Showing papers in "Medical History in 1987"

In the shadow of the poorhouse: a social history of welfare in America

Abstract: It is not uncommon for emeritus professors to take a more reflective view of their discipline, or even for them to grapple with the significance of their specialist knowledge for perennial human questions. Leslie Hearnshaw, for many years Professor of Psychology at Liverpool, is better equipped than many for this role, having already written a history of British psychology and the standard biography of Cyril Burt. In this book, he responds strongly to those he sees as jeopardizing an ancient humanist project of psychological knowledge: over-specialized professional psychologists, historians indifferent to present scientific psychology, and critics of the whole progressivist enterprise. The result is an extraordinarily wide-ranging study-very definitely a conscious act of unification-to portray \"psychology\" as a coherent and progressive endeavour, whatever its problematic qualities as science. His story begins with the animism of early cultures, and it runs through the Greeks to the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, and the grounding of modern psychology in biology, philosophy, and the German universities in the nineteenth century. There is a separate chapter on \"medical influences\", arguing that it is only with the generation ofJames and Ribot that there is any significant medical psychology. He also attempts to do justice to \"the social dimension\"; and few other histories of psychology have had the breadth to assimilate Marx or Parsons. With the twentieth century, Hearnshaw stresses clearly the \"shaping\" power of the occupational organization and application of psychology, as well as the theoretical and methodological issues which usually dominate such general accounts. In the final chapters, he shows that recent psychology has not been so specialized that it has avoided shaping by philosophical critiques, and he then boldly reviews \"the state of the art\", focusing on the neurosciences and the \"cognitive revolution\". In conclusion, he ventures his own candidate for a unifying \"metapsychology\", based on William Stern's \"personalism\". This is an extraordinary journey, and niggles about detail are out of place, though some passing judgments make one blench. Ultimately, I feel, the book is a declaration of faith. Certainly, it does not engage with the deep difficulties, philosophical and historical, of the enterprise; the key values of continuity, progress, and the striving intellect give the book its form and are not themselves the subject of reflection. As a result the material up till the twentieth century is much less interesting (and in my view less defensible) than what follows, since it becomes a …

The history of scurvy and vitamin C.

Abstract: In America, there were a number of praiseworthy attempts to improve the position of the midwife in the early nineteenth century, and an increase in the number of European midwives accompanied the influx of immigrants after the 1880s. Yet the midwives' position was so insecure that they nearly died out as more and more women opted for physician deliveries in hospital. Only recently, since the 1970s, has there been something of a midwife revival, split between the nurse-midwives and the \"independent\" midwives. The difficulties of the American midwife can be attributed largely to the absence of those very factors which strengthened her colleague in Britain. In America, there was no strong eighteenth-century tradition; no strong link with the nursing profession, although the public health nurses held out a hand in the inter-war years; there was no support from the early feminists of this century, and there was no uniform or Federal certification. Instead, there were wide disparities in the often half-hearted attempts to improve and certify midwives in different states, varying from the moderately successful at one extreme, and at the other the introduction of legislation in Massachusetts (in 1907) and Florida (in 1982) intended, directly or indirectly, to outlaw the midwife altogether. Most of all, however, the tradition of general practitioner obstetrics and deliveries conducted in the home, sank very much sooner in the USA than in Britain, almost taking the independent midwife with it. By the second world war, when only thirty-seven per cent of all deliveries in Britain took place in hospital, some eighty per cent of urban deliveries were hospital deliveries in the USA. Home deliveries were almost exclusively confined to the urban poor, especially the black population. Moreover, throughout this century there was the almost total and relentless opposition to the midwife by the American medical profession. With few exceptions, they were set on abolishing all midwife deliveries, even when statistics showed that home was safer than hospital. This is the bare bones of a complex story which is dealt with in Litoff's introduction. The rest ofthe book is a valuable collection of papers and reports that influenced or reflected the midwife debate. There is a 1915 paper by De Lee-the Chicago obstetrician, famous for his \"prophylactic forceps operation\" (1920-in which he says things about midwives that could make your hair curl. There is a paper (1927) by the marvellous Mary Breckenridge, who set up the Frontier Nursing Service in Kentucky, a service of nurse-midwives which achieved near-miracles of obstetric efficiency under the most adverse conditions. This was modelled on the midwife service of the British Highlands and Islands Crown Commission, and highly praised on both sides ofthe Atlantic. Too little attention has been paid to this remarkable woman whose brilliant autobiography, Wide neighborhoods (1952) has now been re-issued in paperback in the USA (Lexington, University Press of Kentucky; reviewed in Med. Hist., 1982, 26: 358-359).These are only two out of eighteen important and fascinating source contributions. To understand the essence of the midwife debate in the USA from 1800 to 1980 is far from easy; but to do so is to appreciate the breadth of the factors which have shaped obstetric care in the Western world. Those who confine their attention to Britain, or for that matter any other European country, know only half the story; that is why a publication such as this is important for us as well as for American historians of midwifery and obstetric care. Irvine Loudon Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, Oxford

