The onset of the atomic age in India embodied a unique postcolonial ambition to harness atomic energy for peaceful purposes. Within this vision, nuclear medicine became a key instrument to modernise the country's colonial healthcare infrastructure. For India's nascent community of radiologists, radioisotopes offered a promising frontier in clinical research and therapeutic applications. Yet the development of nuclear medicine was far from a straightforward extension of atomic research into clinical practice. Instead, it took shape within a centralised framework that concentrated technological resources and expertise in a small number of metropolitan centres. The centralisation of nuclear medicine practice was not merely a response to the resource constraints of a postcolonial economy. It also reflected a technopolitical project that linked the modernisation of public healthcare to expanding atomic energy infrastructure. Situating the emergence of nuclear medicine within the intertwined histories of radiology, cancer care, and atomic energy research, the paper examines the postcolonial aspiration to harness advanced medical specialities through the atomic enterprise. In doing so, it unpacks the technopolitics of nuclear medicine, highlighting the politico-epistemic negotiations that shaped its institutionalisation in India.
Abstract This article discusses the development of the German-speaking anti-vaccination movement from the second half of the nineteenth century to the early twentieth century as an actor-centred history of knowledge. Although the German anti-vaccination movement was a heterogeneous milieu, recurring shared narratives can be identified within the argumentation of its actors: The movement is characterised by a high affinity to conspiracy theories and an anti-science attitude. Antisemitism and völkish ideologies are also a recurring element of this radical rejection of vaccination in the German-speaking region from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards. These narratives are used to construct a knowledge system of smallpox vaccination that was an alternative to medical science and the political decisions based on it.
In the aftermath of the Second World War, Poland faced immense public health challenges amidst widespread destruction and political transformation. This article explores the largely overlooked medical mission of the Unitarian Service Committee (USC) in Poland, situating it within both humanitarian and geopolitical contexts. Drawing on archival research and press accounts, the study reconstructs the USC's multifaceted aid efforts, including its Medical Teaching Mission, the establishment of the Piekary Śląskie hospital, and tuberculosis control initiatives. The analysis highlights how the USC combined direct medical assistance with educational outreach, aiming to support long-term recovery. However, operating behind the Iron Curtain, the Committee's activities were subject to both surveillance and propaganda, revealing the entanglement of health and politics in Cold War Europe. This case offers new insights into the role of non-governmental actors in shaping postwar public health and diplomacy in Eastern Europe.
Torri'r Llech (TLl) (Welsh for 'breaking the rickets') was a bloodletting practice which remained popular in Wales from at least the mid-nineteenth up to the mid-twentieth centuries. The practice involved cutting the ear (pinna) to induce bleeding. Indications were numerous and dynamic. Vernacular medical practices, including bloodletting, have enjoyed a long history in Wales and were influenced by a multitude of conceptual paradigms over the centuries. By drawing on original oral histories, newspaper accounts, as well as existing secondary source material, this article aims to situate TLl within the wider framework of bloodletting practices in Wales and Britain more broadly. In doing so, this paper also considers the ways in which TLl changed over time and how this dynamism proved a persistent threat to the authority of official medical institutions in Wales. By then discussing how TLl itself appeared to draw on diverse conceptual frameworks, it is argued that it may more accurately be defined as a practice within the confines of popular humoralism - a syncretic medical paradigm influenced by humoralism, astrology, Christianity, as well as local belief systems. Ultimately, TLl exhibited remarkable longevity and may have been practised as late as the 1970s-80s in parts of the Upper Swansea Valley, potentially representing the latest example of a humoral bloodletting practice native to the British Isles. This analysis challenges more linear narratives of biomedical ascendancy, showcasing how TLl coexisted with orthodox medicine in a pluralistic medical marketplace in which Welsh patients consistently exercised agency over their own care.
This article explores the data entry labour demands of electronic death registration systems (EDRS), the jurisdiction-specific software systems developed in the United States in the 1990s and 2000s to 'reengineer' the process that informs vital statistics officials of deaths. Over decades of deliberations about how best to design and implement the tools, officials knew of two key issues that challenged death registration historically: the system moved slowly, and the data it produced was not always accurate. This article explores the techno-solutionism that led to the framing of EDRS as a tool that could solve these two issues simultaneously, improving both ease of data entry and the data's integrity. But this flawed optimism about EDRS's dual affordances, the paper argues, contributed to the tool's sluggish implementation.
