{"title":"High-Tech Obstetrics, Colonialism, and Childbirth Choice in Late Twentieth-Century Canada.","authors":"Whitney Wood, Danielle Cossey-Sutton","doi":"10.1353/bhm.2025.a963729","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/bhm.2025.a963729","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Developed in the United States in the late 1950s and 1960s, the electronic fetal monitor (EFM) was increasingly used in obstetric practice throughout North America by the 1970s. In identifying and delineating the \"normal\" fetal heart rate, EFM played a central role in defining obstetric risk and, in the eyes of many practitioners, quickly became an essential tool of \"modern\" and \"safe\" hospitalized birth. Focusing on one specific settler-colonial context, this article explores the relationship between obstetric technologies including the EFM and the childbirth \"choices\" available to mothers giving birth in late twentieth-century Canada. As smaller hospitals, health centers, and nursing stations, particularly in rural, remote, and northern areas, lacked access to what were framed as essential technologies, obstetric services were withdrawn from many communities, a shift that continues to disproportionately affect Indigenous mothers who are routinely evacuated out to give birth in provincial hospitals.</p>","PeriodicalId":55304,"journal":{"name":"Bulletin of the History of Medicine","volume":"99 1","pages":"156-184"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144576945","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":"Internal Rotation(s): Sociomaterial Practices and Embodiments in Hugo Sellheim's Experiments on Birth Mechanics.","authors":"Martina Schlünder","doi":"10.1353/bhm.2025.a963728","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/bhm.2025.a963728","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>At the turn of the twentieth century, in the midst of a shift in obstetrical research toward physiology, German obstetrician Hugo Sellheim (1871-1936) embarked upon a research project on the laws of birth mechanics. In a comprehensive experimental program, centering on the internal rotation of fetuses during birth, he tried to find out what kind of mechanical and expulsive forces were at work in the birthing process. From these experiments emerged a wealth of objects such as anatomical models, mechanical dolls, measuring devices, new physical instruments, and also birthing machines. By paying close attention to these objects and the sociomaterial practices associated with them, this article identifies, tracks, and characterizes the shift to physiology in obstetrics. By adopting a historical-praxiographic method, the article reveals the entanglement between the social and the material and renders visible a new and wider set of actors and relationships that, in turn, adds a novel dimension to the historiography of obstetrics.</p>","PeriodicalId":55304,"journal":{"name":"Bulletin of the History of Medicine","volume":"99 1","pages":"122-155"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144576991","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":"A Social History of Seoul National University Hospital: The National Health Insurance, Three-Minute Consultation, and the Convoluted Legacy of American Aid for a Postcolonial Medical Institution in South Korea.","authors":"Hyung Wook Park","doi":"10.1353/bhm.2025.a968651","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/bhm.2025.a968651","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The author traces the evolution of Seoul National University Hospital (SNUH) and its predecessors, focusing on their transformation from the 1960s to the 1980s. Starting as an impoverished governmental hospital of a postcolonial country, it grew into a major South Korean biomedical corporation with many faculty members with American training, a new main building with the latest technologies, and a larger independent budget supported by the National Health Insurance (NHI). However, this evolution accompanied multiple issues stemming from overcrowding, which resulted in short and skimpy consultations, a poor environment, staff exploitation, and various minor crimes. Yet the crowds in the hospital assisted young doctors' training and some faculty members' research. The author explains this complexity by analyzing the American aid's legacy alongside the NHI's roles. This explains the limitations to the U.S. attempt to shape Korea's medicine amid its state-driven industrialization and health insurance evolution under a military dictatorship, which partly reflected the colonial heritage.</p>","PeriodicalId":55304,"journal":{"name":"Bulletin of the History of Medicine","volume":"99 2","pages":"347-383"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144979569","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":"Reproductive Objects.","authors":"Scottie Buehler, Margaret Carlyle","doi":"10.1353/bhm.2025.a963724","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/bhm.2025.a963724","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This special issue traces the material \"stuff\"-the instruments and other material objects-that constitutes the uneven tapestries of power, authority, and knowledge making around human reproduction. To reevaluate our definition of what counts as a reproductive object, this collection recasts familiar objects, introduces new ones, and juxtaposes mundane things side-by-side with high-tech instruments. It also brings together various methodological approaches to highlight the myriad and multifaceted ways objects are enmeshed in sociomaterial webs. The resulting view of reproductive health care is thus contingent, fluid, and, fundamentally, material.