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The period during and after World War II saw enormous changes in the practice and status of anaesthesia, as well as in female participation. This article offers an account of three South African (SA) women who trained in anaesthetics before and during the War and participated in these changes. By the mid-1960s, they presided over the three independent anaesthetic departments at Johannesburg's three main teaching hospitals, teaching generations of junior doctors. The first woman to register as a specialist anaesthetist in SA, Miriam (Mollie) Barlow, broke the glass ceiling in her own career by lobbying for the professional rights of medical women, although working within the constraints of the medical and political establishment. She also contributed to important SA research on malignant hyperthermia. Hilde Ginsberg collaborated with Barlow in the 1950s, reducing intraoperative and perioperative mortality at Coronation Hospital, and fought for key interventions in anaesthetic practice and policy through the South African Society of Anaesthetists (SASA), becoming its most long-serving and honoured female member. Kathleen Barbara Vetten's exemplary career in academic medicine, including pioneering animal research (developing anaesthetic techniques for open-heart surgery in dogs and protocols for liver transplantation in primates) and a successful operation to separate craniopagus twins, shows both the achievement of and limits to female achievement at the end of this period. This article also offers a short account of factors that hindered black women from entering anaesthesia training, contributing to this history before the 1990s.

The Mexican Medical Movement from 1964-1965 constitutes an important event from the rising urban middle-class, besides it was the first time medical doctors claimed for fair working conditions. The background of this movement is the so-called Crisis of 1958, which included the Movements from the educators union, oil workers union, telegraph workers union and the railroad workers union. The conflict began because interns and residents from the "Hospital 20 de Noviembre" would not get a payment at the end of the year, so on November 26th, 1964, the movement started. The Asociación Mexicana de Médicos Residentes e Internos (AMMRI) was created and their demands were the following: 1) Full working site restitution without retaliations, 2) Legal examination of the scholarship-contract terms, in order to get annual, renewable and progressive contracts, and a fixed salary with the usual working-hours and characteristics of each institution, 3) To have preference to get an adscription at the hospital where the resident studied, 4) Active participation from the resident in the elaboration of the academic plans, and 5) Resolution of each hospital's problems. This movement had social impact for Mexico's contemporary life, nevertheless some of the demands are still unchanged among medical residents.

Since 1974 the National Health Service (NHS) has been subject to successive reorganisations which have shaped and reshaped patterns of administration, clinical care and services. This paper uses two sources of oral evidence: a Witness Seminar with a group of administrators who attended the NHS National Administrators' Training Scheme in the late 1950s and a collection of interviews with doctors and managers who have played key roles in the health services of Manchester and Salford between 1974 and 2007. It surveys the day-to-day interactions between doctors and administrators/managers in hospital settings and analyses what these reveal about relationships within the broader context of shifting organisational structures and management styles. It suggests that the evidence challenges the historical stereotyping of the two groups and that strong working relationships have been determined as much by the values of respect and association as by changes to structures or management styles.

Since hospitals are often at the center of health care services, their foundation and evolution provides valuable insights into local political, economic, and cultural contexts. Based on Western and Chinese sources, this essay employs a transnational approach to explain the establishment of the Tung Wah or Oriental Dispensary in San Francisco. This article describes the institution's aims, financing, and combined operation of Western and Chinese medical staffs in an environment of racial discrimination and political power struggles, as well as deep social and cultural divisions during the early twentieth-century plague epidemic.

This article offers a glimpse into the lives and activities of some of the patients, volunteers and staff in the Saskatchewan mental health system during the period of deinstitutionalization. Drawing on her own experience as a patient in psychiatric wards as well as ongoing research in the history of mental health, it features the role of Regina Volunteer Visitors in Saskatchewan Hospital, Weyburn and examines the importance of occupational and recreational therapies and activities in improving the lives of the patients in that institution. It emphasizes the perspectives of patients and volunteers who actively worked to develop recreational activities, with the intention of helping individuals connect with the surrounding communities. The views and perspectives presented here are drawn from a variety of historical and oral interview sources, including views from visitors to the asylum and patients who lived within its walls. The author has also been a consumer of mental health services, and spent time in the Provincial Mental Hospital in North Battleford. The article therefore makes an important contribution to enhancing our understanding of the social history of deinstitutionalization, not only for its unique source base, but also because those sources have been examined and explained to readers through the perspectives of a former patient herself. This article draws significant attention to the changing opportunities for patients as they interacted with the women's volunteer groups, as well as to how the changes brought about by the encroaching deinstitutionalization, care in the community, and decisions from "above" affected the individuals on the ground.

Background: In the context of the national socialist "Aktion-T4" approximately 70,000 people with mental illness and mental handicap in Germany were killed. The "Heil- und Pflegeanstalt" (mental hospital) Günzburg was a so-called Bavarian "Sammelanstalt" during this period., Methods: The data evaluation is based on patient documents and annual reports of the archives of today's district hospital Günzburg and patient documents of content R 179 of the branch office of the federal archives in Berlin / Lichterfelde. Patient records were analysed with respect to the presence of ten variables considered relevant for selection., Results: Between January 1940 and August 1941 394 patients from Günzburg were displaced to killing facilities of "Aktion-T4" and killed. Age, diagnosis, hospitalisation-time, ability to work, social behavior of the patients and Jewish origin were found to be criteria relevant for selection., Conclusions: This study was able to show the participation of the Günzburg mental hospital in the implementation of "Aktion-T4". However, only few sources regarding the attitudes and actions of hospital medical staff were identified. This question remains the subject of further historical research.

The catchwords "oversupply of physicians" and "mountain of hospital beds" may be considered to mark two points of culmination in German health policy discussion between 1960 and 1990. The political background and the practical implications of this discussion will be illustrated and appreciated taking into account both the distinct positions of the organised medical profession and junior staff., (Georg Thieme Verlag KG Stuttgart, New York.)

