Abstract The visualisation of data in tables has been essential to the historical development of epidemiological reasoning. As visual devices, tables have enabled epidemiologists to compare populations and establish multi-factorial association as a hallmark of modern epidemiology. While tables have usually been understood as instruments of ordering, this article argues that, in fin-di-siècle science, tabulation was a site of scientific experimentation and conflict, and that epidemiological standards later crystallised at least in part in response to the use and misuse of tabulation during these years. Drawing from an analysis of the tabulation practices found in the Indian Plague Commission (IPC) of 1898–99 – a landmark study which has not been fully integrated into the history of epidemiology – this article details how tables were introduced as powerful albeit inconsistent tools of epidemiological reasoning. We initially consider the testimony of medical officers in India, who used tables as an experimental tool to test the value of Haffkine’s vaccine against plague. For commissioners, by contrast, tables were disruptive, equipped with the power of epistemic transgression. Contrary to the traditional function of tables as instruments of colonial order – useful for facilitating the abstraction and categorisation of colonised populations – tables in the IPC emphasised uncertainty and chance at the heart of epidemiological inquiry. This epistemic instability mattered, as we show, for the scientific community in Britain, where criticism of the IPC report stimulated sweeping debate on the presentation of contingency in medical statistics, advancing the formalisation of British epidemiology over the first decades of the twentieth century.
While Mexico today is often characterised as 'tequila country', the most important alcoholic beverage both during the pre-colonial and the Spanish era was pulque, the fermented sap of the agave plant. In addition to holding ritual significance, pulque served a pragmatic purpose: it is nutritious, can replace food and water, and features high microbial diversity. This paper explores how-under colonial rule-pulque was characterized as 'low-class', but also became an important revenue source. While it was discursively linked to problems regarding public hygiene or 'pagan' religions, for many Mexicans pulque was irreplaceable. During the 1700s, a veritable pulque boom saw both enormous investments and state revenues related to this beverage. Political turmoil resulting in Mexico's independence led to a decrease in production and consumption of pulque, before the second half of the nineteenth century witnessed a return to widespread popularity; this was closely linked to improved infrastructure, especially railroads that could transport the rapidly spoiling beverage to customers living further away from production areas. During the authoritarian rule of Porfirio Diaz (1876 to 1911), pulque continued to dominate the alcohol market, but beer consumption sharply increased. Domestic cerveza production was supported through strict tariff policies as well as the integration of foreign know-how and capital. From the late 1800s onwards, discourses on 'progress' and national identity often focused on consumption patterns and lifestyles, with pulque being singled out as an archaic menace to society. Beer, on the other hand, became the epitome of a 'modern' Mexico-especially in the decades following the revolution (1910/1911).
This article examines the controversies around the surgical treatment of cataract in France during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By analysing the various phases that led to the abandonment of the traditional technique of couching the crystalline lens and to the adoption of crystalline extraction, this paper argues that the shift away from the traditional method was driven not mainly by the superiority of the new technique, but rather by its association with the emancipation of surgery from medicine in the eighteenth century, and the recognition of ophthalmology as a medical specialty in the following century.
Between 1938 and 1941, nearly 20,000 Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution arrived in wartime Shanghai, a city already destabilized by the Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945), mass displacement, and fragmented governance. Their arrival exposed the limits of Shanghai's overstretched public health system while also generating new forms of medical organisation, refugee self-governance, and intercultural collaboration. Drawing on archival records, refugee memoirs, wartime newspapers, and medical journals, this article reconstructs the development of an improvised yet integrated refugee healthcare infrastructure between 1939 and 1945. The article argues that refugee medicine in Shanghai evolved beyond emergency relief into a broader regime of care comprising hospitals, nutrition programmes, sanitation campaigns, disease surveillance, and work-relief initiatives. Far from being passive recipients of humanitarian aid, refugee physicians became central actors in constructing and administering this system. In conditions of institutional fragmentation and material scarcity, they adapted European medical knowledge to unfamiliar climatic and epidemiological environments, collaborated with Chinese practitioners and local institutions, and contributed to new forms of medical knowledge production. The Shanghai case complicates conventional narratives of humanitarian governance and colonial medicine. Rather than operating under a centralised state or colonial authority, refugee healthcare emerged through negotiations among municipal authorities, international aid organisations, occupying military force, and Jewish communities. Wartime Shanghai thus became not merely a 'port of last resort,' but a significant site of transnational medical production in which displacement reshaped both medical practice and the meaning of care.
Public doubt about the usefulness of antidepressants appears to have grown, even as scientific agreement about their efficacy has become more settled. This paper examines the role that figures associated with critical psychiatry have had in promoting this doubt. It traces the long entanglement of antidepressants and their critics over the last eighty years, culminating in a 2022 review of the serotonin hypothesis, which, though it made no claims about efficacy, was widely interpreted as showing that antidepressants do not work. Drawing on Oreskes and Conway's concept of 'manufactured doubt', the paper explores how certain philosophical commitments have shaped these actors' views, at times impeding their engagement with new evidence. In doing so, it marks a distinction between productive and unproductive doubt. Whilst external scrutiny has played a significant role in shaping psychiatry, some positions are held so rigidly that the resulting critiques obscure the scientific consensus and risk undermining psychiatric care.