</p>","PeriodicalId":55304,"journal":{"name":"Bulletin of the History of Medicine","volume":"99 1","pages":"1-16"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144576992","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":"The Midwife's Bag: Tracing the Objects of Professional Identity in Post-Unification Italy.","authors":"Jennifer Kosmin","doi":"10.1353/bhm.2025.a963727","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/bhm.2025.a963727","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>As an immediate target of post-Unification legislation, Italian midwives were subject to national efforts to standardize educational and professional practices. As a material emblem of these initiatives, the midwife's bag signified both a recognizable marker of midwives' new professional status and a mechanism for the increased surveillance directed toward them. Drawing on the material feminism of scholars like Donna Haraway and Karen Barad, the author considers three objects contained within the midwife's bag-syringes, stethoscopes, and birth registers-and the associated technologies of asepsis, auscultation, and statistical enumeration. In physical birthing rooms and on the pages of midwifery's new professional journals, the embodied practices associated with, rationale for, and impacts of novel obstetrical objects were negotiated. These technologies were part of the ongoing production of particular kinds of birthing and fetal bodies, ones that were both known and increasingly defined by technologically derived data and measurement.</p>","PeriodicalId":55304,"journal":{"name":"Bulletin of the History of Medicine","volume":"99 1","pages":"94-121"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144576993","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":"Rabbit Spleen and Medicinal Herbs: Animal Infectious Diseases, Grassroots Communes, and the State in Maoist China","authors":"Jongsik Christian Yi","doi":"10.1353/bhm.2024.a937507","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/bhm.2024.a937507","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>summary:</p><p>This article explores how Mao-era China responded to major epizootic and zoonotic diseases. It foregrounds a series of patterns in fighting contagious animal diseases—lockdowns, quarantines, disinfection, mass animal vaccination, mass education, and prioritizing the treatment of infected animals over mass culling—which were together called the Comprehensive Prevention and Treatment (CPT). Shedding light on this understudied topic in the fields of the history of medicine and of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the author argues that it was not the central or provincial governments but rather local communes that led the effort to protect livestock from animal infectious diseases. This article critically demonstrates how the story of the CPT highlights the resilience of communal actors as well as the possibilities and limitations of the Maoist ideal of self-reliance.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":55304,"journal":{"name":"Bulletin of the History of Medicine","volume":"31 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2024-09-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142259735","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":"The Art of Childbirth: A Bilingual Edition by Marie Baudoin (review)","authors":"Lianne McTavish","doi":"10.1353/bhm.2024.a937508","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/bhm.2024.a937508","url":null,"abstract":"<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>The Art of Childbirth: A Bilingual Edition</em> by Marie Baudoin <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Lianne McTavish </li> </ul> Marie Baudoin. <em>The Art of Childbirth: A Bilingual Edition</em>. Ed. and trans. Cathy McClive. The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: The Toronto Series, 98. New York: Iter Press, 2022. x + 244 pp. Ill $54.95 (978-1-64959-078-7). <p>Cathy McClive has produced the first thorough analysis of a previously unpublished manuscript written in 1671 by French midwife Marie Baudoin. McClive’s book begins with a masterful introduction to the life and work of Baudoin, who was the chief mistress-midwife and governor of the Hôtel-Dieu in Clermont-Ferrand, located about 420 kilometres south of Paris. This lengthy introduction (132 pp.) is followed by an annotated translation of the seventeenth-century French text (44 pp.), and then a transcription of it (34 pp.). The translation into English of a largely unknown midwifery text is important, and it sheds new light on the early modern period.