Rochester Studies in Medical History – serie

A multilayered analytical study that situates the Pan American Health Organization in a complex and shifting historical context and examines the internal dynamics of the organization in a probing critical fashion.Marcos Cueto, a widely published medical historian, presents an appealing and well-documented narrative that describes the origins of public health and the creation of PAHO and culminates with the Organization's response to globalization and its commitment to the Millennium Development Goals. The history of PAHO's institutional heritage, notes the author, is "a rich testimony to the depth and breadth of health's value . . . as an indispensable requirementfor peace, security, tolerance, and solidarity . . . and a means of achieving equity . . . in all social spheres."Marcos Cueto is Professor in the School of Public Health at the Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia inLima, Peru, and editor of Missionaries of Science: The Rockefeller Foundation and Latin America [Indiana University Press, 1994].

A look at how the concept of "risk factor" has influenced public health and preventive medicine, with an emphasis upon the study of heart disease.The greatest revolutions in twentieth-century public health and preventive medicine have been the concepts of risk factors and healthy lifestyles as methods of preventing disease. A risk factor is anything that increases the riskof disease in an individual. Lifestyle refers to the individual's personal behaviors with regard to risk factors. Identifying risk factors and modifying them by changing lifestyles in order to prevent disease has become ubiquitousas a strategy in public health.The book examines the history and evolution of the concepts of risk factors and healthy lifestyles and their application to coronary heart disease, the major chronic disease of the twentieth century. The first part contains a history of the use of statistics in public health and medicine, and the ways in which various industries developed the concept of the risk factor. The second part describes the concept of healthylifestyles, which was devised by municipal public health departments and life insurance companies in the early part of the century. The third and fourth parts examine how the concepts of risk factors and lifestyles were applied tothe primary chronic disease of the twentieth century -- coronary heart disease. The focus of the book overall is on coronary heart disease as a public health, rather than a medical, issue, and the various concepts that have beenused in preventing it.William G. Rothstein is Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

Original essays by leading media scholars and historians of medicine that explore the rich history of health-related films.This groundbreaking book argues that health and medical media, with their unique goals and production values, constitute a rich cultural and historical archive and deserve greater scholarly attention. Original essays by leading media scholars and historians of medicine demonstrate that Americans throughout the twentieth century have learned about health, disease, medicine, and the human body from movies. Heroic doctors and patients fighting dread diseaseshave thrilled and moved audiences everywhere; amid changing media formats, medicine's moving pictures continue to educate, entertain, and help us understand the body's journey through life. Perennially popular, health and medicalmedia are also complex texts reflecting many interests and constituencies including, notably, the U.S. medical profession, which has often sought, if not always successfully, to influence content, circulation, and meaning. Medicine's Moving Pictures makes clear that health and medical media representations are "more than illustrations," shows their power to shape health perceptions, practices, and policies, and identifies their social, cultural, andhistorical contexts.Contributors: Lisa Cartwright, Vanessa Northington Gamble, Rachel Gans-Boriskin, Valerie Hartouni, Susan E. Lederer, John Parascandola, Martin S. Pernick, Leslie J. Reagan, Naomi Rogers, Nancy Tomes, Paula A. Treichler, Joseph TurowLeslie J. Reagan is an Associate Professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; Nancy Tomes is a Professor at Stony Brook University; Paula A. Treichler is a Professor atthe University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

A provocative study that explores medical, social, cultural, and aesthetic customs and practices of treating the dead body in Sweden in an era of modernization.Originally published in Swedish in 2002, Death, Modernity, and the Body explores the impact of modernization on customs and practices of treating the dead body in Sweden in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,when intense social and cultural change transformed the country from an agricultural society to a modern industrial state. The book focuses on five arenas: medical research and education, displays of the dead body for entertainment purposes, funerary preparations of the body, memorial photography, and cremation.Åhrén takes an original approach to the history of death in modern society by focusing on the dead body in intersecting cultural domains. Medical, scientific and technological history are thereby connected to popular culture, social and political history, as well as ethnography and anthropology. The scholarly literature on the history of death is disproportionately focused on the Anglophone world, France, and Germany; this study contributes to the scholarship by examining the case of Sweden, where modernization was exceptionally rapid and pervasive, and full of interesting particularities. Eva Åhrén is a Research Fellow and Assistant Professor in the Department for the History of Science and Ideas at Uppsala University, Sweden, and a Research Associate at Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

