orthopaedic treatments required to provide rehabilitative care during the First World War. Moreover, this paper situates Lancashire and its commitment to medical voluntarism and the reconstruction of disabled ex-servicemen as a key site in the UK's history of voluntarism.</p>","PeriodicalId":21922,"journal":{"name":"Social History of Medicine","volume":"37 3","pages":"635-649"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2024-06-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11531405/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142576943","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}
{"title":"Interrogating ‘Parriah Arrack’: Anxieties Over Health, Race and Drinking in Early Colonial Calcutta","authors":"Sarbajit Mitra","doi":"10.1093/shm/hkae027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/hkae027","url":null,"abstract":"Summary The colonial authorities in India had always been watchful of the drinking activities of the European soldiers and sailors, expressing concerns about their moral and physical health. The article suggests that such anxieties motivated the European population in India, particularly in its early days, to investigate the drinking practices of the local population and examine the effects of locally distilled liquor on their health and constitution. Through an analysis of a petition and a Commission report, the paper explores a dialogue between a group of European distillers and the Fort William Medical Board in early nineteenth-century Calcutta, focussing on the topics of drinking and health. The article argues that these early interrogations on the local drink not just reinforced the racial stereotypes concerning taste and technology but also consolidated the idea of the ‘tropic’ that continued to inform Anglo-Indian medical discourses in subsequent years.","PeriodicalId":21922,"journal":{"name":"Social History of Medicine","volume":"51 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-05-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141190544","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":"Educative Psychological Treatment at Edinburgh’s Royal Asylum: Unfolding The Morningside Mirror, 1845–1882","authors":"Christopher Holligan","doi":"10.1093/shm/hkae022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/hkae022","url":null,"abstract":"Summary This article examines moral therapy in relation to writing by fee-paying ‘lunatic’ asylum patients from the upper and middle classes. Their work was published in a nineteenth-century monthly periodical, The Morningside Mirror. There is an intersection of the periodical with status and the interests of gentlemanly values. Despite their psychopathological diagnoses, which included melancholia, writers for the Mirror retained their human capacity to share poignant insights into love and social injustice. Edinburgh’s reputation as a cultural and scientific centre of learning provided opportunities for the asylum to market itself as an iconic sanctuary that could maintain the materially privileged lifestyles of patients. The Morningside Mirror offered creative activity, self-esteem maintenance and public recognition. It connected the Asylum to the society outside. The expression of logic as reflective of the repair of reason signalled, from the viewpoint of psychological medicine, the Mirror’s therapeutic impact and utility to project reputation.","PeriodicalId":21922,"journal":{"name":"Social History of Medicine","volume":"150 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-05-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140834254","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":"French Psychiatry and Alcoholism in the 1950s and 1960s: The Paradoxes of Outpatient Care","authors":"Anatole Le Bras","doi":"10.1093/shm/hkae020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/hkae020","url":null,"abstract":"Summary This article examines the place of alcoholic patients in French psychiatry in the 1950s and 1960s, an era of incipient psychiatric reform. Relying on medical literature, national and department archives, as well as hitherto unexploited patient files from one of the first anti-alcoholic consultations opened in the early 1950s in Paris, it shows how new therapies and drugs, such as disulfiram, revived the interest of psychiatrists for alcoholism and enabled the outpatient treatment of alcoholics. However, the study of patient trajectories reveals that ambulatory care did not substitute itself for hospitalisation. The article then analyses how the psychiatrist–patient relation was transformed in the framework of the consultation, and included new stakeholders such as social workers and family members. It finally explains why therapeutic enthusiasm gave way, at the end of the 1960s, to increasing doubts concerning the role of the psychiatrist in the cure of alcoholism.","PeriodicalId":21922,"journal":{"name":"Social History of Medicine","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140834253","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":"Marginal and Obsolete? Rural Hospitals in Early Modern Europe: A Case Study of Catalonia.","authors":"Julie Marfany","doi":"10.1093/shm/hkae018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/hkae018","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Small local hospitals have been neglected by historians, and frequently assumed to have been marginal to their communities and largely obsolete by the eighteenth century. This paper questions such assumptions via a case study of Catalonia. It provides the first comprehensive estimates for the number of hospitals over the course of the eighteenth century, and then examines a sample of surviving accounts and other documentation to analyse the extent and nature of care provided. While the quality of care varied and most hospitals were restricted by their income, particularly against a background of war and rising prices, many nevertheless provided considerable care both to transient populations of foundlings and migrants and to their local communities. The paper calls for a re-evaluation of these forms of care in line with the re-evaluation of women's caring work.</p>","PeriodicalId":21922,"journal":{"name":"Social History of Medicine","volume":"37 4","pages":"813-841"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2024-04-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11994852/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143982184","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}
Grégory Dufaud, Nicolas Henckes, Marianna Scarfone
{"title":"Psychiatry, Modernity and the Politics of the Individual: The Historical Contours of Mental Hygiene","authors":"Grégory Dufaud, Nicolas Henckes, Marianna Scarfone","doi":"10.1093/shm/hkae015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/hkae015","url":null,"abstract":"Summary This introduction to this special issue devoted to mental hygiene movements in Europe examines the issues and problems facing their historical study. While the definition of mental hygiene was obvious to contemporaries, it referred to highly divergent projects in different socio-political contexts. As a result, historians have struggled to come up with a unified definition of mental hygiene as a category for analysis. After outlining historiographical responses to this question, this essay suggests that mental hygiene can best be understood as a specific way of articulating four dimensions of the psychiatric discipline, namely its organization and its relationship to the state, individuals and science. The final section provides an overview of the themes developed by the articles in this special issue.","PeriodicalId":21922,"journal":{"name":"Social History of Medicine","volume":"43 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-04-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140628723","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}