Medicine and pneumatology: Henry More, Richard Baxter, and Francis Glisson's Treatise on the Energetic Nature of Substance

Abstract: The nature of the soul and its relationship to the body has always proved problematical for Christian philosophy. The source of the difficulty can be traced back to the efforts of the early Fathers to reconcile the essentially pagan concept of an immaterial and immortal soul with apostolic teachings about the after-life in which all the emphasis is placed upon the resurrection of the body. The tensions between these two traditions inevitably became strained during the sixteenth century when Protestant reformers insisted on a closer adherence to Scripture. Furthermore, even when leaving the problems of Scriptural hermeneutics aside, the dualistic approach to the question, in which soul (or spirit) and body are held to be categorically different in essence, had to overcome a number of intractable philosophical problems. So, it was not simply coincidence that when the new mechanical philosophy began to be formulated in a systematic way in the seventeenth century, it was couched in vigorously dualistic terms. In fact, three of the earliest fully elaborated systems of mechanical philosophy, those of Descartes, Digby, and Charleton, were explicitly intended to provide a philosophical prop for dualist theology.' Moreover, it was because of its usefulness in promoting dualism that Cartesianism was first popularized in England not by a natural philosopher but by the Cambridge Platonist and theologian, Henry More.2

Brought to bed. Childbearing in America, 1750-1950.

Abstract: Galen's physiological system was \"completely lacking any scientific basis\", and was in fact a \"highly fanciful concept of bodily function\". For Persaud, \"Galen's death heralded a long era with a predictable outcome. Medicine, and the study of human anatomy in particular, languished in passive moribundity only to reach a climactic end in 1543 with the publication of De corporis humanifabrica. \" Persaud's story ends with an account of the progress of anatomy from Mondino, the \"restorer of anatomy\", through Leonardo da Vinci to Andreas Vesalius, \"the first man of modern science\". Persaud's interpretation will probably be passed over by scholars in the field as being too whiggish. The book may, however, prove to be popular among students new to the field, especially among medical students. Indeed, this is probably precisely the audience at which Persaud (himself an eminent medical doctor if the list of qualifications after his name on the title-page is anything to go by) is targeting his book. It is this aspect of Persaud's book which is probably the most interesting. Far from being particularly revealing about the history of anatomy, this work is more of an insight into the concerns and interests of modern anatomists and how they perceive their own discipline today.

Florence Nightingale and the nursing legacy

Abstract: Inevitably, reading is one of the requirements to be undergone. To improve the performance and quality, someone needs to have something new every day. It will suggest you to have more inspirations, then. However, the needs of inspirations will make you searching for some sources. Even from the other people experience, internet, and many books. Books and internet are the recommended media to help you improving your quality and performance.

Insanity and its treatment in Islamic society.

Abstract: A description of the actual treatment of the insane in medieval Islamic society is a difficult task for three major reasons. First, the medical texts, especially the well-known treatise on insanity by Ishaq ibn 'Imran,2 give descriptions of various mental disturbances and their therapies; these accounts are, however, usually restricted to the Galenic tradition, are generally nonclinical, and do not emphasize psychoses or florid conditions. Like Islamic law, these accounts are prescriptive rather than descriptive, so that any historical survey of the medical treatment of the insane can rely on them only as supportive evidence or as the rationale for the practice of professional physicians. Second, historical descriptions of disturbed men and women are rare, and one must resort to a wide variety of sources, such as adab (belles-lettres), biographical dictionaries, geographers' and travellers' accounts. These depictions of unusual behaviour are, in fact, evaluative. Thus, the third issue is the serious methodological problem ofwhat is meant by \"insanity\" or \"mental illness\".3 For convenience, insanity may be defined as any behaviour that is judged to be abnormal or extraordinary by a social group at a specific time and place. Within the wide spectrum of human behaviour, members ofany society set boundaries to what they believe to be acceptable or permissible. This judgement or consensus depends on the degree to which an individual's behaviour is disturbed as well as on the attitudes of his or her social group toward those actions.4 Mental illness is, then, more intimately dependent on social attitudes and beliefs than physical illness, and this social context largely determines the care and treatment of the insane.