An annotated English translation of the autobiography of Polish microbiologist Ludwik Hirszfeld (1884-1954), with a focus on his contributions to international public health.Ludwik Hirszfeld (1884-1954), one of the most prominent serologists of the twentieth century, discovered the inheritance and established the nomenclature of blood groups and opened the field of human population genetics. He also carried out groundbreaking research in the genetics of disease and immunology. Following World War II, he founded Poland's first Institute of Immunology in Wroclaw, which now bears his name. His autobiographical memoir, The Story of One Life, first published in Poland in 1946, immediately became a bestseller and has been reedited several times since. It is an outstanding account of a Holocaust survivor and a writer capable of depicting the uniqueness and the tragedy of countless individuals caught up in the nightmare of 1939-45. He recollects his time as a physician in the Serbian army in 1915 and his satisfaction as a scientist who helped rebuild Poland after the Treaty ofVersailles; in so doing the contrast between the world before and the world after World War II could not be starker. Hirszfeld wrote this book while in hiding after he escaped from the Warsaw ghetto in 1943; he buried the manuscript and retrieved it only after the war.Drawing on interviews with Hirszfeld's former students and family, as well as unpublished documents, this translation is annotated and has an introduction written by two scholars with unique qualifications to understand both the immediate setting in which Hirszfeld lived his life, and the broader implications of his work to the history of medicine.Marta A. Balinska is a writer and an international consultant in public health.William H. Schneider is professor of history at Indiana University.

A re-examination of the role of charity and treating venereal disease in public hospitals in early-modern London.This book explores how London society responded to the dilemma of the rampant spread of the pox among the poor. Some have asserted that public authorities turned their backs on the "foul" and only began to offer care for venerealpatients in the Enlightenment. An exploration of hospitals and workhouses shows a much more impressive public health response. London hospitals established "foul wards" at least as early as the mid-sixteenth century. Reconstruction of these wards shows that, far from banning paupers with the pox, hospitals made treating them one of their primary services. Not merely present in hospitals, venereal patients were omnipresent. Yet the "foul" comprised a unique category of patient. The sexual nature of their ailment guaranteed that they would be treated quite differently than all other patients. Class and gender informed patients' experiences in crucial ways. The shameful nature of the disease, and the gendered notion of shame itself, meant that men and women faced quite different circumstances. There emerged a gendered geography of London hospitals as men predominated in fee-charging hospitals, while sick women crowded into workhouses. Patients frequently desired to conceal their infection. This generated innovative services for elite patients who could buy medical privacy by hiring their own doctor. However, the public scrutiny that hospitalization demanded forced poor patients to be creative as they sought access to medical care that they could not afford. Thus, Venereal Disease, Hospitals and the Urban Poor offers new insights onpatients' experiences of illness and on London's health care system itself.Kevin Siena is assistant professor of history at Trent University.

Offers a nuanced analysis of the interaction between the Rockefeller Foundation's International Health Division and Mexico's Departamento de Salubridad Pública as they jointly promoted public health through campaigns against yellow fever and hookworm disease, organized cooperative rural health units, and educated public health professionals in North American universities and Mexican training stations.

This is the first book to examine the history of the medical services provided by workhouses, both in Britain and its former colonies, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries workhouses were a key provider of medical care to the poor. Workhouse beds in Britain far outnumbered beds provided by charitable hospitals, and a high percentage of inmates wereelderly and infirm, needing not only accommodation and work but also medical relief.Historians of welfare, the English poor laws, and medicine have been aware of the importance of workhouse-based medicine, but the topic hasnot been studied in depth. This volume is the first to examine the history of the medical services provided by these institutions both in Britain and its former colonies, over the period covered by the Old and New Poor Laws. Written by prominent historians of medicine, welfare, and social policy, the essays document the experiences of those who received care or died in these houses, and form the critical foundation for a new historiography of workhouse medicine.Contributors: Jeremy Boulton, Virginia Crossman, Romola Davenport, Steven King, Angela Negrine, Susannah Ottaway, Rita Pemberton, Jonathan Reinarz, Alistair Ritch, Leonard Schwarz, Samantha Shave, Kevin Siena, Leonard Smith, Alannah Tomkins.Jonathan Reinarz is director of the History of Medicine Unit at the University of Birmingham, UK. He has published extensively on the history of English medical institutions, 1750-1950. Leonard Schwarz has recently retired as a reader in Urban History at the University of Birmingham, where he founded the Birmingham Eighteenth Century Centre.

