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This open access book is an integrated historical and philosophical investigation of several problematic situations that emerge from diverse areas of medical practice. These include (but are not limited to): Paying less attention to patients who are suffering with symptoms because no identifiable pathological lesion or pathophysiological process can be found. Paying too much attention to patients who are not suffering with symptoms because pathological lesions or pathophysiological processes have been found. The tendency to understand patients at risk of developing pathology as being diseased. The tendency to disregard the importance of wider societal consequences of definitions of disease and health. The book shows that many of these problems are related to what disease and health are considered to be and argues that these problems can be addressed by reconsidering the concepts of health and disease employed in practice. It argues for a pragmatic reconceptualization of health and disease that allows clinicians, researchers, and lay people to understand health and disease in many ways, depending on the specific context in which they find themselves and the problems they are trying to solve. In doing so, authors are careful to show how this pragmatism does not endorse “silly” forms of relativism, in which knowledge is reduced to belief or to whatever people find expedient to believe. This work is relevant for philosophers and historians a well as for doctors, health policy makers and other health professionals because it addresses problems sourced from medical practice, albeit using philosophical and historical methods.

The first comprehensive edition of the most important medical compendium on gastrointestinal ailments, bile-induced diseases, and fever from ancient Mesopotamia: the Stomach Treatise from Ashurbanipal’s royal library at Nineveh. Assembled three millennia ago from symptom descriptions, drug recipes, incantations, and healing rituals, this treatise formed part of the only authoritative source of knowledge on therapeutic medicine at the time.

This collective volume looks at European psychiatry in the second half of the twentieth century through a variety of practices that were experienced and routinised in the mental health field after World War II. Case studies from across Europe allow one to appreciate how new ‘ways of doing’ contributed to transform the field, beyond the watchwords of deinstitutionalisation, the introduction of neuroleptics, centrality of patients, humanisation of spaces and overcoming of asylum-era habits. Through a variety of sources and often adopting a small-scale perspective, the chapters closely examine the way new practices took shape and how they installed themselves, eventually facing resistance, injecting new purposes and contributing to enlarging psychiatry’s fields of expertise, therefore blurring its once-more-defined boundaries. The book has four sections: visions, experimentation, reflections and crossing boundaries. The first focuses on experiences that were viewed, lived and narrated by the protagonists as unique and utopian. This character of novelty is also questioned through the patient’s perspective. The following section focuses on some cases whose protagonists were aware that they were trialling new ways of doing. Although these did not necessarily become mainstream, new frameworks of therapeutic intervention were shaped, and feebler protocolar procedures and eclectic appropriations were allowed for. The third section shows how the actors were called to reflect on practices and give them meaning, adopting a reflective habit that questioned the very role of each protagonist of the therapeutic scene. The last section analyses how psychiatry entered fields of expertise other than those usually assumed.

Genome Finland tells a story of genomic medicine in Finland from the study of rare Finnish diseases in the 1960s and 1970s to the implementation of personalized medicine in the 2020s. The main focus is on the 21st century – the period after the Human Genome Project – and on the establishment of new infrastructures to support genomic medicine, such as biobanks. The book opens up the reasoning and discussions as well as the settings and events through which Finnish medical genetics reached the top level of international biomedicine in the late 1990s, biobanks and biobank research evolved during the 2000s and 2010s, and large transnational public-private partnership projects utilising massive amounts of genome and patient data started to dominate also Finnish research into the 2020s. In particular, Genome Finland examines and exposes the connections between biomedical science, ‘knowledge-based’ economy and business, and innovation policy in Finland during the past decades.

This book explores the concepts of sickness and health in Nietzsche’s late philosophy, showing that Nietzsche viewed these concepts not as dialectical opposites but as events that each assert themselves and merge into each other in a constant circular motion. Nietzsche thereby brought together philosophy, psychophysiology, and aesthetics: the "Dionysian artist" thus became the ideal of a healthy life.

Throughout antiquity patients sought relief and healing from their afflictions in the sanctuaries of Asclepius, the God of healing. The Asclepian healing cult included sacrifices, ablutions and incubation. In their dreams, the patients received therapeutic instructions. But not only miraculous cures occurred in the Asclepieia, nor were these sacred sites the last refuge of the seriously ill. Using selected examples from the Roman Imperial Period, Florian Steger outlines the healthcare provided in the prominent Asclepian sanctuaries – Epidaurus and Pergamum in particular – and demonstrates that this healthcare was on a par with the contemporary medical culture. Ancient epigraphic healing reports and the patient journal of the celebrated orator Publius Aelius Aristides paint a vivid picture of the daily treatments. The medicine of Asclepius clearly formed an integral part of the Roman Empire's multifaceted healthcare market.

Should pregnant women be sent to prison? Is prison a place for the birth and care of babies? Can it ever be? This book is the first extensive historical examination of how the modern prison system sought to answer these perennial questions. The book takes the reader through the prison gates to demonstrate that, although a common feature of everyday life in women’s prisons, pregnancy, birth and motherhood were rarely fully considered at policy level. Instead, the experiences of mothers and children were shaped by a myriad of factors including debates about reconciling the management of institutional discipline with the maintenance of health and issues of gender and class. Lamented as an inalienable heritage of woe but also as an opportunity for the closer supervision of mothers, prison births evoked intense debate and required the negotiation of obdurate regimes. The book reveals how oscillating debates about the purpose of prisons shaped the punitive, reformatory and medical treatment of confined mothers. It also challenges scholarly debates about institutional discipline by delving further into the role of prisoners and prison staff in shaping the terms of their incarceration.