Archibald Pitcairne and Newtonian medicine.

Abstract: In the spring of 1692, Isaac Newton entertained a visitor in his rooms in Trinity College, Cambridge. This was in itself unusual for the reclusive scientist; and, in addition, he entrusted to the visitor, Archibald Pitcairne, the fruit of his latest work on alchemy, chemistry, and the theory of matter, the essay 'De natura acidorum'. Over a period of several days, the two conversed on topics related to the essay, or, rather, Pitcairne asked questions which Newton answered. Immediately following his departure, Pitcairne sent copies of the essay, including notes of his interviews, to his friends.' Who was Archibald Pitcairne, that Newton should have entrusted such an important document to him? At the time of his visit, he was on his way to Leiden to assume the professorship of the practice of medicine at that city's university. An Edinburgh physician and a prominent member of scientific circles there, Pitcairne was a close friend of the mathematician David Gregory. Although he had published little, the Leiden appointment signalled his growing reputation as a medical theorist. Pitcairne's ideas grew out of the iatromechanical school, but he also explicitly connected his ideas with those of Newton. His successors and followers accepted this connection. In this paper I shall examine the relationship between Pitcairne's ideas on medicine and physiology and Newton's concept of the microcosm before the publication of the Opticks in 1704. I have argued elsewhere that, at least for the period ofthe 1690s, "Newtonianism" should be narrowly defined as an intellectual movement based on the understanding and use ofNewton's ideas.2 I shall attempt in this paper to measure Pitcairne's work in this period by this criterion. Pitcaime was born in Edinburgh in 1652, the son of a merchant-magistrate who was also a minor laird. He matriculated at the University of Edinburgh in 1668. Soon rejecting the study of divinity, he took the standard arts course, graduating MA in 1671. By then, he had decided to study law, and went to Paris to continue his studies. Apparently he found the law course there not to his liking, for he took up with a group of Scots medical students, and began to accompany them on their hospital rounds. The elder Pitcairne objected to this agreeable activity and called his son home to

The transfer of care. Psychiatric deinstitutionalization and its aftermath.

Abstract: PHIL BROWN, The transfer of care. Psychiatric deinstitutionalization and its afiermath, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985, 8vo, pp. xvi, 275, £19.95. This sociological overview of the impact ofdeinstitutionalization on America's mental health services is written from a perspective which is informed by debates within the history of psychiatry as well as medical sociology. In his description of the growth of a federal mental health policy after World War II, and the shift towards community care, Brown documents the complex interweaving of political and economic factors, institutional and professional inertia, and the impact of psychoactive drugs in the processes of change. He endorses Andrew Scull's argument that psychoactive drugs were taken up with uncritical enthusiasm by a mental health administration which already felt grossly overburdened by its in-patient policy; and he emphasizes that the location of psychiatric in-patient care in general, rather than specialist, hospitals has further entrenched a biomedical approach to mental disorders. The way in which the retraction of state hospital provision for the insane has been shadowed by an expansion of the number of psychiatric beds in voluntary-aided, private general and private psychiatric hospitals is clearly demonstrated. Chilling statistics, such as the 18,000 former state mental hospital inmates estimated to be homeless in New York, portray a stark impression of the colossal inadequacies of \"community care\" as it is currently practised; statistics beside which complaints that, for example, \"the New York City public library system has had to endure troublesome patients hanging out in branch libraries, and to spend scarce funds on extra security\" sound carping. However, one of the strengths of Brown's study is the care he takes to document diverse points of view, seeing the mental health services America now has as the outcome of a dynamic interaction between government policies, professional and institutional interests, and public opinion. The chapter on 'Antipsychiatry and mental patients' rights' offers a subtle reassessment of the patients' rights movement, arguing that even if, as Scull has suggested, its growth was precipitated by the economic crisis within institutional psychiatry, it has heightened public and professional awareness of the importance of respecting patients' civil liberties. In addition, Brown wants to salvage the antipsychiatric idea of \"symptoms-as-protest\" against unacceptable social conditions, insisting that genuine mental health reform, operating through a range of institutional and community-based facilities, could only be effective if it were part of a more widespread expansion ofinvestment in social and welfare services, most notably the creation ofa national health care system. An awkward anachronism in the programmatic conclusion of this otherwise well-informed book is Brown's suggestion, after criticizing the extent to which some states in America rely on contractors to perform essential health care services, that \"Britain's National Health Service is a likely model\" for the more directly-controlled kind of health service he would like to see in America. Charlotte MacKenzie Wellcome Institute