This study of sixteenth-century Seville offers a new perspective on how early modern cities adapted to living with repeated epidemics of plague.Plague and Public Health in Early Modern Seville offers a reassessment of the impact of plague in the early modern era, presenting sixteenth-century Seville as a case study of how municipal officials and residents worked together to create a public health response that protected both individual and communal interests. Similar studies of plague during this period either dramatize the tragic consequences of the epidemic or concentrate on the tough "modern" public health interventions, such as quarantine, surveillance and isolation, and the laxness or strictness of their enforcement. Arguing for a redefinition of "public health" in the early modern era, this study chronicles amore restrained, humane, and balanced response to outbreaks in 1582 and 1599-1600 Seville, showing that city officials aimed to protect the population but also maintain trade and commerce in order to prevent economic disruption.Based on extensive primary sources held in the municipal archive of Seville, the work argues that a careful reading of the records shows a critical difference between how plague regulations were written and how they were enforced, a difference that reflects an unacknowledged process of negotiation aimed at preserving balance within the community. The book makes important contributions to the study of early modern city governance and to the historiography of epidemics more broadly. Kristy Wilson Bowers received her PhD from Indiana University and teaches in the History Department at Northern Illinois University.

New perspectives on the history of twentieth century public health in Europe.European public health was a playing field for deeply contradictory impulses throughout the twentieth century. In the 1920s, international agencies were established with great fanfare and postwar optimism to serve as the watchtower of health the world over. Within less than a decade, local-level institutions began to emerge as seats of innovation, initiative, and expertise. But there was continual counterpressure from nation-states that jealously guarded their policymaking prerogatives in the face of the push for cross-national standardization and the emergence of original initiatives from below.In contrast to histories of twentieth-century public health that focus exclusively on the local, national, or international levels, Shifting Boundaries explores the connections or "zones of contact" between the three levels. The interpretive essays, written by distinguished historians of public health and medicine, focus on four topics: the oscillation between governmental and nongovernmental agencies as sites of responsibility for addressing public health problems; the harmonization of nation-states' agendas with those of international agencies; the development by public health experts of knowledge that is both placeless and respectful of place; and the transportability of model solutions across borders. The volume breaks new ground in its treatment ofpublic health as a political endeavor by highlighting strategies to prevent or alleviate disease as a matter not simply of medical techniques but political values and commitments.Contributors: Peter Baldwin, Iris Borowy, James A. Gillespie, Graham Mooney, Lion Murard, Dorothy Porter, Sabine Schleiermacher, Susan Gross Solomon, Paul Weindling, and Patrick Zylberman.Susan Gross Solomon is Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto.Lion Murard is a senior researcher at CERMES (Centre de Recherche Médecine, Sciences, Santé et Société), CNRS-EHESS-INSERM, Paris.Patrick Zylberman is Chaired Professor of the History of Health at the EHESP French School of Public Health Rennes, Sorbonne Paris Cité.

This book examines the Rockefeller Foundation's attempts to introduce the laboratory sciences, particularly biochemistry, into the Edinburgh medical world of the 1920s.In the first half of the twentieth century, reformers attempted to use the knowledge and practices of the laboratory sciences to radically transform medicine. Change was to be effected through medicine's major institutions; hospitals were to be turned into businesses and united to university-based medical schools. American ideas and money were major movers of these reforms. The Rockefeller Foundation supported these changes worldwide. reform, however, wasnot always welcomed. In Britain many old hospitals and medical schools stood by their educational and healing traditions. Further, American ideals were often seen as part of a larger transatlantic threat to British ways of life. In Edinburgh, targeted by reformers as an important center for training doctors for the empire, reform was resisted on the grounds that the city had sound methods of education and patient care matured over time. This resistance waspart of an anxiety about a wholesale invasion by American culture that was seen to be destroying Edinburgh's cherished values and traditions. These latter in turn were seen to stem from a distinct Scottish way of life. This bookexamines this culture clash through attempts to introduce the laboratory sciences, particularly biochemistry, into the Edinburgh medical world of the 1920s.Christopher Lawrence is Professor of the History of Medicine at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine, University College London. He is a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