Mind Museums offer a fresh perspective on the heritage of mental health, bringing museums into sharp focus. Drawing on interdisciplinary approaches from architecture, museum and exhibition design, and heritage and museum studies, it examines former psychiatric asylums that have been converted into museums. The book presents a comprehensive investigation of mind museums, the first of its kind in Europe, and explores their potential in raising awareness and dismantling the stigma surrounding mental health. Through an indepth examination of selected European examples, Lanz describes what mind museums are and how they came to be. The innovative visitor studies carried out at the Museo di Storia della Psichiatria in Reggio Emilia, which are presented here, explore people’s encounters with mind museums and reveal the profound impact of such experiences. By uncovering the power of these heritage sites in facilitating discussions on mental health, civility, and care, Lanz provides new insights into the emotive capacity of the museum and visitors’ reflexivity at place-based memory sites. Mind Museums will be of great interest to scholars and postgraduatelevel students engaged in the study of museums, heritage, exhibition design, architecture, and mental health. It should also be of interest to heritage professionals, particularly those working in mind museums and other similar sites, such as prison museums and sites of conscience.

This volume explores the life of Bjargey “Bíbí” Kristjánsdóttir (1927–1999), an Icelandic woman with intellectual disabilities, through analysis of her autobiography and personal archive on the basis of the research disciplines of critical disability studies and microhistory. Bíbí, who grew up in northern Iceland on a small farm called Berlin, fell ill when she was in her first year and was afterward labeled "feeble-minded" by her family and the local community. When Bíbí died, she had finished a 145,000-word autobiography which she had written alone and kept secret from her family and neighbors, very few of whom even knew that she could read and write. This book aims to consider Bíbí’s life through her autobiography and other historical sources she created, to identify how various historical, social, and cultural factors interacted and influenced her circumstances. It explores Bíbí’s agency, and how she managed to play her cards within the narrow scope given to her by society. What makes Bíbí’s history extraordinary is precisely the direct connection to her world through her counter-archive. This book provides students and scholars of the humanities and the social sciences with a new way of critical thinking about both disciplines.

Renaissance anatomist Gabrielle Falloppia is best known today for his account of the eponymous fallopian tubes but he made numerous other anatomical discoveries as well, was one of the most famous surgeons of his time, and is widely believed to have invented the condom. Drawing on Falloppia's Observationes anatomicae of 1561 and on dozens of handwritten and published sets of student notes, this book not only looks at Falloppia’s anatomical lectures and demonstrations. It also studies Falloppia’s work on surgical topics – including the French disease and cosmetic surgery – on thermal waters, and on pharmacology. Last but not least, it uses student notes and the letters of contemporary scholars to throw a new light on Falloppia’s biography, on his very special relationship with the botanist Melchior Wieland, who lived in his house for several years, and on his conflicts with his fellow professors in Padua, one of whom, Bassiano Landi, was murdered just ten days after his funeral – by Falloppia’s disciples, as some believed. Written by one of the leading scholars in the field of early modern medicine, this book will appeal to all those interested in the teaching and practice of anatomy, surgery, and pharmacology in the Renaissance.

Brilliant, volatile, and invariably male, the surgeon stereotype is a widespread and instantly recognisable part of Western culture. Setting out to anatomise this stereotype, Cold, Hard Steel offers an exciting new history of modern and contemporary British surgery. The book draws on archival materials and original interviews with surgeons, analysing them alongside a range of fictional depictions, from the Doctor in the House novels to Mills & Boon romances and the pioneering soap opera Emergency Ward 10. Presenting a unique social, cultural, and emotional history, it sheds light on the development and maintenance of the surgical stereotype and explains why it has proved so enduring. At the same time, the book explores the more candid and compassionate image of the surgeon that has begun to emerge in recent years, revealing how a series of high-profile memoirs both challenge the surgical stereotype and simultaneously confirm it.

This edited volume examines the performance of physicians, psychiatrists and other scientists as expert witnesses in modern European courts of law and police investigations. Its chapters discuss cases from criminal, civil and international law to parse the impact of forensic evidence and expertise in different European countries (Scotland, England, Germany, Spain, Italy, Russia, Portugal, Norway and the Netherlands) in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They show how modern forensic science and technology was inextricably entangled with political ideology, gender norms, changes in the law and legal systems. New scientific ideas and technology, such as blood tests and DNA, helped develop forensic science, but did not necessarily lead to a straightforward acceptance of expertise in the courtroom. Discussing fascinating case studies, the chapters in this book highlight how the ideology of authoritarian and liberal regimes affected the practical enactment of forensic expertise. They also emphasise the influence of images of masculinity and femininity on the performance of experts and their assessment of evidence, victims and perpetrators, for example in cases of rape, infanticide and crimes of passion. This book is an important contribution to our knowledge of modern European forensic practices, which, as several chapters underline, sometimes surprisingly diverge from institutional regulations.