Making a long story short: a note on men's height and mortality in England from the first through the nineteenth centuries.

Abstract: The use of data on height to examine the degree to which improvements in nutrition have contributed to the historical decline in mortality is explored. Specifically the author uses a variety of archaeological and historical data to examine changes in height from the first to the nineteenth centuries in England. The analysis indicates that mortality began to decline at least half a century before the height data show a significant improvement in nutrition. The significance of the changes occurring in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is stressed.

What price community medicine? The philosophy, practice and politics of public health since 1919

Abstract: that AIDS is a \"racial poison\", compared to which the threats to the health of the population identified by the earlier social hygiene movement pale into insignificance! But even to raise such issues is to draw attention to the enormous changes that have occurred in the social framework of discussion on public health since the period that Greta Jones has skilfully anaylsed in this book. As Jane Lewis points out, few histories of the National Health Service, prior to the work of Charles Webster, have paid much attention to the role of public health departments in the State system of health care in Britain. Lewis's book admirably corrects this deficiency and documents the complex historical price that has been paid for community medicine, involving the internal failures of preventive medicine and the external constraints that it has persistently encountered both from government and clinicians. Dr Lewis outlines how the concept of public health, which enjoyed a broad political mandate in the nineteenth century, became much narrower during the twentieth century, concentrating on the delivery of personal health services and municipal hospital management. This development has resulted in the ill-defined realm of community medicine, created as a new specialism in 1974. But community medicine is a sort of no-man's land for doctors who are specialized in health planning, epidemiology, disease prevention, and environmental analysis. They are caught somewhere between the cost-cutting requirements of local government management and the priorities of a clinical medicine that regards its own professional independence as a divine right. The decline of public health, according to Lewis, has largely been the result of the profession's failure to establish a coherent philosophy and to function as a watchdog service, relating poverty and ill health to political decisions concerning the allocation ofeconomic resources for the health of populations. The salaried officers of the public service allowed themselves to be sidetracked into focusing their attention on the management of personal health services. This left the public health service ill-equipped to counter the criticisms made by political pressure groups and social investigators of poverty and ill health during the second world war. The rise of the academic concept of social medicine replaced old-style public health with new analyses of social pathology. This, together with the power ofthe clinical profession, eliminated the role ofmedical officers of health from the centre stage of the National Health Service when it was established in 1948. …

The history of the therapeutic use of crude penicillin.

Abstract: The antibacterial properties of culture filtrates of Penicillium notatum were discovered in 1928 by Alexander Fleming,' but the realization of penicillin's full therapeutic potential had to await the contributions of Florey and Chain some twelve years later.2 Although early samples of the penicillin salts produced at Oxford were remarkably potent, they were not very pure,3 and difficulties with large-scale production meant that even these partially purified products were not initially widely available. This led a number of workers to re-examine the therapeutic properties of crude penicillin filtrates. Since their aim was to produce large amounts ofcrude filtrate for direct use on patients, complex purification procedures were purposely avoided. In this way, it was hoped that crude penicillin might be produced and used in hospitals, or even by general practitioners; as a result the crude product become known as \"home-made penicillin\".4 These culture filtrates were quite distinct from the partially purified penicillin salts produced by the Oxford workers and are referred to in this essay as crude penicillin. Essentially, three methods were developed for the topical application of crude penicillin. These were (1) use of liquid filtrates which were usually applied using lint or other absorbent material; (2) the use of dressings inoculated with P. notatum often in conjunction with liquid filtrates; and (3) the application ofcrude penicillin in agar, the so-called pen-agar method. In addition, crude filtrates were also occasionally administered by injection. A number of remarkable cures were achieved using crude penicillin, but fears concerning its uncontrolled production and purity eventually limited its use. At the same time, however, the partially purified product was becoming more widely available, making the use of crude filtration obsolete. As a result, the relatively large-scale production and use of crude penicillin covered only a short period from * Milton Wainwright, BSc, PhD, Lecturer in Microbiology, Department of Microbiology, University of Sheffield, Sheffield S10 2TN. l A. Fleming, 'On the antibacterial action of cultures of a Penicillium with special reference to their use in the isolation of B. influen-ae', Br. J. exper. Path., 1929, 10: 226-236. 2 E. Chain, H. W. Florey, A. D. Gardner, N. G. Heatley, M. A. Jennings, J. Orr-Ewing, and A. G. Sanders, 'Penicillin as a chemotherapeutic agent', Lancet, 1940, ii: 226-228. 3 D. Masters, Miracle drug, London, Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1946, p. 102. 4 A. J. Hobson and L. D. Galloway, 'Home-made penicilin', Lancet, 1944, i: 230-231.