A detailed examination of the political forces and events that shaped smallpox vaccination policy in England, Wales, Ireland, and Scotland during the nineteenth century.The introduction of public vaccination was among the greatest of public health triumphs. By the end of the nineteenth century, legislation framed and implemented by medical experts in Britain's government brought smallpox under control for the first time.The Politics of Vaccination: Practice and Policy in England, Wales, Ireland, and Scotland, 1800-1874, by historian Deborah Brunton, reveals the conflict that accompanied this success, and highlights how power differentials among government officials, medical experts, and general practitioners influenced vaccination policy across Great Britain. Brunton challenges the assumption that expert supervision was crucial, showing instead that local organization was pivotal to successful public vaccination.Throughout Britain, ordinary practitioners -- eager to enhance their professional status -- demanded the right to shape and supervise public vaccination. But their achievement depended on wider political considerations, and varied from country to country. In England and Wales, for instance, practitioners were defeated by a new band of medical experts who had established apower base within government. In Scotland, medical professionals contrived to keep most vaccination within the private sector, but local enthusiasm ensured very high levels of participation. Public vaccination was most successfulin Ireland, where practitioners had limited influence over dispensary provision and smallpox was nearly eradicated, if briefly, in the 1860s.In The Politics of Vaccination, Brunton demonstrates that public vaccination was not simply a medical matter: it was a divisive political issue, with outcomes strongly influenced by competing partisan interests.Deborah Brunton is senior lecturer in History of Medicine at the Open University.

A history of the little-known or forgotten academic origins of modern organ transplant surgery.This book investigates a crucial -- but forgotten -- episode in the history of medicine. In it, Thomas Schlich systematically documents and analyzes the earliest clinical and experimental organ transplant surgeries. In so doing helays open the historical origins of modern transplantation, offering a new and original analysis of its conceptual basis within a broader historical context.This first comprehensive account of the birth of modern transplantmedicine examines how doctors and scientists between 1880 and 1930 developed the technology and rationale for performing surgical organ replacement within the epistemological and social context of experimental university medicine. The clinical application of organ replacement, however, met with formidable obstacles even as the procedure became more widely recognized. Schlich highlights various attempts to overcome these obstacles, including immunologicalexplanations and new technologies of immune suppression, and documents the changes in surgical technique and research standards that led to the temporary abandonment of organ transplantation by the 1930s.Thomas Schlichis Professor and Canada Research Chair in the History of Medicine at McGill University.

An annotated English translation of the autobiography of Polish microbiologist Ludwik Hirszfeld (1884-1954), with a focus on his contributions to international public health.Ludwik Hirszfeld (1884-1954), one of the most prominent serologists of the twentieth century, discovered the inheritance and established the nomenclature of blood groups and opened the field of human population genetics. He also carried out groundbreaking research in the genetics of disease and immunology. Following World War II, he founded Poland's first Institute of Immunology in Wroclaw, which now bears his name. His autobiographical memoir, The Story of One Life, first published in Poland in 1946, immediately became a bestseller and has been reedited several times since. It is an outstanding account of a Holocaust survivor and a writer capable of depicting the uniqueness and the tragedy of countless individuals caught up in the nightmare of 1939-45. He recollects his time as a physician in the Serbian army in 1915 and his satisfaction as a scientist who helped rebuild Poland after the Treaty ofVersailles; the contrast between the world before and the world after World War II could not be starker. Hirszfeld escaped from the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943; he hid the manuscript for this book and retrieved it only after the war.Drawing on unpublished documents, as well as interviews with Hirszfeld's former students and family, this translation is annotated and has an introduction written by two scholars with unique qualifications to understand both the immediate setting in which Hirszfeld lived his life, and the broader implications of his work to the history of medicine.Marta A. Balinska is a writer and an international consultant in public health.William H.Schneider is Professor of History at Indiana University.

Biography of a World War II-era physician whose work was a response to the suffering of Holocaust victims, and whose investigations laid the groundwork for the Nuremberg Medical Trials.John W. Thompson: Psychiatrist in the Shadow of the Holocaust is the biography of a doctor whose revulsion at Nazi human experiments prompted him to seek a humane basis for physician-patient relations. As a military scientific intelligence officer in 1945, Thompson was the first to name "medical war crimes" as a special category for prosecution. His investigations laid the groundwork for the Nuremberg medical trials and for the novel idea of "informed consent." Yet, Thompson has remained a little-known figure, despite his many scientific, literary, and religious connections. This book traces Thompson's life from his birth in Mexico, through his studies at Stanford, Edinburgh, and Harvard, and his service in the Canadian Air Force. It reconstructs his therapeutic work with Unesco in Germany and his time as a Civil Rights activist in New York, where he developed his concept of holistic medicine.Thompson was close to authors like Auden and Spender and inspirational religious figures like Jean Vanier, founder of L'Arche. He drew on ideas of Freud, Jung, and Buber. The philosophical and religious dimensions of Thompson's response to Holocaust victims' suffering are key to this study, which cites accounts of psychiatrists, students and patients who knew Thompson personally, war crimes prosecution records, and unpublished personal papers.Paul Weindling is Wellcome Trust Research Professor at the Centre for Health, Medicine and Society: Past and Present, Oxford Brookes University, UK.