</p> <p>McClive’s introduction is arguably the highlight of the publication. Meticulously researched, it draws on her expertise in the history of childbirth to place Baudoin’s writing within the context of early modern midwifery practice and theories of childbirth. The introduction goes, however, far beyond the medical domain to consider the diverse circumstances that shaped Baudoin’s midwifery text. McClive draws on archival sources to examine Baudoin’s personal relationships, notably her marriage and position within an influential Jansenist network, as well as the midwife’s savvy use of microcredit to pursue her goals after separating from her husband, and her role in managing disputes with the <em>soeurs grises</em> at the hospital in Clermont-Ferrand. McClive further considers the materiality of the midwifery manuscript, the opportunities and limitations of surviving historical records, and the gendered dynamics that inform all of the topics she addresses. This nuanced approach reveals the complex life of one early modern French woman, while undermining simplistic understandings of early modern midwifery, including the idea that male practitioners used instruments, while women did not.</p> <p>The original manuscript by Baudoin is unique in several respects. It was written in the form of a forty-page letter, addressed to the Parisian physician Noël Vallant, perhaps at his request. Though Vallant had planned to publish Baudoin’s discussion of her midwifery theory and hands-on practice, he never did so. Sections of Baudoin’s text were published in 1899, when physician Paul-Émile Le Maguet extracted parts of the letter from Vallant’s <em>portefeuille</em>, now at the Bibliothèque Nationale, and commented on them in his medical thesis, but, as McClive shows, he excluded the most innovative and historically interesting aspects of the manuscript.<sup>1</sup> McClive suggests that Le Maguet d","PeriodicalId":55304,"journal":{"name":"Bulletin of the History of Medicine","volume":"29 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2024-09-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142259734","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":"A Tribute to Caroline Catherine Hannaway (1943–2024)","authors":"Sharon E. Kingsland, Jeremy A. Greene","doi":"10.1353/bhm.2024.a937502","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/bhm.2024.a937502","url":null,"abstract":"<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> A Tribute to Caroline Catherine Hannaway (1943–2024) <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Sharon E. Kingsland and Jeremy A. Greene </li> </ul> <p>Caroline Catherine Hannaway (née Moorhouse), a historian of medicine with close ties to the Johns Hopkins Departments of History of Medicine and History of Science and Technology for many years, passed away on March 14, 2024. Caroline was born in Melbourne, Australia, on August 22, 1943. Her father, Charles Edmund Moorhouse (1911–2002), was a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Melbourne. Her mother, Catherine Albright Moorhouse (née Manderson; 1914–1989), was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, later becoming an Australian citizen. Caroline grew up in Melbourne along with her sister, Jane, and her brother, Weston.</p> <p>Caroline’s undergraduate studies in the 1960s were in the history and philosophy of science at the University of Melbourne. Students were expected to study the history of all sciences, including astronomy, physics, mathematics, chemistry, and biology. Caroline did not intend originally to be a historian of medicine, but there was one seminar in the history of nineteenth-century British medicine, taught by Diana Dyason, that piqued her interest because the course focused on reading primary texts.<sup>1</sup> She decided to leave Australia for graduate study in Baltimore at the Institute of the History of Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University, which had offered her tuition and a fellowship. She ended up staying in Baltimore after graduation, not her original intent, because she met Owen Hannaway, historian of chemistry in the History of Science Department. Owen was a brilliant and creative scholar, teacher, and raconteur. They fell in love, married in 1969, and were a devoted couple until Owen’s death in 2006. Since Owen was from Glasgow, they enjoyed not only visits to Scotland over the years, but also the Scottish and Celtic festivals in Maryland.</p> <p>Both Owen and William Coleman, who was historian of biology and medicine in the Department of History of Science, encouraged Caroline’s interests in French medicine, which became the subject of her doctoral <strong>[End Page v]</strong> dissertation. Coleman had pointed out the obvious advantages to working on French history, namely that one could spend weeks in Paris enjoying the food and historical surroundings as well as having adventures in the archives. She and Owen took this advice to heart, spending many summers in France working on various projects. But digging in the archives for her dissertation research presented many challenges and required perseverance. The records she needed were in the Academy of Medicine in Paris, but prospective users had first to persuade the porter to open the street door to allow entry, then thread their way