Patients and practitioners. Lay perceptions of medicine in pre-industrial society.

Abstract: Feel lonely? What about reading books? Book is one of the greatest friends to accompany while in your lonely time. When you have no friends and activities somewhere and sometimes, reading book can be a great choice. This is not only for spending the time, it will increase the knowledge. Of course the b=benefits to take will relate to what kind of book that you are reading. And now, we will concern you to try reading patients and practitioners lay perceptions of medicine in pre industrial society as one of the reading material to finish quickly.

The poor in western Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

Abstract: The new catalogue marks a definite stage in the development of the collection. In 1982, a new funding programme was introduced by the collection's original patron, now called SmithKline Beckman, and a new curator, Dr Diane Karp, was appointed to make acquisitions and prepare the exhibition here recorded. Of the works in the exhibition, no fewer than fifty-six (about one-third) were acquired under the new programme, and their quantity is more than matched by their quality. The collection now includes fine drawings by Abraham Bloemaert, Guercino, and Pierre-Alexander Wille (all acquired in 1984); rare prints by the Fontainebleau school (also 1984), Hans Burgkmair (1982), C. J. Visscher (1983), and Erich Heckel (1983); and eloquent photographs by Hugh Welch Diamond (1984), Diane Arbus (1984), and W. Eugene Smith (1981-84). All the works are reproduced in the catalogue. Also in the exhibition, but acquired too late to enter the catalogue, was the young (Sir) Thomas Lawrence's pastel of a mad girl, dated 1786, which came up for auction at Christie's, London, on 19 March 1985. The catalogue is organized in four sections: anatomy; healers (physicians, surgeons, tooth-drawers etc.); disease, disability and madness; and the context of life, birth, and death. However, the works are so different from each other that they shine as individual items rather than as members of a group. Of particular interest to this reviewer are the tribute to the founders of serum-therapy for diphtheria by Charles Maurin, c. 1895, in the form of a drawing and a somewhat divergent etching; and the watercolour depicting his own expected death by the obscure and extremely ill Ligurian artist Giovanni David, c. 1780-90, whose numerous sufferings (arthritis, dropsy, fevers) were the subject of a controversial pamphlet published in Genoa in 1790. These works are a challenge to the historian's subtlety in interpreting historical documents, but the analyses of them in the catalogue are masterly.

Managing madness: changing ideas and practice.