This paper explores and compares smoking advertisements and anti-smoking and anti-cancer messages in Australia's migrant press, particularly newspapers, from 1930 to 1960. It investigates the ways in which smoking was promoted to migrant communities through their newspapers, contrasts this with the increasing prevalence of anti-smoking and broader anti-cancer messages, and explores whether there were any shifts in advertising and in anti-smoking messages following the growing research linking smoking and cancer (particularly lung cancer) from 1950. These messages were ultimately tied to this growing research, as well as the various Australian state and national anti-cancer campaign committees which emphasised early diagnosis and swift treatment as the best method to combat a range of cancers. Yet the Australian authorities, although finally acknowledging the dangers of cigarette smoking, rejected any government intervention other than providing the medical reports to the public. Greek-language newspapers (notably To Ethnico Vema) form an important case study; however, other foreign-language and migrant community papers were also consulted, including Italian, Jewish, and French.
After years of focussing on infectious and degenerative illnesses, U.S. public health turned to the problem of accidents. Over the course of the twentieth century, safety practitioners repurposed the models of infectious disease control, risk-factor medicine, and biomechanics to improve the precision of injury data and to guide its applications. The resulting set of frameworks, methods, and practices, collectively referred to as 'the epidemiology of accidents', changed how health professionals analysed injuries but never produced a lasting consensus on appropriate safety interventions. This article uses the understudied history of home accident prevention to explain why mid-twentieth-century public health failed to prioritise injury control and what made home accidents especially intractable. During the 1940s, the American Public Health Association and U.S. Public Health Service collected statistics from communities across the country to determine the causes of home accidents and to inform local safety campaigns. These investigations were comprehensive but nonspecific, seeking to educate families about all the dangers of domestic space. After John Gordon published his influential study on accidents in 1949, this approach shifted from counting cases associated with risky behaviours and conditions to quantifying the extent to which isolable risk factors contributed to injuries. From the 1960s to 1970s, William Haddon changed accident prevention again, defining injuries as 'abnormal energy exchanges' and finding ways to minimise harm when accidents happened. Across these iterations, the epidemiology of accidents tried to identify, classify, quantify, and control the causes of home injuries but fell short of translating research into policy.
In 1970, Ted Williams - a medical missionary who had been running a small hospital at Kuluva in the West Nile region of Uganda for decades - was approached by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) to help establish a major study on the possible role of Epstein-Barr Virus in the aetiology of Burkitt's lymphoma (BL). At the time, there was intense global interest in BL, as the cancer promised to be the first shown to have a viral aetiology. IARC centred its project at Kuluva Hospital and in the West Nile district because of Williams' unusually detailed and accurate records. Williams was a meticulous record-keeper, who relied on various methods of data collection, from collecting and comparing to selecting and sorting. His paper-based archives and recording practices provide a rare window onto epidemiological knowledge production in East Africa in the decades before computing reshaped medical record-keeping. By tracing the 'sociomaterial paper trail' of Williams's work, this paper examines how persona, place, and paper intersected in the making of medical knowledge, and how the researcher's persona shapes the kinds of epidemiological data that are ultimately produced.
Literature about the discovery of the leprosy bacterium Mycobacterium leprae usually mentions the Hansen-Neisser controversy. It is an established narrative that Neisser tried to present himself as the discoverer of the leprosy bacterium. However, Neisser's first publication on Mycobacterium leprae refers explicitly to Hansen's original discovery. How did the notion of Neisser trying to claim Hansen's discovery emerge? A thorough source-critical examination of Hansen's and Neisser's scientific and popular publications between 1874 and 1897 as well as of the literature dealing with the so-called controversy brought interesting new results. The notion that Neisser tried to steal Hansen's discovery is based on a misreading of Neisser's publications by Hansen's biographer. But Neisser tried indeed to bypass Hansen in trying to prove that Mycobacterium leprae was the contagion causing leprosy. The competition between the two scientists resulted in a personal enmity. This study shows how the history of modern science is prone to myths and underlines the importance of source criticism when dealing with established narratives.
This article studies the relation between research reactors, the development of nuclear research centres and the pharmaceutical industry in the recent history of nuclear medicine. While existing scholarship has rightfully highlighted how medical applications served as a useful argument to de-militarize the image of large-scale nuclear research infrastructure during the Cold War, this study extents this perspective beyond the Cold War era. Using the Belgian Nuclear Research Centre as a case study, this article highlights how their orientation was negotiated within economic and political considerations. From the 1990s onwards, therapeutic radiopharmaceuticals experienced increasing attention, while the amount of radioisotope-producing reactors was decreasing. In an era that had become more critical of nuclear infrastructure, this article shows how the production of radioisotopes became a social-political argument in the preservation of test reactors.
