Bøger i Medicine and Biomedical Sciences in Modern History serien

This book explores the dissemination of knowledge around Chinese medicinal substances from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries in a global context. The author presents a microhistory of the caterpillar fungus, a natural, medicinal substance initially used by Tibetans no later than the fifteenth century and later assimilated into Chinese materia medica from the eighteenth century onwards. Tracing the transmission of the caterpillar fungus from China to France, Britain, Russia and Japan, the book investigates the tensions that existed between prevailing Chinese knowledge and new European ideas about the caterpillar fungus. Emerging in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Europe, these ideas eventually reached communities of scientists, physicians and other intellectuals in Japan and China. Seeking to examine why the caterpillar fungus engaged the attention of so many scientific communities across the globe, the author offers a transnational perspective on the making of modern Europeannatural history and Chinese materia medica.

This book offers the first in-depth investigation into the relationship between the National Birth Control Association, later the Family Planning Association, and contraceptive science and technology in the pre-Pill era. It explores the Association¿s role in designing and supporting scientific research, employment of scientists, engagement with manufacturers and pharmaceutical companies, and use of its facilities, patients, staff, medical, scientific, and political networks to standardise and guarantee contraceptive technology it prescribed and produced. By taking a micro-history approach to the archives of the Association, this book highlights the importance of this organisation to the history of science, technology, and medicine in twentieth-century Britain. It examines the Association¿s participation within Western family planning networks, working particularly closely with its American counterparts to develop chemical and biological means of testing contraception for efficacy, quality, and safety.

This book traces the career of pioneering South African plastic and reconstructive surgeon, Jack Penn, from its beginnings during the Second World War. It explores the establishment of Penn¿s private practice, and his work in diverse countries, including Gabon, Japan and Israel, as he sought to rectify the injury caused by conflict. It also addresses his role on the President¿s Council, established by Prime Minister P.W. Botha to introduce reform to the system of apartheid.Penn¿s career is contextualised by modernisation which was a significant feature of twentieth-century South Africa. It was linked with race from the inception of the state in 1910 with racial segregation and paternalism. Penn¿s work during the Second World War was part of a ¿modernist¿ bent by the state under Jan Smuts to take the lead in promoting science and technological development ¿ which continued during apartheid. Modernisation was also fluid with state priority shifting between the two poles of development and security as apartheid policies were met with hostility both within the state and beyond its borders. Within the context of decolonisation, increasing black urbanisation required a balancing act on the part of the state to uphold the ideology of racial distinction while simultaneously addressing economic challenges ¿ and this was reflected in the reform initiatives under Botha.Plastic and reconstructive surgery as evident in the work of Jack Penn is intertwined with this narrative of apartheid, modernisation and reform. It demonstrated Western prowess, with medicine and development a perceived bulwark against Communism. It also served as a means for the modernising apartheid state to initiate, maintain or enhance alliances with other states in the facing of mounting isolation and international condemnation.The career of Jack Penn, then, is a lens through which the contradictions, complexities and anxieties of twentieth-century South Africa are exposed.

Ninety years after the discovery of human influenza virus, Modern Flu traces the history of this breakthrough and its implications for understanding and controlling influenza ever since. Examining how influenza came to be defined as a viral disease in the first half of the twentieth century, it argues that influenzäs viral identity did not suddenly appear with the discovery of the first human influenza virus in 1933. Instead, it was rooted in the development of medical virus research and virological ways of knowing that grew out of a half-century of changes and innovations in medical science that were shaped through two influenza pandemics, two world wars, and by state-sponsored programs to scientifically modernise British medicine. A series of transformations, in which virological ideas and practices were aligned with and incorporated into medicine and public health, underpinned the viralisation of influenza in the 1930s and 1940s. Collaboration, conflict and exchange between researchers, medical professionals and governmental bodies lay at the heart of this process. This book is a history of how virus researchers, clinicians, and epidemiologists, medical scientific and public health bodies, and institutions, and philanthropies in Britain, the USA and beyond, forged a new medical consensus on the identity and nature of influenza. Shedding new light on the modern history of influenza, this book is a timely account of how ways of knowing and controlling this intractable epidemic disease became viral.