International Relations in Psychiatry: Britain, Germany, and the United States to World War II addresses a crucial period in the history of psychiatry by examining the transfer of conceptual, institutional, and financial resources and the migration of psychiatrists between Britain, the United States, and Germany.The decades around 1900 were crucial in the evolution of modern medical and social sciences, and in the formation of various national health services systems. The modern fields of psychiatry and mental health care are located at the intersection of these spheres. There emerged concepts, practices, and institutions that marked responses to challenges posed by urbanization, industrialization, and the formation of the nation-state. These psychiatric responseswere locally distinctive, and yet at the same time established influential models with an international impact. In spite of rising nationalism in Europe, the intellectual, institutional and material resources that emerged in thevarious local and national contexts were rapidly observed to have had an impact beyond any national boundaries. In numerous ways, innovations were adopted and refashioned for the needs and purposes of new national and local systems.International Relations in Psychiatry: Britain, Germany, and the United States to World War II brings together hitherto separate approaches from the social, political, and cultural history of medicine and health care and argues that modern psychiatry developed in a constant, though not always continuous, transfer of ideas, perceptions, and experts across national borders. Contributors: John C. Burnham, Eric J. Engstrom, Rhodri Hayward, Mark Jackson, Pamela Michael, Hans Pols, Volker Roelcke, Heinz-Peter Schmiedebach, Mathew Thomson, Paul J. Weindling, Louise Westwood Volker Roelcke is Professor and Director at the Institute for the History of Medicine, Giessen University, Germany.Paul J. Weindling is Professor in the History of Medicine, Oxford Brookes University, UK.Louise Westwood is Honorary Research Reader, University of Sussex, UK.

Kim Pelis uses a wide range of French and Tunisian archival materials and a close reading of Nobel Prize-winning bacteriologist Charles Nicolle's scientific papers and philosophical treatises to explore the relationship of scienceand medicine to society and culture in the first third of the twentieth century.This book examines the biomedical research of Nobel Prize-winning bacteriologist Charles Nicolle during his tenure as director of the Pasteur Institute of Tunis. Using typhus as its lens, it demonstrates how the complexities of early twentieth century bacteriology, French imperial ideology, the "Pastorian mission," and conditions in colonial Tunisia blended to inform the triumphs and disappointments of Nicolle's fascinating career. It illuminates how thesediverse elements shaped Nicolle's personal identity, the identity of his institute, and his innovative conception of the "birth, life, and death" -- or, the emergence and eradication -- of infectious disease.Kim Pelis blends exhaustive archival research with a close reading of Nicolle's written work -- scientific papers, philosophical treatises, and literary contributions -- to explore the complex relations between biomedical ideas and socioculturalcontext. The result is a study that will be of interest not only to students of French history, colonial medicine, and the history of the biomedical sciences but also to anyone seeking to understand how individuals have attemptedto deal creatively with complex times and ambiguous knowledge.Kim Pelis, a medical historian by training, is a writer for the director of the National Institutes of Health.

Essays from noted contributors trace the evolution of the neurological patient's role, treatment, and place in the history of medicine.Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, Tourette's, multiple sclerosis, stroke: all are neurological illnesses that create dysfunction, distress, and disability. With their symptoms ranging from impaired movement and paralysis to hallucinationsand dementia, neurological patients present myriad puzzling disorders and medical challenges. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries countless stories about neurological patients appeared in newspapers, books, medical papers, and films. Often the patients were romanticized; indeed, it was common for physicians to cast neurological patients in a grand performance, allegedly giving audiences access to deep philosophical insights about the meaning of life and being.Beyond these romanticized images, however, the neurological patient was difficult to diagnose. Experiments often approached unethical realms, and treatment created challenges for patients, courts, caregivers, and even for patient advocacy organizations. In this kaleidoscopic study, the contributors illustrate how the neurological patient was constructed in history and came to occupy its role in Western culture. Stephen T. Casper is assistant professor in Humanities and Social Sciences at Clarkson University. L. Stephen Jacyna is reader in the History of Medicine and Director of the Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London.