The 1896 Bombay plague outbreak prompted the colonial government to recruit trained British nurses from England to serve the afflicted Indians of the Presidency. Studying this relatively under-explored aspect of British colonial nursing, this paper examines the politics of representation of the Western, non-military nurses serving the colonised Other through nineteenth-century periodical accounts and personal letters of a nurse stationed in Bombay. Owing to the popularity of British periodicals and the significant role they played in shaping public debates in the Metropole, periodical plague literature portrayed Western nurses as spokespersons for the Empire's benevolent rule in Bombay. Contrarily, the intimacy and confidentiality of letter-writing allowed nurses to offer a more nuanced and critical account of life and work in Bombay. The paper contends that the non-military Western nurse's medical career, mobility, and financial stability framed her multidimensional identity, which was further defined by the intersecting issues of race, class, gender and culture she encountered in Bombay. Comparing their varied portrayals in the periodicals and the letters, the paper argues that the politics of representation of women's lives were influenced by both their sociopolitical subjectivities and the narrative forms through which they articulated their experiences.
The closed method for the treatment of compound fractures of the limbs emerged and popularised during the interwar period. The historiography on this procedure sustains an essentially Anglo-Saxon narrative focusing on contributions by the American surgeon Winnett H. Orr during the First World War and the Spanish Josep Trueta during the Spanish Civil War and his exile in Britain. This paper aims to 'open' this story by reconstructing the early work of another Spanish surgeon: Manuel Bastos. Although originally an army medical officer, Bastos specialised in the treatment of limb fractures in a dual military-civilian context. On the one hand, during successive assignments to the Spanish Protectorate in Morocco, he familiarised with the management of gunshot wounds. On the other hand, he specialised in the treatment of tuberculosis humerus fractures in children at the Instituto Rubio in Madrid. The visit to Spain of the Argentinian surgeon Pedro Chutró, who had acquired a great prestige in First World War Paris for his approach to fractures and osteomyelitis, and the escalation of the Moroccan campaigns to the so-called Rif War (1921-27) gave Bastos the opportunity, the idea, and the courage to develop a closed treatment of humerus fractures in soldiers. Chutró's influence on Bastos persisted in the context of the Hispano-Americanist policy embraced in mid-twentieth-century Spain. Ultimately, this study questions the understanding of the closed method as a single, univocally traceable procedure, suggesting instead parallel versions emerging in different sites and transforming themselves and influencing each other as they circulated globally.
The Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918 caused well over fifty million deaths. The epicentre undoubtedly was China, where gene mixing of different virus strains occurred amongst aquatic, migrant birds. But where and when did the virus first infect (or spill over to) a human being? We take, as our starting point, a paper demonstrating that an infection causing the same symptoms as the influenza virus was widespread in New York during the winter of 1917-1918. The authors of that paper went on to suggest that the virus had probably reached North America from Europe, in the context of troop movement during World War I. Our own researches have focussed on this point. We show that outbreaks of serious respiratory disease, local in nature but causing unusual patterns of mortality, were indeed reported by scientists and doctors in army hospitals in England and in France, well before the first wave of the pandemic had arrived. We use the records of these hospitals, now held in the National Archives, to trace the progress of this disease amongst the individuals who fell ill. We examine contemporary reactions to this minor epidemic - an epidemic, we suggest, which acted as a herald wave of the pandemic yet to come. The latter part of our paper addresses the second question, as to how troop movement across the North Atlantic, once the United States had entered into war, may well have enabled the virus to spread from Europe to North America.