The relationship between alcohol consumption and liver cirrhosis has long been contested by doctors and medical professionals, creating numerous implications for the public reputation of alcohol in Britain. Despite this, it was not until the 1970s that cirrhosis came to be understood as an ¿alcoholic disease¿. This book contextualises developments in this debate through the twentieth century by examining the significant influence that medical expertise had on policy responses to alcohol misuse, as well as the social reputation of alcohol consumption. It demonstrates how the degree to which drinking was seen to be responsible for liver disease directly shaped how different groups, such as the temperance movement and the drinks industry, exaggerated or downplayed the destructive properties of alcohol. Covering a series of themes including the science of disease causation, the social standing of medical expertise, and alcohol and public health policy, this book argues that in order toproperly understand the trajectory of debates around drinking we need to consider the twentieth-century ¿alcohol problem¿ as primarily a medical issue. Contrary to the tendency by existing works to disassociate perceptions and responses to alcohol use from the objective knowledge of its effects on the body, this book shows that medical understandings of liver disease influenced how alcohol was conceptualised in relation to its harms. Offering a fresh perspective on the interaction between scientific knowledge and policy during the twentieth century, this book provides insights for those researching the social, political and cultural history of modern Britain, as well as historians of medicine and health.

In demonstrating their historical significance as subjects and shapers of medicine, it offers important insights into past animal lives, and reveals that what we think of as 'human' medicine was in fact deeply zoological.Each chapter analyses an important episode in which animals changed and were changed by medicine.

This book offers the first in-depth investigation into the relationship between the National Birth Control Association (NBCA), later the Family Planning Association (FPA), and contraceptive science and technology in the pre-Pill era.

Offering a valuable resource for medical and other historians, this book explores the processes by which pharmacy in Britain and its colonies separated from medicine and made the transition from trade to profession during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. When the Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain was founded in 1841, its founders considered pharmacy to be a branch of medicine. However, the 1852 Pharmacy Act made the exclusion of pharmacists from the medical profession inevitable, and in 1864 the General Medical Council decided that pharmacy legislation was best left to pharmacists themselves. Yet across the Empire, pharmacy struggled to establish itself as an autonomous profession, with doctors in many colonies reluctant to surrender control over pharmacy. In this book the author traces the professionalization of pharmacy by exploring issues including collective action by pharmacists, the role of the state, the passage of legislation, the extension of education, and its separation from medicine.The author considers the extent to which the British model of pharmacy shaped pharmacy in the Empire, exploring the situation in the Divisions of Empire where the 1914 British Pharmacopoeia applied: Canada, the West Indies, the Mediterranean colonies, the colonies in West and South Africa, India and the Eastern colonies, Australia, New Zealand, and the Western Pacific Islands. This insightful and wide-ranging book offers a unique history of British pharmaceutical policy and practice within the colonial world, and provides a firm foundation for further studies in this under-researched aspect of the history of medicine.

This edited collection brings together new research by world-leading historians and anthropologists to examine the interaction between images of plague in different temporal and spatial contexts, and the imagination of the disease from the Middle Ages to today.

This book tells the story of the thousands of corpses that ended up in the hands of anatomists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

This book takes a historical and anthropological approach to understanding how non-human hosts and vectors of diseases are understood, at a time when emerging infectious diseases are one of the central concerns of global health.

This historical reconstruction of the social life of penicillin between the 1940s and 1980s - through the dictatorship to democratic transition - explores political, public, medical, experimental and gender issues, and the rise of antibiotic resistance.

It situates the history of abortion and contraception within the historiography of the fertility decline and the question of whether the decline was due to adjustment to changing social conditions or innovation of contraceptive methods.

This open access book looks at the dramatic history of ovariotomy, an operation to remove ovarian tumours first practiced in the early nineteenth century. Ovariotomy soon occupied a complex position within medicine and society, as an operation which symbolised surgical progress, while also remaining at the boundaries of ethical acceptability.

In this book, the ownership, distribution and sale of patent medicines across Georgian England are explored for the first time, transforming our understanding of healthcare provision and the use of the printed word in that era.

This book reveals the ever-present challenges of patient care at the forefront of medical knowledge.

This book takes a historical and anthropological approach to understanding how non-human hosts and vectors of diseases are understood, at a time when emerging infectious diseases are one of the central concerns of global health.

Drawing on historical research on the place of the public in public health in Britain from the establishment of the National Health Service in 1948, the book presents a new perspective on the relationship between state and citizen.

This edited volume draws historians and anthropologists together to explore the contested worlds of epidemic corpses and their disposal.

The study explores the factors that encouraged Ireland's medical personnel to join the British Army medical services and uncovers how Irish hospital governors, in the face of increasing staff shortages and economic inflation, ensured that Ireland's voluntary hospital network survived the war.

This edited volume draws historians and anthropologists together to explore the contested worlds of epidemic corpses and their disposal.

This volume focuses on gynaecological cancer to explore the ways in which gender has shaped medical and public health responses to cancer in England. Rooted in gendered perceptions of cancer risk, medical and public health efforts to reduce cancer mortality since 1900 have prominently targeted women's cancers.

This book offers a comprehensive and inclusive insight into the history of prostate cancer and its sufferers. As diseases of the prostate, including prostate cancer, came to be better understood in the early twentieth century, therapeutic nihilism continued as curative radical surgeries and radiotherapy failed.