This open access book offers a comprehensive overview of the history of genomics across three different species and four decades, from the 1980s to the recent past. It takes an inclusive approach in order to capture not only the international initiatives to map and sequence the genomes of various organisms, but also the work of smaller-scale institutions engaged in the mapping and sequencing of yeast, human and pig DNA. In doing so, the authors expand the historiographical lens of genomics from a focus on large-scale projects to other forms of organisation. They show how practices such as genome mapping, sequence assembly and annotation are as essential as DNA sequencing in the history of genomics, and argue that existing depictions of genomics are too closely associated with the Human Genome Project. Exploring the use of genomic tools by biochemists, cell biologists, and medical and agriculturally-oriented geneticists, this book portrays the history of genomics as inseparably entangled with the day-to-day practices and objectives of these communities. The authors also uncover often forgotten actors such as the European Commission, a crucial funder and forger of collaborative networks undertaking genomic projects. In examining historical trajectories across species, communities and projects, the book provides new insights on genomics, its dramatic expansion during the late twentieth-century and its developments in the twenty-first century. Offering the first extensive critical examination of the nature and historicity of reference genomes, this book demonstrates how their affordances and limitations are shaped by the involvement or absence of particular communities in their production.

This open access book demonstrates that, while occupation has been used to treat the mentally disordered since the early nineteenth century, approaches to its use have varied across different countries and in different time periods. Comparing how occupation was used in French and English mental institutions between 1918 and 1939, one hundred years after the heyday of moral therapy, the book is an essential read for those researching the history of mental health and medicine more generally. It provides an overview of the legislation, management structures and financial conditions that affected mental institutions in France and England, and contributed to their differing responses to the new theories of occupational therapy emerging from the USA and Germany during the interwar period.

This open access book explores the history of pellagra, a vitamin deficiency disease brought about by a shift in agriculture to maize, and which was first identified in Italy in the 1760s. With a focus on the insanity that was caused by the disease, the authors examine how thousands of patients were treated in Italian psychiatric asylums, shedding light on the sufferer’s point of view. Setting pellagrous insanity in a wider context of man-made or societal (anthropogenic) disease, where poverty, diet and disease meet, the book contributes to the history of medicine and science, the history of psychiatry, economic and social history, agrarian history, and food and nutrition history. Additionally, the authors aim to transnationalise Italian history by making comparisons with related issues, such as tertiary syphilis in the UK. Drawing from a wide range of printed and archival sources, including the writings of Italian medical investigators, the book examines how medical and scientific research was carried out during the long nineteenth century and the uncertainties that this engendered, in terms of classification, explanation, diagnosis and treatment. Offering a unique perspective on an endemic illness which came to be known as the disease of the four ds: dermatitis; diarrhea; dementia; and death, this book provides an engaging account of one of the most perplexing causes of mental illness.

This open access book brings together an eclectic cast of scholars in related disciplines to examine ageing in the Soviet Union, covering the practice of geriatrics, the science of gerontology, and the experience of growing old. Chapters in the book focus on concepts and themes that analyse Soviet ageing in its medical, political and social contexts, both in the Soviet Union and internationally. Ageing was hardly a uniquely Soviet phenomenon: over the past fifty years, moreover, governments and societies have been dealing with steady increases in their ageing populations. Almost paradoxically, however, societal focus on this ageing population, its lives, and its social impact remains extremely limited. Compared to most sciences, gerontology is pitifully underfunded; geriatrics is amongst the least prestigious branches of medicine; and while the world’s population is growing undeniably older, great disagreement remains over what can and should be done in response. These were the same challenges that the USSR faced in the post-war decades (1945-1991), and the contributions included in this volume help to flesh out and contextualize the example of Soviet gerontology and geriatrics as one possible model of response. Geriatrics and Ageing in the Soviet Union captures the growing interest in this important subject, demonstrating the influence of ageing on Soviet science and society and the impact of Soviet gerontology and geriatrics at a global level. The book is available under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Wellcome Trust and Liverpool John Moores University.

This Open Access book combines philosophical and historical analysis of various forms of alternatives to mechanism and mechanistic explanation, focusing on the 19th century to the present. It addresses vitalism, organicism and responses to materialism and its relevance to current biological science. In doing so, it promotes dialogue and discussion about the historical and philosophical importance of vitalism and other non-mechanistic conceptions of life. It points towards the integration of genomic science into the broader history of biology. It details a broad engagement with a variety of nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first century vitalisms and conceptions of life. In addition, it discusses important threads in the history of concepts in the United States and Europe, including charting new reception histories in eastern and south-eastern Europe. While vitalism, organicism and similar epistemologies are often the concern of specialists in the history and philosophy of biology and of historians of ideas, the range of the contributions as well as the geographical and temporal scope of the volume allows for it to appeal to the historian of science and the historian of biology generally.

