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Abstract: This paper attempts to bring new insights to a long-standing historical debate over medical specialization by analyzing the formation of medical mycology, a somewhat marginal biomedical discipline that emerged in the mid-twentieth century around studies of fungal disease in humans. The study of fungi predates that of bacteria and viruses, but from the 1880s it became eclipsed by bacteriology. However, in the postwar period, there were moves to establish medical mycology as an independent speciality. I trace the processes that led to the launch of professional societies in the United States, Britain and Japan, three major players in medical mycology, and more broadly in biomedicine. The analysis of the three different national contexts illustrates how geographical, medico-technological, epidemiological, political and social conditions gave the specialty a distinctive character in each country; this was further complicated by the different and changing medical fields in which fungal diseases were studied and treated. The three case studies show medical specialization as a process that is not simply cumulative but responds to specific historical events and developments. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In this paper we examine the ecological relations between household income distribution and age-grouped mortality in Britain and Japan. Comparable datasets were prepared in terms of age intervals of mortality, household income intervals and geographical units for years around 1990. Then we conducted a series of regression analyses to associate absolute and relative income indices with age and sex-specific standardized mortality ratios (SMRs). The results are as follows: (1) In Britain mortality is lower where inequalities in income are lower, while in Japan there is no obvious relationship. It is, however, apparent that -- just as in the case of the USA and Canada -- Britain and Japan appear to merge and appear part of a greater pattern when considered as a series of city regions. Thus an overall global relationship between income inequality and mortality may exist. To assess such global relationship, further studies using cross-national regional datasets covering a wide rage of rich nations are desirable. (2) Income-mortality relations are consistent among different age-sex groups in Britain, but there are substantial differences in the relationships as revealed between different demographic groups in Japan. In particular, while absolute income levels are correlated negatively with mortality of working-age men in both countries, mortality of elderly people in Japan is higher where absolute income is higher. This indicates the different historical contexts to the health divides these two different geographical contexts, but further consideration of a more historically nuanced understanding of income-mortality relations is required. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]