Abstract: \"semi-welfare state\" (p. 29)-reflects his historicist bias that events should unfold toward goals set by historians. To Katz, Western Europe provides models of \"complete welfare states\". Like most ambitious books, this one has flaws. The first four chapters are mainly about a few communities in Eastern states, rather than about America. Because he excludes health services (except public mental hospitals) from his study, he ignores the difficult question of how institutions treated the sick poor. His strong distaste for charity \"reformers\" leads him to ignore evidence that, after the turn of the century, some of them-Edward T. Devine, for example-were collectivists boring from within established agencies (p. 83). In his brief summary of public health work at the turn of the century, he uncritically (and uncharacteristically) accepts contemporary claims for its effectiveness in reducing mortality from tuberculosis and other diseases (pp. 141-142). At the end of the book, he ignores the influence of events during the Second World War on social policy in the 1940s and 1950s. He ignores rural poverty throughout the book. Despite these limitations, this book should quickly replace existing summary accounts of the history of welfare in America. Unlike this reviewer, moreover, many British readers will be heartened by Katz's polemical stance and his impatience with American exceptionalism in social policy. Drawing upon existing historical and sociological scholarship, this book attempts a synthetic overview of the theoretical status of psychiatry and of changing psychiatric ideas and practices from the eighteenth century to the present. The focus is largely, though not exclusively, on English society (Scotland, for much of this period, had its own rather distinctive response to the problems posed by the mad). And the perspective is of someone sympathetic to recent critics of the psychiatric enterprise (though not unreservedly so). Currently a lecturer in sociology at the University of Essex, Dr Busfield was trained as a clinical psychologist, and worked in that capacity at a mental hospital for a number of years. Part One of the book focuses on conceptual and definitional matters. After two chapters presenting what she terms \"the liberal-conception of psychiatry and medicine\", she turns to an examination of the anti-psychiatrists of the 1960s and early 1970s-most prominently Szasz, Laing, Goffman, and Scheff. This is all quite useful but standard stuff. The discussions of anti-psychiatry, for instance, lean heavily on prior critiques by Sedgwick, Ingleby, and others. There are some sensible comments …

Disease and civilization. The cholera in Paris 1832

Abstract: It has footnotes and a bibliography but a historiographical chapter would have been invaluable for teacher and student alike. More particularly, Berliner does not situate his work in relation to E. Richard Brown's Rockefeller medicine men, which appeared in 1979. This provocative work Berliner acknowledges, saying: \"Despite the clearly dominant role that Rockefeller played in the transition from a sectarian to a scientific medical education system, it is surprising that only. . [Brown]. . has specifically told this story\" (p 4). There are a couple of points about this: first, Brown did not tell a \"story\" but gave an interpretation; second, Berliner's book in structure and argument seems, to me, to be very close to Brown's. Berliner has worked and published on this material for many years, and there seems a curious failure on his part to advance the debate. Although Berliner deals at length with some things, such as the Chicago episode, which are only outlined by Brown, he never suggests where he differs from him or agrees with him, where he would change the emphasis and so forth. A Marxist not engaging in dialectics is a very strange business indeed. (paperback). After over thirty years of preparation by members of the staff of the Hamburg Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, the first volume of the Index to Hippocrates has finally appeared. The tardiness ofpublication has not been without substantial benefit, for, as the introduction reveals, a growing consciousness of the deficiencies ofearlier Hippocratic scholarship led to the complete rethinking and reworking of the original plan. What is modestly labelled an Index is now major work of learning in its own right, far removed from a computerized concordance. The preparation of this first volume involved little more than a total revision of the manuscripts of the Hippocratic Corpus, a list of the most significant being in the Introduction, and a re-edition of the whole text. The deficiencies of Littre's editing are made clear, and the superiority of more scientific editors amply demonstrated. Secondly, each entry includes a translation of the term into Latin, as well as a lexicographical breakdown of the various uses of the word. Most important of all, each entry also includes not only major variants in the text of the passage cited, but also emendations and conjectures. From this it is possible to determine the value of the citation far more accurately than from a straightforward reference, and …

The early recognition of streptococci as causes of disease.

Abstract: On 9 April 1880, a young Scottish surgeon and bacteriologist, Alexander Ogston, reported to the German Surgical Congress in Berlin his observations of micrococci, growing sometimes in clusters and sometimes in chains, in the pus of acute abscesses. ' Ogston was no stranger to Germany. The son of Francis Ogston, professor ofmedical jurisprudence in the University of Aberdeen, Alexander Ogston began his medical studies at Aberdeen, but during the summer of 1863 he travelled to Prague, where he spent several weeks attending lectures and clinics informally. In. October 1863, he went to Vienna, where he registered as an \"sextraordinary student\" to attend the lectures of Joseph Hyrtl, Ernst Brucke, Carl Rokitansky, Johann Oppolzer, Johann Dumreicher, and others, but except for Hyrtl's lectures in anatomy, Ogston soon ceased to go to the public university lectures in favour of small private classes on new medical specialities, such as ophthalmology. The following summer of 1864, he attended clinics in Berlin, where he studied under RudolfVirchow, Albrecht Graefe, and Bernhard Langenbeck. In the autumn of 1864, Ogston returned to Aberdeen, where he completed his medical studies, receiving the MB, CM degrees in 1865 and theMD degree in 1866.2 In 1870, he became a junior surgeon at the Aberdeen Royal Infirmary; he acted initially as ophthalmic surgeon and anaesthetist. Shortly before his appointment, Ogston had learned that in Glasgow Joseph Lister had discovered a means of preventing the formation ofpus and blood poisoning in operation wounds, a discovery astonishing to him because at the Aberdeen Royal Infirmary all operation wounds suppurated. In 1870, Ogston went to Edinburgh to call on Lister, who hadjust moved from Glasgow to the professorship ofclinical surgery in the University ofEdinburgh. Lister explained to him the principles upon which the antiseptic method was based, and suggested that he go to Glasgow to see how antiseptic surgery was being practised at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary. There, Lister's former assistant and successor, Hector Cameron, took Ogston to the wards of the infirmary to see surgical patients who had been operated on