[The article deals with the characteristics of professional activities of medical personnel in Byelorussia during the fascist aggression and subsequent occupation]

For almost 250 years the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary was staffed with resident physicians and surgeons.This paper traces the history and the traditions of the Residency Mess, its inhabitants' lives, duties and leisure activities and how these have changed over the years.

Some alchemists and chemists are known in Lorraine at the beginning of the 17th century. But "real" chemists appear only in the middle of the 18th century. In Nancy, the primary official chemists are the professors of the Royal Collège of medicine, then those of the Faculty of medicine in 1776 and after: Henry Michel du Tennetar and Pierre-François Nicolas. In Metz, the first successful attempt of a chemical course is obtained by the apothecary Jean-Baptiste Thyrion from 1765 to 1769. Michel is his successor in 1778. His teaching is immediately and widely successful. Around Michel, the members of the Royal Society of science and art and the practitioners of the military hospital are also very actice. After the Revolution, many years will be necessary to Nancy and Metz to obtain the creating of a new universitary chemical teaching.

As military physician Tyrbas de Chamberet was a witness of his time. In 1804 he arrived in Paris and became a medical student. Later he followed the army in Italy, Spain and took part to a mission in Poland where cholera epidemic had broken. As chief of the Hospital Val-de-Grâce he knew people around Larrey and Broussais. In his writings he gave some advices for the organisation of the Military Health Service according to the different governments as well as the characters of his contemporaries.

Dr Milton Douglas Quigless, a graduate of Meharry Medical College, arrived in Tarboro, North Carolina, in 1936 to practice medicine. For 10 years, he tried to obtain hospital privileges at the Edgecombe General Hospital, but segregation laws prevented him from performing surgery and admitting ill patients to this local facility. After years of frustration, Dr Quigless decided to establish his own hospital so that he could adequately care for his patients. In 1946, the doors of the Quigless Hospital-Clinic opened--the first hospital for blacks in Tarboro. As a noted family physician and distinguished community leader, Dr Quigless had an enormous impact on the lives of multiple generations of North Carolinians.

To operate on the abdominal aorta is difficult enough today, even with all the appurtenances of the modern operating theatre. Yet the first time this was performed, as an emergency by Astley Cooper of Guy's Hospital in 1817, it was carried out without any form of anaesthetic, in the patient's bed, at night and therefore, presumably, by lamp light.

The year 1933 was remarkable in the history of lung surgery in that five surgeons, in five separate medical centres in the USA and Canada, performed the first, and successful, pneumonectomies for tumours of the lung.

Anyone who has seen a skull bone flap being turned or the sternum being divided at a median sternotomy will be well aware of the considerable bleeding that can occur in these procedures from the highly vascular red bone marrow inside these structures. They will also, no doubt, have seen the surgeon stem the bleeding by smearing wax--Horsley's bone wax--over the cut surfaces of the bone.

The purpose of this article is to explore the ambiguous position of sister tutors, within the nursing and hospital hierarchy between 1918 and 1960. The function of the sister tutor was to train the probationers (student nurses). However, I will argue that the students' education was to come second to the service needs of the hospital, the authority of the matron and desire of the medical profession to maintain control over the nursing curriculum and nursing practice. Therefore sister tutors were caught 'in-between' several opposing forces which together militated against the individual sister tutor's work and the ability of the nursing profession to recruit adequate numbers of senior nurses into the classroom. The recruitment issue was further hampered by the widespread knowledge that much of the sister tutor's work was not student education at all, but organising lectures by medical staff and marking students' notes. In order to gauge the 'official' attitudes to the sister tutors and also the experiences of those who either worked as sister tutors or were taught by them, I used both archival and oral evidence in the research for this article. Pseudonyms have been used throughout for the oral history respondents.

As part of his series of articles exploring the lives of those behind great surgical innovations, Professor Harold Ellis looks at the work of Sir William Arbuthnot Lane, who was responsible for pioneering many surgical techniques.

The Scottish Women's Hospitals (SWH), a unique health institution in the history of medicine, staffed entirely by women, was founded soon after the outbreak of the First World War, August 12, 1914 in Edinburgh, by the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies. The founder and the main driving force behind this organisation was Dr. Elsie Inglis (1864-1917). Although her proposition to the British War Office had been rejected, she offered her services to the Allies (France, Belgium, Russia and Serbia). The first 200 bed SWH unit was sent to France in November 1914, and soon after followed other units, so at the end there were 13 very well equipped SWH units working in the various theatres of war in Belgium, Serbia, Russia, Rumania and Greece. The first unit of SWH came to Serbia in early January 1915, and was located at Kragujevac. Soon after, three other SWH units arrived to Serbia and were stationed at Mladenovac, Valjevo and Lazarevac. It was an enormous help to Serbia, full of wounded and sick people, due to the dreadful typhus epidemic which was devastating the country. A large SWH unit, attached to the Southern Slav Volunteer Division, had worked on the Dobrudja front, and there were three hospitals and a special transport unit on the Salonika Front, which were all engaged in the treatment of Serbian wounded soldiers until the end of the First World War. Two other SWH units, located in France, were treating the Serbian refugees. Serving bravely and honorably on the various theatres of war, the legendary Scottish Women's Hospitals made enormous contributions to the allied war efforts, and helped Serbian people a great deal.

This is the first in a series of four papers that Dr. Wooley wrote exclusively for The American Heart Hospital Journal based on his book, The Irritable Heart of Soldiers and the Origins of Anglo-American Cardiology, published by Ashgate Publishing in 2002.1 Dr. Wooley's book also casts light on the origins of the specialty heart hospital.