This edited volume brings together leading scholars to explore the emergence of the stress concept and its ever-changing definitions since the 1940s.Stress is one of the most widely utilized medical concepts in modern society. Originally used to describe physiological responses to trauma, it is now applied in a variety of other fields and contexts, such as in the constructionand expression of personal identity, social relations, building and engineering, and the various complexities of the competitive capitalist economy. In addition, scientists and medical experts use the concept to explore the relationship between an ever-increasing number of environmental stressors and the evolution of an expanding range of mental and chronic organic diseases, such as hypertension, gastric ulcers, arthritis, allergies, and cancer.Thisedited volume brings together leading scholars to explore the emergence and development of the stress concept and its definitions as they have changed over time. It examines how stress and closely related concepts have been used to connect disciplines such as architecture, ecology, physiology, psychiatry, psychology, public health, urban planning, and a range of social sciences; its application in different settings such as the battlefield, workplace, clinic, hospital, and home; and the advancement of techniques of stress management in a number of different national, sociocultural, and scientific locations.Contributors: Theodore M. Brown, David Cantor, Otniel E. Dror, Rhodri Hayward, Mark Jackson, Robert G. W. Kirk, Junko Kitanaka, Tulley Long, Joseph Melling, Edmund Ramsden, Elizabeth Siegel Watkins, Allan Young.David Cantor is acting director, Office of History, National Institutesof Health. Edmund Ramsden is Wellcome Trust University Award Research Fellow at the School of History, Queen Mary, University of London.

An examination of the complex interrelationship between charity birth control clinics and the commercial marketplace in the United States through the 1970s.The Birth Control Clinic in a Marketplace World is the first book to chart the origins and evolution of the charity birth control clinic movement in the United States from the 1910s through the 1970s, a period that witnessed dramatic transformation in the goods and services such clinics provided. Rose Holz uncovers the virtually unexamined relationship between Planned Parenthood and the commercial marketplace sphere. Challenging more thanthirty years of historiography on birth control, Holz sheds new light on battles over reproductive rights through her analysis of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America within the context of the commercial birth control world. Revealing that it would be Planned Parenthood's engagement to charity -- the argument the organization once used to discredit the presumed profit-driven exploitation of the marketplace -- that would put precisely those women ithoped to assist in dangerous situations, she asks such probing questions as: What were the meanings attached to the provision of birth control and its commercial distribution? How in turn were these meanings used as sources of power? The project draws on rich primary sources to answer these questions and to examine the historical role of the local birth control clinic in modern America. Rose Holz earned her PhD in history from the University ofIllinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is associate director of and associate professor of practice in the Women's and Gender Studies Program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Reveals the history of the individuals who worked to make psychiatry more available to Harlem's black community in the early Civil Rights Era.Toward the middle of the twentieth century, African Americans in New York City began to receive increased access to mental health care in some facilities within the city's mental health system. This study documents how and why this important change in public health-and in public opinion on race-occurred. Drawing on records from New York's children's courts, Harlem's public schools, Columbia University, and the Department of Hospitals, Dennis Doyle tells here the story of the American psychiatrists and civil servants who helped codify in New York's mental health policies the view that blacks and whites are psychological equals. The book examines in particular the events through which these racial liberals working in Harlem gained a foothold within New York's public institutions, creating inclusive public policies and ostensibly race-neutral standards of care. Psychiatry and Racial Liberalism in Harlem, 1936-1968 not only contributes to the growing body of historiography on race and medical institutions in the civil rights era but, more importantly, shows how inveterate racial prejudices within public policy can be overcome.Dennis A. Doyle is assistant professor of history at the Saint Louis College of Pharmacy.