As part of the United Kingdom’s response to the escalating HIV/AIDS crisis during the 1980s, special wards and community-based services were established to care for people living with HIV/AIDS (PWHA). Much of the pioneering and innovative care developed at these centres can be attributed to nurses. However, UK nursing history has hitherto neglected to tell their stories. This chapter rectifies this omission by drawing on a wealth of source material including previously unseen, enlightening, and frequently moving oral histories, as well as archival and news media sources, to explore the actions and perceptions of the UK nurses who cared for PWHA, alongside the reflections of PWHA and their loved ones who received this care. This chapter reveals how assertive PWHA took control of their own care, often becoming experts on their condition – a phenomenon that challenged ideas of medical paternalism by reclaiming decision-making power in the name of the patient. We explore questions of ethics and socialisation by analysing how nurses were similarly tasked with deciding what actions were permissible in times of crisis – decisions made along the frequently blurred lines that this crisis drew between private and professional lives. Appreciating the personal draw that HIV/AIDS care had to nurses who identified as queer in particular, and the sense of duty this often evoked, offered a meaningful way of interpreting the research gathered for this chapter. Last, this makes an important contribution to the documented history of nurses’ experiences and constructions of the care of individuals belonging to stigmatised groups.

As part of the United Kingdom’s response to the escalating HIV/AIDS crisis during the 1980s, special wards and community-based services were established to care for people living with HIV/AIDS (PWHA). Much of the pioneering and innovative care developed at these centres can be attributed to nurses. However, UK nursing history has hitherto neglected to tell their stories. This chapter rectifies this omission by drawing on a wealth of source material including previously unseen, enlightening, and frequently moving oral histories, as well as archival and news media sources, to explore the actions and perceptions of the UK nurses who cared for PWHA, alongside the reflections of PWHA and their loved ones who received this care. This chapter reveals how assertive PWHA took control of their own care, often becoming experts on their condition – a phenomenon that challenged ideas of medical paternalism by reclaiming decision-making power in the name of the patient. We explore questions of ethics and socialisation by analysing how nurses were similarly tasked with deciding what actions were permissible in times of crisis – decisions made along the frequently blurred lines that this crisis drew between private and professional lives. Appreciating the personal draw that HIV/AIDS care had to nurses who identified as queer in particular, and the sense of duty this often evoked, offered a meaningful way of interpreting the research gathered for this chapter. Last, this makes an important contribution to the documented history of nurses’ experiences and constructions of the care of individuals belonging to stigmatised groups.

In recent years there has been a resurgence of museum exhibitions on the history of HIV/AIDS. While many assumed that there was enough awareness of the historical significance of this new disease to ensure the careful collection and conservation of relevant material, it is increasingly clear that a narrow range of items have been saved. As historians and curators turn to these holdings for analysis and exhibition, they find that archival and museum collections inadequately represent the impact of HIV/AIDS across diverse groups and places. This chapter considers some of the factors that have shaped museum responses to HIV/AIDS, from the accession of objects to the framing of narratives. It discusses the role of national contexts and pays close attention to the role of Dutch self-image in the framing of HIV/AIDS history there as a story of consensus and success, and the implications of this for museums and exhibitions in the Netherlands. Analysis draws on ongoing discussions with Dutch curators and a workshop with curators from museums across Europe, as well as an exhibition in Amsterdam at the International AIDS Society conference there in July 2018. This chapter highlights some of the issues that have limited museum collections and explores the potential consequences for public history. It argues that the current situation is problematic not only because archives and museum objects fuel inaccurate perceptions of the past about who was as risk and why, but also because these histories feed into responses to HIV/AIDS – and Covid-19 – in the present.

Edinburgh was disproportionately affected by HIV/AIDS in the early 1980–1990s, and women and children were affected in higher numbers there than elsewhere in the UK. Edinburgh’s AIDS crisis also followed a different pattern, with new infections predominantly occurring among IV drug users and heterosexuals. Because of the high rates of HIV infection among women in Edinburgh, the city rapidly became host to numerous charities and organisations scrambling to meet the needs of HIV-affected women and families, aiming to prevent new infections and meet the emotional, medical, housing, and educational needs of those already affected by the virus.This chapter traces how healthcare workers and HIV-affected women responded in Edinburgh. This was interdisciplinary collaborative AIDS activism born out of the daily fight for resources, information, space, and empathetic treatment for women and their families. This activism can be traced in texts both academic and creative, and was at the very least a backdrop for many women’s experience of HIV and AIDS in Edinburgh in the late twentieth century. To focus the analysis, the creation of the Paediatric AIDS Resource Centre (PARC) in Edinburgh is examined, alongside some of the items the centre published. The need for PARC is demonstrated not just by placing it in its social, political, and historical context, but by recovering the words of HIV-affected women and healthcare workers drawing on its resources, writing these women back into the history they created as subjects rather than objects.

In Soviet Nightingales, Susan Grant tracks nursing care in the Soviet Union from its nineteenth-century origins in Russia through the end of the Soviet state. With the advent of the USSR, nurses were instrumental in helping to build the New Soviet Person and in constructing a socialist society. Disease and illness were rampant in the early 1920s after years of war, revolution, and famine. The demand for nurses was great, but how might these workers best serve the country's needs? By examining living and working conditions, nurse-patient relations, education, and attempts at international nursing cooperation, Grant recounts the history of the Bolshevik effort to define the "Soviet" nurse and organize a new system of socialist care for the masses. Although the Bolsheviks aimed to transform healthcare along socialist lines, they ultimately failed as the struggle to train skilled medical workers became entangled in politics. Soviet Nightingales draws on rich archival research from Russia, the United States, and Britain to describe how ideology reinvented the role of the nurse and shaped the profession.

