Bulletin of the history of medicine
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Historical Article
Catching cowpox: the early spread of smallpox vaccination, 1798-1810.
The introduction of smallpox vaccination after the publication of Edward Jenner's An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of Variolae Vaccinae depended on the spread of cowpox, a relatively rare disease. How Europeans and their colonial allies transported and maintained cowpox in new environments is a social and technological story involving a broad range of individuals from physicians and surgeons to philanthropists, ministers, and colonial administrators. Putting cowpox in new places also meant developing new techniques and organizations. This essay focuses on the actual practices of vaccination and their environmental contexts in order to illuminate the dynamic exchanges of materials, images, and ideas that made the spread of vaccination possible.
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Medical observers during the American Civil War were happily surprised to find that typhus fever rarely made an appearance, and was not a major killer in the prisoner-of-war camps where the crowded, filthy, and malnourished populations appeared to offer an ideal breeding ground for the disease. Through a review of apparent typhus outbreaks in America north of the Mexican border, this article argues that typhus fever rarely if ever extended to the established populations of the United States, even when imported on immigrant ships into densely populated and unsanitary slums. It suggests that something in the American environment was inhospitable to the extensive spread of the disease, most likely an unrecognized difference in the North American louse population compared to that of Europe.
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Biography Historical Article
Henry Sigerist and the history of medicine in Latin America: his correspondence with Juan R. Beltran.
During the years of World War II, the American Association for the History of Medicine fostered a Pan-American policy aimed at establishing relationships with Latin American historians of medicine. Juan R. ⋯ The correspondence between Henry Sigerist and Beltrán makes manifest that by 1941 good channels of communication were established between Baltimore and Buenos Aires, but the friendly links did not last long. The motives for this can be found in the competing aims of the AAHM and Beltrán, and the pattern of international relationships during the war years.
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This essay reconstructs a social and cultural history of "truth serum" in America during the 1920s and 1930s, identifying the intellectual ingredients of the idea of a physiological "truth technique," and examining why it seemed to meet an urgent need. It argues that truth serum had the patina of modern science but produced a phenomenon that could be understood and evaluated by every man. ⋯ This view contributed to the production of a public understanding of memory that both diverged from previous claims about memory and recall, and ran counter to the direction of current psychological research. It thus helped lay the groundwork for claims about memory permanence and scientific recall techniques later in the twentieth century.
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Historical Article
Patterns of municipal health expenditure in interwar England and Wales.
This article aims to fill a gap in the history of medical services in England and Wales in the interwar period by focusing on the historiographically neglected municipal sector--a relative neglect that is particularly unjustified given that this sector provided an increasingly wide array of medical services over the period. Focusing on the highly urbanized county boroughs, this article investigates whether and how expenditure on municipal health services changed over the interwar period, and whether these patterns were replicated by boroughs across England and Wales. ⋯ Considered regionally, the Northeast and the West Midlands were found to perform poorly in expenditure terms compared to the data set as a whole, while the large conurbations of Leeds, Manchester, and Liverpool raised the average performance of the Northwest and Yorkshire. Regional patterns are found to be less consistent in the south of the country, where voluntary provision and demands arising from the boroughs' geographical position (for example, seaside resorts) may have exerted significant influences over levels of expenditure on health.