The milk option. An aspect of the history of the infant welfare movement in England 1898–1908

Abstract: The history of the English infant welfare movement is a complicated story of both successful action and failed initiatives.t Two of these abortive ventures were the campaign to improve the bacteriological quality of the milk supply in general, and the establishment of milk depots to provide clean milk for infants and young children alone. At the turn of the twentieth century, diarrhoea was considered to be the single most preventable cause of infant death, and as milk was the primary nutrient of infants, it was investigated as the most probable agent of infection. In this paper, I shall discuss how attention came to be focused on the health of infants and on the role milk played in their morbidity and mortality. I shall trace the initiatives to ameliorate the milk supplied to the public and to organize a pure milk source solely for infants. During the first decade of the twentieth century, these attempts failed. Nevertheless, they are of interest to us in providing a case study of the interaction of a macroscopic problem reflected in statistics and the microscopic search in bacteriological laboratories, the intersection of scientific research and medical practice, and the relation between what is known and what action is taken. In short, three themes emerge: the general problem of infant health delineated by statistics, the specific questions asked by science, and the concrete answers provided by public health practice. By the turn of the twentieth century, the annual reports of the Registrar General announcing the yearly crop of babies and the toll of infant life had become a cause for concern. Failure to register both births and deaths was negligible by this time, and the data thus collected made precise calculations ofvital statistics possible. ' Between 1876, when the first returns under the compulsory Births and Deaths Registration Act of 1874 were collected, and 1899, the crude birth rate per 1,000 population dropped from 35.5 to 30.5, a decrease of 14.1 per cent2 (fig. 1). Although the birth rate in other European countries showed a similar decline, this was little cause for solace, given contemporary notions of imperial responsibility, and given the fact that, except for France, the percentage decrease in England and Wales was greatest.3

Manual work, technology, and industrial health, 1918-39.

Abstract: Workers' health in the inter-war years has been the subject ofrecent enquiry and was a topic that generated much contentious contemporary debate.' The focus of discussion has been the impact ofmass unemployment and consequent deprivation on standards of health, physique, and general well-being. The object here is to open up a further, so far very neglected dimension, by switching attention to the workplace, and investigating the theme of health at work in the 1920s and 1930s.2 The present generation has grown up with the knowledge that work, working conditions, and technology may seriously affect the mental and physical health and well-being of individual workers, and that health, fitness, and fatigue can considerably influence productivity levels and efflciency. Evidence of these correlations accumulated with the practical work of the Factory Inspectorate from the 1830s, the weight of experience of a relatively thin strand of welfarist, humanitarian employers (of the G. Cadbury and S. Rowntree genre), and the experimentation of "scientific management" theorizers, including the Americans, F. W. Taylor (time study) and F. and L. Gilbreth (motion study).

Health and virtue: or, how to keep out of harm's way. Lectures on pathology and therapeutics by William Cullen c. 1770.