The present volume offers the first critical edition of the medieval Arabic translation of Galen's Commentary on Book 6 of the Hippocratic Epidemics. It is the sequel to the previous editions of Galen's Commentary. The Arabic text is accompanied by an English translation and extensive indices. The introduction outlines the history of the Greek and Arabic text of the commentary and discusses authorship, dating and style of the Arabic translation.

The present volume offers the first critical edition of the medieval Arabic translation of Galen's Commentary on Book 6 of the Hippocratic Epidemics. It is the sequel to the previous editions of Galen's Commentary. The Arabic text is accompanied by an English translation and extensive indices. The introduction outlines the history of the Greek and Arabic text of the commentary and discusses authorship, dating and style of the Arabic translation.

The present volume offers the first critical edition of the medieval Arabic translation of Galen's Commentary on Book 6 of the Hippocratic Epidemics. It is the sequel to the previous editions of Galen's Commentary. The Arabic text is accompanied by an English translation and extensive indices. The introduction outlines the history of the Greek and Arabic text of the commentary and discusses authorship, dating and style of the Arabic translation.

Vor mehr als 50 Jahren wurde in Deutschland eine Psychiatriereform eingeleitet, die aus den vormaligen Anstalten ein gemeindeorientiertes System sozialpsychiatrischer Hilfen formte. Von den Anfängen nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg bis zur Gegenwart bettet Christian Reumschüssel-Wienert die Entwicklung der Psychiatrie in die sozioökonomische, politische und kulturelle Entwicklung der Bundesrepublik ein. Eine integrierte Sichtweise berücksichtigt sozialpsychiatrische Diskurse ebenso wie psychiatrie- und behindertenpolitische Aspekte in klinischen und außerklinischen Kontexten. Es zeigt sich, dass die Sozialpsychiatrie gesellschaftliche Modernisierungsschübe reflektiert und nachholend umsetzt.

Schmerz ist kulturell überformt. Durch das kulturelle Phänomen der Verfeinerung des Spürens werden unsere Körper immer empfindlicher. Am Beispiel von Kopfschmerzen kann Stefan Dreßke zeigen, dass die physische Empfindlichkeit den Normen und Praktiken sozialer Milieus, des Geschlechts und des Alters folgt. Die soziologische Studie mit Berichten von 136 Frauen und Männern untersucht die sich zunehmend differenzierenden Deutungen des Körperausdrucks und den Wandel der Krankheitsvorstellungen. Dabei wird deutlich, dass Krankheiten der Empfindlichkeit Narrative sind, die der Verständigung in Sprach- und Praxiscodes dienen und die institutionellen Regimes folgen.

In Acts of Care, Sara Ritchey recovers women's healthcare work by identifying previously overlooked tools of care: healing prayers, birthing indulgences, medical blessings, liturgical images, and penitential practices. Ritchey demonstrates that women in premodern Europe were both deeply engaged with and highly knowledgeable about health, the body, and therapeutic practices, but their critical role in medieval healthcare has been obscured because scholars have erroneously regarded the evidence of their activities as religious rather than medical. The sources for identifying the scope of medieval women's health knowledge and healthcare practice, Ritchey argues, are not found in academic medical treatises. Rather, she follows fragile traces detectable in liturgy, miracles, poetry, hagiographic narratives, meditations, sacred objects, and the daily behaviors that constituted the world, as well as in testaments and land transactions from hospitals and leprosaria established and staffed by beguines and Cistercian nuns. Through its surprising use of alternate sources, Acts of Care reconstructs the vital caregiving practices of religious women in the southern Low Countries, reconnecting women's therapeutic authority into the everyday world of late medieval healthcare. Thanks to generous funding from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access (OA) volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other Open Access repositories.

Thure von Uexküll (1908-2004) ist einer der Väter der psychosomatischen Medizin in Deutschland. Sein lebenslanges Bemühen um eine naturphilosophisch-systemtheoretisch begründete bio-psycho-soziale Medizin ist unverändert aktuell. Ottmar Leiß nimmt sich diesem Pionier an und betrachtet in aktueller Relektüre seine theoretischen Ansätze und die Auswirkungen seiner Arbeiten u.a. auf das medizinische Menschenbild und das Verhältnis zwischen ärztlich Tätigen und Patient*innen. Die Integration von Salutogenese und Hartmut Rosas Resonanztheorie in Uexkülls Konzepte machen diese zum handlungsleitenden Kompass für eine humane Medizin.

The title of the book pays tribute to two Dutch scientists without whom virology would arguably not exist today, at least not in its present guise. The first is Antony van Leeuwenhoek, whose reports of microscopic discoveries in the early eighteenth century aroused interest in the world of invisible creatures. His findings laid the basis for a theory of a particulate cause of infectious diseases, but, as George Rosen wrote, without any tangible results in support of the theory (1993/1958, pp. 84-85). Some 250 years later Martinus Willem Beijerinck launched the discipline of virology with his idea that tobacco mosaic disease (TMD) was caused by a living contagious fluid or filterable living pathogen.

