Contesting the Animal Model: Axel Holst and the Controversy over Scurvy and Beriberi
In contemporary writing Axel Holst and Theodor Frølich are being celebrated as the first to produce an animal model for the experimental production of scurvy. But in their time their research was contested by their peers, most vocally by the polar hero and zoologist Fridtjof Nansen. This paper explores how Axel Holst initially started out as a microbe hunter and worked within a bacteriological framework, before he shifted to performing feeding experiments and came to understand scurvy as a deficiency disease. This radical shift in framework may take part in explaining the controversy around their research. But most importantly, this paper argues, we must understand this in light of the contested status of animal models and modelling work in medical science. In order to analyse this, the paper suggests that we attend to a broad set of approaching and defining ‘models’. Moreover, the paper suggests that we extend our discussion from ‘the animal model’ and what an animal model is, to modelling practices and what models can do, and sometimes fail to do. The paper concludes with arguing that Holst and Frølich in fact did not develop an animal model, i.e. a shared example upon which scientists base their work.
Quelle: http://shm.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/27/3/577?rss=1
The Machinery of Authoritarian Care: Dramatising Breast Cancer Treatment in 1970s Britain
This article examines the professional and public response to the television play Through the Night, which aired on BBC1 in December 1975. One of the first British mass media portrayals of a woman's experience being treated for breast cancer, this play attracted a large audience and considerable attention from both critics and everyday viewers. My analysis of the play draws on sources documenting expert responses to the play in its production stages, as well as critics' and viewers' responses to what the play said about breast cancer treatment in particular, and about Britons' experiences of medical institutions more broadly. Together, I argue, these sources help us see how Through the Night's critique of what one expert called ‘the machinery of authoritarian care’ reverberated with and supported the efforts of professionals anxious to improve patient experience, and how it crystallised the concerns of activists and everyday viewers.
Quelle: http://shm.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/27/3/557?rss=1