Abstract: William Cullen MD (1710-90) has not generally been considered amongst the front rank of medical scholars.' His position as a professor in the Edinburgh Medical School, holding consecutively the chairs ofchemistry (1755-66), the theory ofmedicine (1766-73), and the practice of medicine (1773-89), and at the same time (1755-76) contributing to the clinical classes given by himself and his colleagues in the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, has ensured him a place in medical annals.2 Estimation of Cullen's particular contribution to medical science has, however, been qualified.3 His biographer, writing in the early decades of the nineteenth century, began an exercise in rehabilitation which, by focusing on the originality of Cullen's research, set the tone of most subsequent assessment. He has been seen, for example, as one of the \"systematizers\" ofthe eighteenth century, along with such men as Friedrich Hoffmann (1660-1742), Georg Ernst Stahl (1660-1734), and Albrecht von Haller (1707-77), each ofwhom created a theory ofhuman physiological organization from one fundamental concept.4 But Cullen's physiological base in neural function is considered derivative, a

Surgeons at the Bailey. English forensic medicine to 1878

Abstract: Since the history of British legal medicine is uncharted, let alone the subject of definitive studies, to attempt a synthesis is a bold step. The range of potential subject matter and sources is so vast and ill-defined that any historian will confront dilemmas. Forbes attempts to cut through them to provide what he himselfcalls the first \"chronicle\" ofthe topic. He does this by extracting \"medical\" material from one extremely rich, continuous and connected set of criminal trial records, the Old Bailey Sessions Papers (beginning in 1684), commenting as he goes along in the light of relevant secondary sources. The result is unsatisfactory: at times we have little beyond a listing of what Forbes (and modern forensic pathologists) judge to be \"'medical\" evidence as it appears in these records. On the positive side, though, here is a readable introduction to a great range of case material, undoubtedly raising fascinating questions, of great contemporary relevance, about how \"expert\" knowledge interacts with public affairs. And there are more than a few bizarre and gruesome tales. Forbes resolves one dilemma, namely, which audience to write for, by plumping for doctors rather than historians. Thus he organizes the great bulk of the case material along lines which reflect a standard forensic test-such as the late Keith Simpson's own (Simpson provides a Foreword here). As with a modern forensic text, what gets recorded are empirical statements about investigative procedures, the state of bodies, the results of chemical analyses, and so on, often with little record as to what the case is otherwise about. This recording does suggest what a range of\"expert\" beliefs played a role. Much more seriously, the result in Forbes's work is that it is not a problem in itself to know what is \"medical\" or \"expert\" evidence, since modern medical understandings preselected the whole scheme of organization. Important questions concerning who and what were recognized as expert by the courts and the conditions (procedural and social) in which such \"expertise\" had influence are left untouched. The book begins with an overview, covering the legal and institutional setting of what is now forensic medicine. Here and later, Forbes relies on and quotes from secondary sources, some of which even at their best repeat tired cliches which themselves ought to be the subject of historical work (like the coronership impeding the progress of forensic medicine compared with Continental Europe). Secondary sources, as yet, provide no …

The medical activities of mid-nineteenth-century chemists and druggists, with special reference to Wakefield and Huddersfield.

Abstract: During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, many facilities were created with the express aim ofproviding medical care and treatment. The foundation oflarge numbers ofdispensaries and infirmaries, the establishment ofa formal channel ofmedical relief through the agency of the New Poor Law, and the setting up of a network of friendly societies, with facilities for the pecuniary and medical relief of their sick members, gave the poor and labouring classes of this period more access to medical treatment than they had ever had before. Meanwhile, those wealthy enough to pay for private medical care could utilize the services of a growing number of qualified medical practitioners. Yet rich and poor alike continued to resort to a variety of\"unqualified\" or \"fringe\" sources of medical aid. For some, such forms of medical treatment supplemented treatment by a \"regular\" practitioner; for others, with limited access or money, or with a preference for fringe methods, these were the sole means of medical relief. A wide variety of labels has been thrown up to describe the unqualified, influenced by a practical need to distinguish this group from the protessionals and by sociological terminology, the fringe, periphery, alternative or unorthodox practitioners, paramedics, quacks, and so on. The labels refer to a heterogeneous collection ofindividuals and groups, using varying methods of diagnosis and treatment, drawing on folk traditions, ancient remedies or the \"new sciences\" of, for instance, hydropathy, homeopathy, mesmerism or medical botany, or, in some cases, on showmanship, trickery or commercial enterprise. Until at least the mid-nineteenth century, we are not really in position to distinguish between professional practitioners and the fringe in terms of the quality of treatment given, its scientific standing or success rate. In such circumstances, it is perhaps most useful to distinguish between fringe and orthodox medicine on the grounds of legal and professional inclusion and exclusion.1 The nineteenth century saw not only the survival of traditional fringe practitioners-folk