This open access edited collection contributes a new dimension to the study of mental health and psychiatry in the twentieth century. It takes the present literature beyond the ‘asylum and after’ paradigm to explore the multitude of spaces that have been permeated by concerns about mental well-being and illness. The chapters in this volume consciously attempt to break down institutional walls and consider mental health through the lenses of institutions, policy, nomenclature, art, lived experience, and popular culture. The book adopts an international scope covering the historical experiences of Britain, Ireland, and North America. In accordance with this broad approach, contributions to the volume span academic fields such as history, arts, literary studies, sociology, and psychology, mirroring the diversity of the subject matter. This book is available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com

This chapter explores the value and relevance of a combined academic and public engagement approach to the history of medicine. The authors consider a specific mental health project at the Bethlem Museum of the Mind, in the context of a longer tradition of service user involvement in mental health research and museology. It is argued that the project’s approach presented a unique opportunity for mental health education and the reduction of stigma. These elements of the project informed the historical focus, resulting in a more inclusive history than in many institutional histories of psychiatry, focusing on the importance of space, place and architecture in twentieth-century psychiatry. The chapter concludes that community engagement within a museum setting enriches the history of medicine as a discipline and vice versa.

This open access book provides the first critical history of the controversy over whether to cull wild badgers to control the spread of bovine tuberculosis (bTB) in British cattle. This question has plagued several professional generations of politicians, policymakers, experts and campaigners since the early 1970s. Questions of what is known, who knows, who cares, who to trust and what to do about this complex problem have been the source of scientific, policy, and increasingly vociferous public debate ever since. This book integrates contemporary history, science and technology studies, human-animal relations, and policy research to conduct a cross-cutting analysis. It explores the worldviews of those involved with animal health, disease ecology and badger protection between the 1970s and 1990s, before reintegrating them to investigate the recent public polarisation of the controversy. Finally it asks how we might move beyond the current impasse.

Coalmining was a notoriously dangerous industry and many of its workers experienced injury and disease. However, the experiences of the many disabled people within Britain’s most dangerous industry have gone largely unrecognised by historians. This book examines the British coal industry through the lens of disability, using an interdisciplinary approach to examine the lives of disabled miners and their families.The book considers the coal industry at a time when it was one of Britain’s most important industries, and follows it through a period of growth up to the First World War, through strikes, depression and wartime, and into an era of decline. During this time, the statutory provision for disabled people changed considerably, most notably with the first programme of state compensation for workplace injury. And yet disabled people remained a constant presence in the industry as many disabled miners continued their jobs or took up ‘light work’. The burgeoning coalfields literature used images of disability on a frequent basis and disabled characters were used to represent the human toll of the industry.A diverse range of sources are used to examine the economic, social, political and cultural impact of disability in the coal industry, looking beyond formal coal company and union records to include autobiographies, novels and oral testimony. It argues that, far from being excluded entirely from British industry, disability and disabled people were central to its development. The book will appeal to students and academics interested in disability history, disability studies, social and cultural history, and representations of disability in literature.

This open access book explores the question of who or what ‘the public’ is within ‘public health’ in post-war Britain. 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. Focusing on health education, health surveys, heart disease and the development of vaccination policy and practice, the book establishes that ‘the public’ was not one thing but many. It considers how public health policy makers and practitioners imagined the public or publics. These publics were not mere constructions; they had agency and the ability to ‘speak back’ to public health. The nature of publicness changed during the latter half of the twentieth century, and this book argues that the relationship between the public and public health offers a powerful lens through which to examine such shifts.

Mobilising a queer theoretical framework, by which we mean embracing unhappiness, ephemerality, and instability, this chapter reflects on processes of archiving oral histories as part of the European HIV/AIDS Archive (EHAA). It presents selected challenges and tensions that lie at the heart of remembering, narrating, and archiving the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the broader European region. The EHAA, an online collection of oral history interviews and digitised materials, has been developed to further establish HIV/AIDS history as part of the broader social memory, so as to work through the trauma of mass death and social discrimination and to document innovations, tensions, and inconsistencies in engaging with the epidemic across the region. Building on a growing interest in archiving histories of HIV activism across Europe and North America, the EHAA project dates back to efforts by the ‘AIDS History into Museums Working Group’ to preserve such histories in Germany. The project was further developed and expanded in two research projects: ‘Disentangling European HIV/AIDS Policies: Activism, Citizenship and Health’ and ‘Don’t Criminalize Passion! The AIDS Crisis and Political Mobilization in the 1980s and early 1990s in Germany’. Explicitly deviating from an investment in offspring as a route for the transmission of memory, the EHAA joins other queer archival work imagined as sites for handing down queer history. This chapter argues that the EHAA contributes to queer memory work as a necessary revision of public remembrance and current perceptions of the epidemic, and, at the same time, as a source of inspiration for future activism.