Sheds new light on what the WHO described as "the single most devastating infectious disease outbreak ever recorded," focusing on social control, gender, class, religion, national identity, and military medicine's reactions to thepandemic.Situating the Iberian Peninsula as the key point of connection between Europe and the Americas, both epidemiologically and discursively, The Spanish Influenza Pandemic of 1918-1919 sheds new light on what the World Health Organization described as "the single most devastating infectious disease outbreak ever recorded." The essays in this volume elucidate specific aspects of the pandemic that have received minimal attention until now, including social control, gender, class, religion, national identity, and military medicine's reactions to the pandemic and relationship with civilian medicine. While World War I, as the authors point out, is the context for these discussions, the experiences of 1918-19 remain persistently relevant to contemporary life, particularly in view of events such as the 2009 H1N1 swine flu pandemic and the Ebola outbreak of 2014.Contributors: Catherine Belling, JosepBernabeu-Mestre, Liane Maria Bertucci, Ryan A. Davis, Esteban Domingo, Magda Fahrni, Hernán Feldman, Pilar León-Sanz, Maria Luísa Lima, Maria de Fátima Nunes, Mercedes Pascual Artiaga, María-Isabel Porras-Gallo, Anny Jackeline Torres Silveira, José Manuel Sobral, Paulo Silveira e Sousa, Christiane Maria Cruz de Souza.María-Isabel Porras-Gallo is professor of history of science in the Medical Faculty of Ciudad Real at the University of Castilla-La Mancha (Spain).Ryan A. Davis is assistant professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at Illinois State University.

An engaging and surprising history of surgeries on the clitoris, revealing what the therapeutic use of female circumcision and clitoridectomy tells us about American medical ideas concerning the female body and female sexuality.From the late nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century, American physicians treated women and girls for masturbation by removing the clitoris (clitoridectomy) or clitoral hood (female circumcision). During this same time, and continuing to today, physicians also performed female circumcision to enable women to reach orgasm. Though used as treatment, paradoxically, for both a perceived excessive sexuality and a perceived lack of sexual responsiveness, these surgeries reflect a consistent medical conception of the clitoris as a sexual organ. In recent years the popular media and academics have commented on the rising popularity in the United States of female genital cosmetic surgeries, including female circumcision, yet these discussions often assume such procedures are new. In Female Circumcision and Clitoridectomy in the United States: A History of a Medical Treatment, Sarah Rodriguez presents an engaging and surprising history of surgeries on the clitoris, revealing how medical views of the female body and female sexuality have changed -- and in some cases not changed -- throughout the last century and a half.Sarah B. Rodriguez is lecturer in medical humanities and bioethics and in global health studies at Northwestern University.

Examines the ongoing, worldwide epidemiological transition from acute infectious diseases to chronic diseases as the predominant causes of death, presenting a new theory on how chronic diseases have developed.Since the eighteenth century, chronic diseases have superseded acute infectious diseases as the predominant cause of morbidity and mortality; age at death has shifted from childhood to older adult ages; and life expectancy, population, and the proportion of older people continue to increase. This transition constitutes a fundamental change in the human condition, and thus an understanding of the historical process behind it is of major importance.This book is the first to document this ongoing, worldwide epidemiological transition in a single country, drawing on records of cause-specific mortality since the eighteenth century in England and comparative data from other Westerncountries. Alexander Mercer discusses possible causes of specific disease trends, reassessing the relative importance of "health interventions" and "standard of living" as determinants of increased life expectancy, and presents anew theory of how chronic diseases have developed. Showing that specific microorganisms are causal agents in some chronic diseases, the study suggests that a new conceptualization of the epidemiological transition is required, one that takes into account interrelationships between infectious diseases, between infections and chronic diseases, and between disorders underlying different chronic diseases. Alexander Mercer is an independent researcher.

A new release, with a new preface, of Richard A. Meckel's classic history of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American campaign to reduce infant mortality.Twenty-five years after its 1990 publication, Richard A. Meckel's Save the Babies remains widely acknowledged as the single most comprehensive and authoritative history of the multifaceted infant welfare campaign that attended and contributed to the dramatic late nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century reduction of infant mortality in the United States.Beginning with the mid-nineteenth-century transformation of infant mortality from a social fact into a social problem in need of amelioration and ending with the Great Depression, Meckel depicts and analyzes the evolution of a reform movement that had a single overriding goal but was made up of professional, political, philanthropic, and lay voluntary groups with often competing ideas and agendas. He shows how interaction and negotiation between these groups and their interests, as well as changing social and medical theory, shaped the successive ways that both the major causes of infant mortality and the best policies for its reduction were conceptualized and promoted. In an epilogue, the author provides an overview of the American discourse on infant mortality from the 1930s through the 1980s.For this new release of Save the Babies, the author has added a preface that surveys the related historical scholarship published since 1990 and details how the American discourse oninfant mortality has evolved since then.Richard A. Meckel is professor of American Studies, Brown University, and author of Classrooms and Clinics: Urban Schools and the Protection and Promotion of Child Health, 1870-1930.