The physician and chemist Heinrich Mückter (1914-87) is widely known for his role in developing thalidomide at Grünenthal, whose market launch led to one of the most serious pharmaceutical scandals in history. Less scholarly attention has been paid, however, to his involvement in Nazi Germany's typhus control and vaccine research and production between 1942 and 1945. Drawing on a variety of historical sources, this article reconstructs his work at a delousing facility in the Białystok District and at the Institute for Typhus and Virus Research of the German Army High Command in Krakow under hygienist Hermann Eyer (1906-97). We show that Mückter participated in a racially framed typhus control programme and in ethically dubious vaccine production methods. He also conducted unethical and methodologically questionable vaccine experiments on human beings in Krakow, including underage test subjects and exploiting the structural vulnerability of the occupied Polish population. In addition, we reassess assumptions about cooperation between Eyer's Wehrmacht institute and the research station at Buchenwald concentration camp under SS physician Erwin Ding-Schuler (1912-45). Taken together, we argue that Mückter operated within a broader network of civilian and military scientists, health officials, and representatives of the pharmaceutical industry who accelerated the erosion of ethical boundaries in biomedical research and contributed to an exterminatory health and population policy in the occupied East. These practices, termed the 'Nazi typhus complex', reveal how preventive medicine, biomedical research, and exterminatory policies were intertwined in the context of an anti-Slavic war of annihilation and the Holocaust.
This article examines Charles Bell's experimental practices by drawing historiographical attention away from the priority disputes over the spinal nerve functions for which he was most famous. I argue that Bell's primary research interest was the expression of emotions. To this end, he developed a programme of vivisection that explored the underlying mechanisms of emotion. However, this also resulted in a profound contradiction between his experimental practices and his worldview - conducting painful experiments on beloved animals despite moral revulsion towards animal experimentation. This opens up three interconnected areas. Firstly, it allows an exploration of disciplinary identity in medicine, particularly the way that disciplines demanded specific practices and behaviours. Secondly, vivisection more generally required methods and ethics that opposed the growing anti-cruelty voice. Here, a combination of animal choice and the importation of techniques from the slaughterhouses was critical. Thirdly, vivisectors navigated a complex emotional landscape between their professional obligations and broader cultural sensibilities. These three areas are linked together using Boddice's concept of moral economies, the affective frameworks that structured feelings. Particularly important were the sentimental and Romantic economies, both of which impacted Bell and his research. At the same time, Bell always struggled to reconcile the tensions between his disciplinary identity and his sentimental and Romantic beliefs, ultimately leading him to abandon experimentation after his assistant John Shaw's death. I conclude by identifying the guarantees provided by character for licensing ostensibly cruel behaviours, thus allowing for the maintenance of probity within competing moral economies.
This special issue, which brings together six articles, seeks to explore the question of madness from non-European contexts (Latin America and Africa), taking part in the dynamic renewal of historiography on mental disorder and psychiatry in the ‘Global South’ over the past few years. 1
This paper examines letters from the casebooks of the Valkenberg Lunatic Asylum in the Cape Colony during the South African War. Valkenberg was opened in 1891 in Cape Town, and was the only asylum established exclusively for white patients in the Cape. The South African War took place between 1899 and 1902, and several soldiers serving in the War were treated at Valkenberg during this period. The letters were written by a male patient who used bureaucratic and legal channels to claim his sanity and secure release from the asylum, showcasing a rare example from the archive of a patient's voice as well as a view into the inner workings of a colonial asylum in South Africa. These letters allow a view into the personal lives of patients and attendants, the medical rules doctors followed, and instances of racism, unexpected solidarity, and loneliness. Analysing these letters reveals the changes taking place in a turbulent South Africa, including the tensions and conflicts of a country at war, the racism and nationalism of early twentieth-century South Africa, and the violence present within the asylum network. By examining letters written directly by a patient, which give voice to a perspective that official institutional records would not ordinarily allow, this paper seeks to contribute to the literature on patient voices in the history of psychiatry.
This article examines the historical transformation of childhood vaccination in the Netherlands between 1872 and 1959. It analyses how vaccination was reframed from an individual parental responsibility to a collective practice through the establishment of the 'Rijksvaccinatieprogramma' (National Immunisation Programme). I analyse this historical trajectory as a case of 'public health atomism', a strategy that achieves collective health by prioritizing individual health outcomes and local action. Rather than relying on top-down state mandates, the 'Rijksvaccinatieprogramma' was a consequence of co-operation between general practitioners, municipal health officials, civil society organisations, and volunteers. Drawing from published medical sources, parliamentary records, and material from local and national archives, this article provides a detailed historical account of how local governance and autonomy shaped vaccination practices, highlighting the role of the 'entgemeenschap' (vaccination community) as a key organisational model for situated collaboration. As such, it revisits childhood vaccination as an archetypical example of biopolitical state intervention, demonstrating how localised, flexible co-operation was instrumental in integrating vaccination into Dutch society.