The medicalisation of alcohol use has become a prominent discourse that guides policy makers and impacts public perceptions of alcohol and drinking. This book maps the historical and cultural dimensions of the phenomenon. Emphasising medical attitudes and theories regarding alcohol and the changing perception of alcohol consumption in psychiatry and mental health, it explores the shift from the use of alcohol in clinical treatment and as part of dietary regimens to the emergence of alcoholism as a disease category that requires medical intervention and is considered a threat to public health.

This chapter examines the writings of the renowned late-eighteenth-century Moroccan ambassador Ibn Uthmân Al-Meknassî, the first known traveller from his country to leave an account of European quarantine as experienced during his two diplomatic missions in Spain’s Ceuta (1779) and Malta’s Valletta (1782). It shows that quarantine, on the one hand, acted as a marker of otherness by which Ibn Othman was identified as a Muslim, though this was not a uniform process, owing to the fact that significant differences existed in the degree of alterity experienced in Spain and Malta, and indeed other parts of the Mediterranean. The subjective opinion on quarantine, on the other hand, was also one of the means through which Ibn Uthmân situated himself within Makhzen (Moroccan government) elites at a time when a division between those who declared themselves in favour of European-style modernisation and those who advocated a rejection of European novelties was already visible.

This chapter investigates the setting up of a network of lazarettos along the southern and eastern littorals of the Mediterranean during the nineteenth century. The fundamental thesis is that these lazarettos, constructed and frequently directed by Europeans, sustained the expansion of Western colonialism in the region. Starting with an investigation of the workings of the first Sanitary Councils – in North Africa and Ottoman-ruled ports – which preceded the International Sanitary Conferences, the study then goes on to show how maritime quarantine catered for the European powers’ commercial, shipping and imperial interests in the region. By examining the regulations and the actual practices of disinfection adopted in these lazarettos, this chapter also shows how these institutions constructed and/or consolidated stereotypes of the ‘Muslim Arab’ as a ‘threatening contagious body.’

This chapter provides a thorough investigation of the modes by which the sanitary administration coevolved coherently with and inseparably from the Spanish state’s modern transport-communication and economic-industrial infrastructures throughout the nineteenth century. It also investigates examines how quarantine institutions functioned as sanitary gateways or entry checkpoints at borders, physically marking and consolidating while protecting the national territorial space. The paper traces the ideas underpinning the configuration and development of the sanitary network on Spanish national territory, which occurred unevenly – with the most evolved parts depending on certain strategic ports and on links with the railway transport infrastructure that was still under construction. It also suggests that the gradual relaxation of quarantine in liberal Spain was periodically called into question by economic and political policies that defined the relation between the coastal and inland regions of the country.

This chapter investigates the use of quarantine as an instrument of social control and as dispositive for the construction and stigmatization of the Muslim ‘other’. The study takes the under-researched case of the Hajj to Mecca from the Balkans, hence focusing on Muslims from Bulgaria and Bosnia-Herzegovina (the latter under Austrian-Hungarian rule as from 1878). Both Bosnian and Bulgarian Muslim pilgrims experienced quarantine on their return from Mecca, yet in unequal measures. Bosnian hajjis were given a more lenient quarantine than their Bulgarian co-religionists by their separate sanitary authorities – with regard to the duration of isolation and the disinfection of their bodies and personal belongings. This was due to the different political and cultural attitudes towards their Muslim minorities by these two Balkan regimes.

This chapter deals with a rather unknown quarantine institution: the lazaretto of Mogador Island in Morocco. Specifically, the work explores the site’s centrality to the Spanish imperialist project of “regeneration” over of its southern neighbour. In contrast with the “civilisation” schemes deployed by the leading European imperial powers at the end of the nineteenth century, regeneration did not seek to construct a colonial Morocco but a so-called African Spain in more balanced terms with peninsular Spain. This project was to be achieved through the support and direction of ongoing Moroccan initiatives of modernisation, as well as through the training of an elite of “Moors” who were to collaborate with Spanish experts sent to the country, largely based in Tangier. Within this general context, the Mogador Island lazaretto became a key site of regeneration projects. From a sanitary and political point of view, it was meant to define a Spanish-Moroccan space by marking its new borders and also to protect “Moorish” pilgrims against both the ideological and health-related risks associated with the Mecca pilgrimage.

This open access book looks at the dramatic history of ovariotomy, an operation to remove ovarian tumours first practiced in the early nineteenth century. Bold and daring, surgeons who performed it claimed to be initiating a new era of surgery by opening the abdomen. 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. This book traces the operation’s innovation, from its roots in eighteenth-century pathology, through the denouncement of those who performed it as ‘belly-rippers’, to its rapid uptake in the 1880s, when ovariotomists were accused of over-operating. Throughout the century, the operation was never a hair’s breadth from controversy.

Mediterranean quarantines investigates how quarantine, the centuries-old practice of collective defence against epidemics, experienced significant transformations from the eighteenth century in the Mediterranean Sea, its original birthplace. The new epidemics of cholera and the development of bacteriology and hygiene, European colonial expansion, the intensification of commercial interchanges, the technological revolution in maritime and land transportation and the modernisation policies in Islamic countries were among the main factors behind such transformations. The book focuses on case studies on the European and Islamic shores of the Mediterranean showing the multidimensional nature of quarantine, the intimate links that sanitary administrations and institutions had with the territorial organisation of states, international trade, the construction of national, colonial, religious and professional identities of political regimes.