along corridors and stairways mostly in the dark: “The keeper of the archives saw herself as the guardian of treasures to be protected rather than","PeriodicalId":55304,"journal":{"name":"Bulletin of the History of Medicine","volume":"25 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2024-09-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142259731","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":"A Clinic for the People: Toward an Antiracist Psychiatry at the Tuskegee Institute 1947–1965","authors":"Kylie M. Smith","doi":"10.1353/bhm.2024.a937505","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/bhm.2024.a937505","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>summary:</p><p>From 1947 until 1963, a small group of psychiatrists from the Tuskegee Veterans Administration Hospital ran a Mental Hygiene Clinic designed to provide outpatient care and education to the Black residents of Macon County, Alabama. In an analysis of the clinic and the work of its Director, Dr. Prince Barker, we see the ways that Black psychiatrists tried to develop an antiracist approach to psychiatry and to develop their own autonomy in segregated Alabama. But there were limitations to this work. Tensions between the state funding body, local politics, and the internal racism of psychiatry itself all made it difficult for Tuskegee psychiatrists to provide alternatives to care beyond the veil of the color line.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":55304,"journal":{"name":"Bulletin of the History of Medicine","volume":"41 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2024-09-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142259733","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":"The Doctor Who Would Be King by Guillaume Lachenal (review)","authors":"Matthew M. Heaton","doi":"10.1353/bhm.2024.a937509","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/bhm.2024.a937509","url":null,"abstract":"<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>The Doctor Who Would Be King</em> by Guillaume Lachenal <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Matthew M. Heaton </li> </ul> Guillaume Lachenal. <em>The Doctor Who Would Be King</em>. Trans. Cheryl Smeall. Theory in Forms. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2022. x + 301 pp. Ill. $28.95 (978-1-4780-1786-8). <p>In this rather idiosyncratic volume, Lachenal recounts the life and times of Dr. John Joseph David, a French colonial army doctor who twice found himself in the position of acting as a high-level colonial administrator of French-controlled territories, first on Wallis Island in the South Pacific (1933–38) and later in the Haut-Nyong province of Cameroon (1939–44). In both instances, Dr. David took on responsibilities above and beyond the traditional role of a colonial doctor and in the process established regimes effectively governed by principles of public health, fundamentally linking prospects for economic development and effective administration to the health and well-being of indigenous populations. In both places, David also developed something of a cult of personality, remembered mostly as strong, capable, and variously kind and severe, depending on the circumstances. David’s bearing was so regal that he became known colloquially as “Emperor” in Haut-Nyongo, and as “King” in Wallis, despite never holding either title within French or indigenous political structures.</p> <p>Telling the story of Dr. David, however, is more easily conceptualized than executed. The Haut-Nyong efforts in medical administration seemed novel on first blush, but ultimately “[led] to a somewhat disappointing conclusion: ‘the Haut-Nyong experiment was not very original, neither in substance nor in form’” (p. 74). Though based on principles of prioritizing public health, David’s developmentalist administration ultimately looked very much like other colonial projects of the time, despite being run by doctors. Hoping that David’s earlier odyssey in Wallis might provide insights to reinvigorate the search for historical significance, Lachenal delves into what for him are new and uncharted waters. In Wallis he uncovers another episode of quintessential colonial bravado, in which David insinuated himself into the local political system and instituted significant economic reforms to incorporate Wallis into the imperial economy. But the story here fizzled out, too, with David leaving unceremoniously in the wake of a catastrophic epidemic of typhoid fever, without much to show for his time as “king.” <strong>[End Page 328]</strong> Ultimately, Lachenal laments, “Wallis would be a case study that would have no instance of any generality, except . . . that of ‘micro-insularity’ itself” (p. 137).</p> <p>Lachenal does his due diligence, but the documentary record of David’s tenure is spotty at best. Oral interviews with friends and associates of Dr. David’s in Cameroon and Wallis produce a range of impressions and ar","PeriodicalId":55304,"journal":{"name":"Bulletin of the History of Medicine","volume":"24 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2024-09-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142259736","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}