The first study in English that examines barefoot doctors in China from the perspective of the social history of medicine.In 1968, at the height of the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese Communist Party endorsed a radical new system of health-care delivery for the rural masses. Soon every village had at least one barefoot doctor to provide basic medical care, creating a national network of health-care services for the very first time. The barefoot doctors were portrayed nationally and internationally as revolutionary heroes, wading undaunted through rice paddies to bring effective, low-cost care to poor peasants.This book is the first comprehensive study to look beyond the nostalgia dominating present scholarship on public health in China and offer a powerful and carefully contextualized critiqueof the prevailing views on the role of barefoot doctors, their legacy, and their impact. Drawing on primary documents from the Cultural Revolution and personal interviews with patients and doctors, Xiaoping Fang examines the evidence within the broader history of medicine in revolutionary and postreform China. He finds that rather than consolidating traditional Chinese medicine, as purported by government propaganda, the barefoot doctor program introducedmodern Western medicine to rural China, effectively modernizing established methods and forms of care. As a result, this volume retrieves from potential oblivion a critical part of the history of Western medicine in China. Xiaoping Fang is assistant professor of Chinese history at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

Drawing from original correspondence penned by lobotomy patients and their families as well as from the professional papers of lobotomy pioneer and neurologist Walter Freeman, The Lobotomy Letters gives an account of the widespread acceptance of this controversial procedure.The rise and widespread acceptance of psychosurgery constitutes one of the most troubling chapters in the history of modern medicine. By the late 1950s, tens of thousands of Americans had been lobotomized as treatment for a host of psychiatric disorders. Though the procedure would later be decried as devastating and grossly unscientific, many patients, families, and physicians reported veritable improvement from the surgery; some patients were even considered cured.The Lobotomy Letters gives an account of why this controversial procedure was sanctioned by psychiatrists and doctors of modern medicine. Drawing from original correspondence penned by lobotomy patients andtheir families as well as from the professional papers of lobotomy pioneer and neurologist Walter Freeman, the volume reconstructs how physicians, patients, and their families viewed lobotomy and analyzes the reasons for its overwhelming use.Mical Raz, MD/PhD, is a physician and historian of medicine.

Examines the advent, during the mid-nineteenth century in Britain, of techniques of infectious disease surveillance, now one of the most powerful sets of tools in modern public health.Intrusive Interventions is a history and critical study of public health in the Victorian and Edwardian period. Drawing on an array of archival sources from across provincial England and London, it investigates the emergence and consolidation of a set of government policies that came to be known as infectious disease surveillance, including compulsory infectious disease notification, domestic quarantine, mandatory removal to a hospital, contact tracing, and the disinfection of homes and belongings. Although these were a set of spatialized practices implemented in diverse settings such as hospitals, schools, and disinfecting stations, their effect was to retrain the gaze of public health onto domestic space and in the process both disrupt and reinforce the centrality of the family and domesticity in Victorian and Edwardian culture. Examining political ideologies of freedom and individuality as well associal policy, medical theory, laboratory research, material culture, and public health practice, author Graham Mooney argues that infectious disease surveillance reconfigured late nineteenth-century hygienic norms and forms of citizenship. Public health practice had to be continually reshaped in order to negate the political fallout of a tendency toward coercion and unwanted interference -- debates that, as the author of this important study points out,continue to resonate today.Graham Mooney is Assistant Professor at the Institute of the History of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University.

Explores the history of vaccine development and the rise of antivaccination societies in late-nineteenth-century America.Most people today celebrate vaccination as a great achievement, yet many nineteenth-century Americans opposed it, so much in fact that states had to make vaccination compulsory. In response, antivaccination societies formed all over the United States, lobbying state legislatures and bringing lawsuits to abolish these laws. One such lawsuit ultimately arrived at the United States Supreme Court, which upheld the laws in a landmark decision, Jacobson v. Massachusetts (1905). In this study, Karen Walloch examines the history of vaccine development in the United States, the laws put in place enjoining the practice, and the popular reaction against them. Walloch finds that at theend of the nineteenth century Americans had good reason to fear vaccination. Vaccines simply did not live up to claims made for their safety and effectiveness. They induced pain, disability, and grim or even fatal infections. Inthis critical history of the antivaccine movement and of Jacobson v. Massachusetts in particular, Walloch locates the beginnings of a legacy of doubt about vaccination -- one that affected legislation in all fifty states and is still very much alive today. Karen Walloch is a historian who teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.