This open access book surveys drinking in Britain between the Licensing Act of 1869 and the wartime regulations imposed on alcohol production and consumption after 1914. This was a period marked by the expansion of the drink industry and by increasingly restrictive licensing laws. Politics and commerce co-existed with moral and medical concerns about drunkenness and combined, these factors pushed alcohol consumers into the public spotlight. Through an analysis of public and private records, medical texts and sociological studies, the book investigates the reasons why Victorians and Edwardians consumed alcohol in the ways that they did and explores the ideas about alcohol that circulated in the period. This book shows that they had many reasons for purchasing and consuming alcoholic substances and these were driven by broader social, cultural, medical and commercial factors. Although drunkenness may have been the most visible consequence of alcohol consumption, it was not the only type of drinking behaviour. Alcohol played an important social role in the everyday lives of Victorians and Edwardians where its consumption held many different meanings.

Reposant sur une enquête traversant non seulement l’ensemble de l’œuvre publiée de Jean Starobinski, mais aussi tirant de l’ombre de très nombreux documents inédits déposés aux archives conservées à la Bibliothèque nationale de Berne, cette étude s’attache à montrer comment le langage et la rhétorique adoptés par le discours scientifique moderne doivent être pris en compte dans leur rapport dialectique aux mythes politiques et à certaines images récurrentes dans l’art et la littérature occidentales.

The Liber Aurelii is a Latin medical text apparently compiled in Late Antiquity. It is the first part of a largely therapeutic two-volume work, which treats acute diseases. The author’s name is fictitious and unknown to the most original manuscripts. The work is thus a (rather successful) anonymous compilation, which uses primarily methodic sources, especially Soranus of Ephesus (2nd century AD). Not least due to the textual tradition’s complexity, only a single late manuscript has so far been printed in 1847. In addition to the direct transmission represented by five manuscripts, there is an abridged and slightly revised version in nine manuscripts. Gariopontus, an eleventh century physician, also quoted almost the entire text in his still unedited Passionarius, sometimes in slightly revised form. His exemplar was better than the archetype of the direct transmission. The present edition reconstructs an archetype text of the direct transmission (approximately eighth century). On facing pages, the text forms of the abridged version and of Gariopontus are edited synoptically. The differences between the versions show how physicians of the High Middle Ages tried to make sense of the often corrupted text. The corrupted archetype text is only minimally interfered with in the edition; a special apparatus presents the editor’s suggestions for improvement. The unusual technical vocabulary of the text is made accessible by a glossary at the end of the edition.

The social position of learning disabled people has shifted rapidly over the last 20 years, from long-stay institutions, first into community homes and day centres, and now to a currently emerging goal of ""ordinary lives"" for individuals using person-centred support and personal budgets. These approaches promise to replace a century and a half of ""scientific"" pathological models based on expert assessment, and of the accompanying segregated social administration which determined how and where people led their lives, and who they were. This innovative volume explains how concepts of learning disability, intellectual disability and autism first came about, describes their more recent evolution in the formal disciplines of psychology, and shows the direct relevance of this historical knowledge to present and future policy, practice and research. Goodey argues that learning disability is not a historically stable category and different people are considered ""learning disabled"" as it changes over time. Using psychological and anthropological theory, he identifies the deeper lying pathology as ""inclusion phobia"", in which the tendency of human societies to establish an in-group and to assign out-groups reaches an extreme point. Thus the disability we call ""intellectual"" is a concept essential only to an era in which to be human is essentially to be deemed intelligent, autonomous and capable of rational choice. Interweaving the author's historical scholarship with his practice-based experience in the field, Learning Disability and Inclusion Phobia challenges myths about the past as well as about present-day concepts, exposing both the historical continuities and the radical discontinuities in thinking about learning disability.

This book challenges widespread assumptions about Hippocrates (and, in the process, about ancient Greek medicine) and will also explore the creation of modern myths about the ancient world. Through the lens of reception studies Helen King considers what ‘Hippocrates’ means today. He features powerfully in our assumptions about ancient medicine, and our beliefs about what medicine – and the physician himself – should be. In ethics, as well as in actual treatments recommended by both orthodox and alternative medicine, ‘Hippocrates’ still features as a model to be emulated. Why do we continue to use him in this way, and how are new myths constructed around his name? And what can this tell us about popular engagements with the classical world today?

Animals and Medicine: The Contribution of Animal Experiments to the Control of Disease offers a detailed, scholarly historical review of the critical role animal experiments have played in advancing medical knowledge. Laboratory animals have been essential to this progress, and the knowledge gained has saved countless lives—both human and animal. Unfortunately, those opposed to using animals in research have often employed doctored evidence to suggest that the practice has impeded medical progress. This volume presents the articles Jack Botting wrote for the Research Defence Society News from 1991 to 1996, papers which provided scientists with the information needed to rebut such claims. Collected, they can now reach a wider readership interested in understanding the part of animal experiments in the history of medicine—from the discovery of key vaccines to the advancement of research on a range of diseases, among them hypertension, kidney failure and cancer. This book is essential reading for anyone curious about the role of animal experimentation in the history of science from the nineteenth century to the present.