{"title":"Chinese-Iranian Medical Exchanges During the Yuan Dynasty: A Historical Perspective.","authors":"Ehsan Doostmohammadi","doi":"10.1093/jhmas/jrag018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jhmas/jrag018","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The Yuan dynasty marked the period of medieval China's most frequent foreign exchanges. After the establishment of the four great khanates of the Mongol Empire, the Yuan dynasty maintained close relations with the Ilkhanate, which became known as the Land of Iran. These interactions facilitated extensive medical exchanges between the two khanates. During this process, the Silk Road became a bridge for exchanging medicinal knowledge and practices between the Great Yuan and Iran. The exchange of medicines and medical prescriptions between the two was continuous, with both regions' medical practitioners adopting and applying each other's knowledge, thus bringing about a certain degree of transformative influence on their respective traditional medical systems. Based on medical and historical literature from medieval Iran and China, this study conducts a meticulous textual examination of relevant sources. This research aims to reveal an aspect of the medical exchanges between these medieval territories.</p>","PeriodicalId":49998,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2026-04-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147787490","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Correction to: Safe Sex and the Debate over Condoms on Campus in the 1980s: Sperm Busters at Harvard and Protection Connection at the University of Texas at Austin.","authors":"","doi":"10.1093/jhmas/jrae038","DOIUrl":"10.1093/jhmas/jrae038","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":49998,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences","volume":" ","pages":"229"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2026-04-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13070690/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142650552","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Fearing Meningitis: Disease, Emotions and the Spotted Fever Epidemics of 1904-1907.","authors":"Ian Miller","doi":"10.1093/jhmas/jrae039","DOIUrl":"10.1093/jhmas/jrae039","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The meningitis (or spotted fever) outbreaks (c.1904-1907) caused worldwide alarm but remain largely forgotten. This article uses these outbreaks as an invaluable case study for understanding early twentieth-century responses (individual and collective) to a mysterious, potentially deadly infection. More specifically, it focuses on the social production of fear until physicians and medical scientists devised new ways of making meningitis more manageable, with reference to a range of actors who shaped public responses and feelings. Ultimately, the article argues that initial attempts to warn and educate about meningitis usually promoted fear and avoidance, but as meningitis became more manageable, emotional responses to its outbreaks altered significantly. Emotions were constructed and experienced in the context of a new medical modernity optimistic about public health and clinical interventions. Exploring the physical and emotional in tandem takes us to the heart of societal and personal experience of disease outbreaks.</p>","PeriodicalId":49998,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences","volume":" ","pages":"193-212"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2026-04-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142808059","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Contagious Vibrations: Sympathetic Resonance as a Model for Disease Transmission in the Writings of Ficino, Fracastoro, and Cardano.","authors":"Remi Chiu","doi":"10.1093/jhmas/jrae023","DOIUrl":"10.1093/jhmas/jrae023","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Contagious diseases were among the most vexing problems in ancient theories of health, which could not easily account for how a corruption of one person's humors could cause a similar corruption in another's. One useful explanatory concept for Renaissance doctors tackling this theoretical gap was the phenomenon of resonance or \"sympathetic vibration\" - where one stationary string begins to vibrate spontaneously when a similarly tuned string is plucked nearby - as both resonance and contagion involved some mysterious, insensible action at a distance between an agent and a patient. Tracing the writings of Marsilio Ficino, Girolamo Fracastoro, and Girolamo Cardano, this essay explores the relationships between the writers' accounts of sympathetic vibrations and their contagion theories. It argues that different conceptions of the acoustic phenomenon - either as a manifestation of a Neo-Platonic World-Soul that underpinned the universe or else as a physical effect - revealed the writers' cosmological views that, in turn, informed their accounts of the human body and disease.</p>","PeriodicalId":49998,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences","volume":" ","pages":"121-136"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2026-04-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142127098","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Animal Trauma and the Creation of a Rinderpest Epidemic in German East Africa.","authors":"Thaddeus Sunseri","doi":"10.1093/jhmas/jrag016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jhmas/jrag016","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In 1912 officials in German East Africa reported that rinderpest, the most feared cattle scourge, had invaded for the first time since the 1890s African panzootic. This acknowledgment launched an expensive vaccination campaign and the creation of a veterinary infrastructure after years of neglect. Despite reports that rinderpest had been present in the region for several years, Germans nevertheless considered it an external threat, constructing disease laws accordingly. Modern virologists believe that rinderpest had been enzootic in colonial Tanzania since the 1890s, causing low mortality, afflicting animals with no prior exposure. African cattle keepers also believed the disease was the same as that of the 1890s. German resistance to recognizing rinderpest before 1912 owed to their faith in injection trials to verify a virus, and their failure to understand that enzootic rinderpest behaved differently than it did during prior epidemics. Moreover, colonial policies that traumatized animals, including landscape engineering, disease controls, wildlife slaughter, the commodifying of cattle, trade violence, and colonial warfare helped enzootic rinderpest become epidemic. The rinderpest campaign itself caused animal distress through mass vaccination and branding. While historians understand how colonial rule exacerbated human health by creating stress and compromising immunity, the same understanding has not been applied to animal health.</p>","PeriodicalId":49998,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2026-04-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147595717","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Epidemic times: epidemic ontologies and temporalities in medieval islamic medicine.","authors":"Ahmed Ragab","doi":"10.1093/jhmas/jrag005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jhmas/jrag005","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Recent scholarship on the Black Death has uncovered crucial new insights into the disease and its spread, and has charted ways for historians to collaborate with the biological sciences. However, this approach has emphasized the primacy of a modern Western biomedical ontology that understands the disease and its spread through Yersinia pestis. In Islamic history, this meant a focus on tracing how medieval authors distinguished modern biological plague symptoms from those of other conditions, when and where the disease first emerged. Building on postcolonial methodological approaches, this article sidesteps modern biological categories and focuses on the construction of plague as a medieval disease, regardless of its relationship to modern biological plague. The article argues that the disease should be understood within an expansive, inclusive epistemology that focuses on the epidemic's mortality. It uses this approach to investigate the temporal structures that governed the disease, its perception, and management.