Social history of medicine : the journal of the Society for the Social History of Medicine
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Biography Historical Article
'Purgatory on earth': an account of breast cancer from nineteenth-century France.
The subject of this article is the terminal illness of Zelie Martin who died from breast cancer in 1877. She was a Catholic woman of Normandy, a professional lace-maker, and the mother of five daughters. ⋯ Her accounts of the disease are compared with medical texts of the period. Religious responses to illness, and the suppport offered by family members are also described.
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Historical Article
An 'anthropathology' of the 'American Negro': anthropology, genetics, and the new racial science, 1940-1952.
This essay documents how, in the 1940s and early 1950s, one scientifically discredited racialist assumption, namely the notion that 'hybridity', embodied by the 'American Negro', and linked to degeneration and disease, was re-authorized, again by science, through the discursive fusion of anthropology, medicine and genetics in the context of a particular disease--sickle cell anaemia. More specifically, I am concerned with the construction of what came to be called an 'anthropathology' of the 'American Negro', the discourse networks that situated it, its conditions of possibility and its consequences.
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Historical Article
'Searching for Mary, Glasgow': contact tracing for sexually transmitted diseases in twentieth-century Scotland.
Social historians of medicine and sexuality have focused in recent years upon various strands of public health policy towards sexually transmitted diseases. However, despite the fact that, from the 1930s, contact tracing became one of the primary weapons with which British government sought to contain the incidence of STDs, its history in twentieth-century Britain has been largely ignored. Based on a range of governmental and private archives, supplemented by interviews with former practitioners, this paper examines the development of contact tracing in Scotland from its origins in the interwar period, through its expansion under Defence Regulation 33B during the period 1942-7, to its postwar development within the National Health Service. Particular attention is paid to the discriminatory aspects of wartime controls and to the professional, resource, and legal constraints shaping contact tracing in postwar Scotland.
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Biography Historical Article
Should smallpox virus be destroyed? The relevance of the origins of vaccinia virus.
The fate of surviving stocks of smallpox virus is still uncertain, and it is important that arguments in favour of retention or destruction should present balanced evidence. This article balances the view, probably incorrect and possibly alarmist presented earlier in this Journal by Peter Razzell, that vaccinia and cowpox viruses were derived from smallpox virus. The generally accepted alternative view that all three viruses are independent species and that smallpox virus could not emerge through simple mutation of the other two is presented, together with appropriate literature citations.
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This paper reviews the rise of medical nationalism and protectionism in France from the end of the nineteenth century through to the 1940s, with an emphasis on the Vichy period. It presents this nationalism as part of a continuity, showing its beginnings well before the coming of the Vichy government, its extremes under this government, and its continuation after the fall of the Vichy government, although retreating from its more extreme positions.