</p>","PeriodicalId":49998,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2026-03-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147576330","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Defense and disaster medicine: civil contingencies and natural disasters in Swedish civil defense.","authors":"Fredrik Bertilsson","doi":"10.1093/jhmas/jrag010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jhmas/jrag010","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>As in many other countries, Swedish defense during the Cold War was primarily organized around the perceived threat of war, including the potential use of nuclear weapons. This article shifts attention from such scenarios to the ways in which civil contingencies and natural disasters were conceptualized as knowledge objects within the emerging field of defense and disaster medicine. Their incorporation into Sweden's preparedness agenda signaled a broader and more multifaceted understanding of protection and security within the scientific advisory system of the Swedish defense. By centering medical knowledge production on these hazards, the article offers new insights into the role of medical expertise in Swedish preparedness, while simultaneously shifting focus away from a war-centered narrative of Cold War defense investments. The empirical exploration spans the period from the late 1950s, when a comprehensive governmental inquiry into Swedish defense medicine led to the establishment of the Delegation for Applied Medical Defense Research [Försvarsmedicinska forskningsdelegationen] and subsequently the Organizing Committee for Disaster Medicine [Katastrofmedicinska organisationskommittén] (Kamedo) in the first half of the 1960s. The study concludes in the mid-1970s, when the Delegation was incorporated into the Swedish Defense Research Establishment [Försvarets forskningsanstalt] (FOA).</p>","PeriodicalId":49998,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2026-03-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147576366","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Long History of Misconduct on the Medical Licensing Examination in the United States.","authors":"David Alan Johnson","doi":"10.1093/jhmas/jrag001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jhmas/jrag001","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>A written examination for medical licensure developed in nearly every state in the late nineteenth century. Cheating behaviors (e.g., copying, test proxies, attempted pre-access) emerged soon after. State medical boards adopted mechanisms to deter and detect such behaviors. The twentieth-century shift to nationally administered exams (NBME Parts, FLEX, USMLE) saw a continuation of exam misconduct despite the application of greater controls and data forensic analyses. Two features characterize historical and contemporary misconduct on the medical licensing examination: infrequency and persistence. Though exam misconduct appears modest in scope (national data exists only for the last 30 years), its impact extends beyond infrequency to include risk to the broader medical licensing system and even patient outcomes. Evidence presented here makes clear that the soft underbelly of historical and contemporary exam security was the human element: lapses in following procedures designed to protect the licensing and examination systems but also a general belief that a security breach happens elsewhere. The infrequency of the behavior is remembered but the documented persistence of cheating behaviors is forgotten.</p>","PeriodicalId":49998,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2026-03-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147367301","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Anesthesia in Victorian Canada: surgical accidents, risk, and safety.","authors":"J T H Connor","doi":"10.1093/jhmas/jrag002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jhmas/jrag002","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The process of inhalation anesthesia was one of several Victorian innovations that transformed surgery. Its uptake in Canada from the 1840s to the early 1900s affords insights into situating attitudes towards surgical accidents, risk, and safety, along with the concomitant issues of blame and medical progress. Based on contemporary English-language Canadian medical journals, including their publication of clinical case reports, detailed newspaper accounts of legal proceedings, and editorial commentaries, this article reveals a spectrum of responses by Canadians to the opportunity of being spared pain during surgical operations and childbirth. These published sources show that the uptake of inhalation anesthesia was not a straightforward or inevitable success story, although it became commonplace and standard practice. Rather, as I demonstrate, enthusiasm over its adoption in Canada was tempered by social and scientific questions, making the process complex, nuanced, and subject to challenge and debate.</p>","PeriodicalId":49998,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2026-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147357431","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A forgotten episode in the history of tobacco control: how Australia achieved a ban on television advertising of cigarettes.","authors":"Carolyn Holbrook, Ann Westmore, Thomas J Kehoe","doi":"10.1093/jhmas/jraf026","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jhmas/jraf026","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>While Australia is now renowned for world-leading anti-tobacco measures, including being the first jurisdiction to introduce plain packaging of cigarettes in 2012, it was not always at the forefront of tobacco control. This article traces the history of the process by which cigarette advertising on radio and television was banned in Australia in the mid-1970s, several years after similar legislative measures were introduced in comparable countries, including Denmark, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Using the archive of Cancer Council Victoria and other anti-cancer advocacy organisations, along with official government records, this case study shows how an important milestone in cancer control was achieved over a process of several years using a combination of innovative strategies. Cancer control advocates simultaneously persuaded politicians with scientific evidence about the harms of tobacco, activated public opinion with a humorous television advertising campaign in order to exert pressure on the political class, and devised policies that would ameliorate some of the concerns of local tobacco growers and media companies. This persistent, multi-pronged and innovative campaign can be seen as an important staging ground for the victories that Australian cancer control advocates would achieve in the following decades against Big Tobacco.</p>","PeriodicalId":49998,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2026-02-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146151178","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}