‚Scientific Truth into Homely Language‘: The Training and Practice of Midwives in Ophthalmia Neonatorum, 1895-1914
Ophthalmia neonatorum, a form of neonatal conjunctivitis, was seen to be a serious problem in England at the turn of the twentieth century. Midwives were directly implicated in its prevalence with debate ensuing over the extent to which they should be taught about ophthalmia neonatorum and the extent to which they should participate in the diagnostic and therapeutic process. The involvement of midwives in cases of ophthalmia neonatorum has received little attention from historians. Yet it constitutes an important case study for the limitations in theoretical knowledge available to midwives, and for the professional and disciplinary boundaries imposed upon midwifery practice following the passing of the Midwives Act in 1902 and the establishment of the Central Midwives Board. This article addresses the training of midwives in ophthalmia neonatorum and the ways in which midwives were able to utilise such training in their professional practice.
Quelle: http://shm.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/27/2/199?rss=1
‚I’m not the tradesman‘: A Case Study of District Midwifery in Nottingham and Derby 1954-1974
This paper uses oral and documentary evidence to explore district midwifery between 1954 and the 1974 re-organisation of the National Health Service. It argues that during this period district midwives saw themselves as having autonomy and prestige in their work but that this situation was fragile, conditional and ultimately short-lived. The paper will draw on evidence from midwifery casebooks and oral interviews with district midwives to explore their working lives. Three main themes will be discussed: workload and coping; relationships with GPs, particularly beliefs about equality and expertise; and relationships with women. The paper will consider the collapse of the local authority led district midwifery service in the early 1970s, and relate this to the themes discussed, arguing that the way in which midwives thought about their work may have had a negative impact on their ability to adapt to changes.
Quelle: http://shm.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/27/2/221?rss=1
Eyesight and Governance in Britain: Bureaucracy and the Senses in the 1920s
Eyesight became a public concern to an unprecedented extent in 1920s Britain. This article discusses a number of enquiries made in these years into the causes of the impairment of eyesight, related legislation and some industry field studies.
Quelle: http://shm.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/27/2/241?rss=1
Modern Mothers for Third World Nations: Population Control, Western Medical Imperialism, and Cold War Politics in Haiti
This article examines American Unitarian Universalist missionaries who were avowed ‘anti-imperialists’. They opposed United States military and economic hegemony and hoped to resolve ‘Third World’ dependency. Nevertheless, they became cultural imperialists when they empowered a Haitian physician named Ary Bordes to promote Western medicine and contraception in a peasant community in Haiti in the 1960s. The article shows how the population control movement transcended a very wide spectrum in American Cold War politics. Both extremes, Cold Warriors and their religiously-motivated detractors, had rival roles to play in the creation of a ‘medical empire’ that linked health care and reproduction in Haiti to medical culture in the United States. American missionaries employed medicine, contraception, and instruction to try to turn Haiti's peasant women into ‘modern’ mothers who would advance their nation and show the ‘Third World’ a new path to prosperity.
Quelle: http://shm.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/27/2/260?rss=1
Christianity and Eugenics: The Place of Religion in the British Eugenics Education Society and the American Eugenics Society, c.1907-1940
Historians have regularly acknowledged the significance of religious faith to the eugenics movement in Britain and the USA. However, much of this scholarship suggests a polarised relationship of either conflict or consensus. Where Christian believers participated in the eugenics movement this has been represented as an abandonment of ‘orthodox’ theology, and the impression has been created that eugenics was a secularising force. In contrast, this article explores the impact of religious values on two eugenics organisations: the British Eugenics Education Society, and the American Eugenics Society. It is demonstrated that concerns over religion resulted in both these organisations modifying and tempering the public work that they undertook. This act of concealing and minimising the visibly controversial aspects of eugenics is offered as an addition to the debate over ‘mainline’ versus ‘reform’ eugenics.
Quelle: http://shm.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/27/2/281?rss=1
Madness and Sexual Psychopathies as the Magnifying Glass of the Normal: Italian Psychiatry and Sexuality c.1880-1910
By focusing on Italian psychiatric debates about sexual inversion this article shows how Italian psychiatrists came to argue that there was no clear-cut boundary between normal sexual behaviour and sexual perversion, and traces the debates and fields of knowledge that contributed to the development of such a position. First, it shows how French psychiatry shaped Italian views on sexual psychopathies. Second, it demonstrates that in Italy, psychiatric research on so-called sexual psychopathies was from its inception part of a wider debate about the blurred boundary between sanity and insanity. Third, it reveals how sexologists embraced various theories of evolution, which implied that sexual perversions were latent in any normal individual. The article argues that despite the fact that in Italy same-sex desires were pathologised in the last three decades of the nineteenth century, historical accounts that emphasise such a pathologisation obscure psychiatric positions that endeavoured to normalise same-sex desires.
Quelle: http://shm.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/27/2/303?rss=1
The Rise of Child Psychiatry in Portugal: An Intimate Social and Political History, 1915-1959
In recent decades, the study of the history of medicine and psychiatry has grown and interest has been developed in the particular social and institutional configuration of fields such as child psychiatry. That historical literature has, however, accounted mainly for the Anglo-American world and a research gap persists with regard to other national contexts. Drawing on a historiography of medical archives in Portugal, this paper aims to analyse the social, institutional and political conditions behind the rise of child psychiatry. Such an analysis will inquire into the international, national and local factors that played a part in that historical process and suggests a periodisation beginning in 1915, when the Medical-Pedagogic Institute was first created, and concluding in 1959, when ‘child neuropsychiatry’ was finally recognised by the Portuguese Medical Board.
Quelle: http://shm.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/27/2/326?rss=1
Heroes and Hysterics: ‚Partisan Hysteria‘ and Communist State-building in Yugoslavia after 1945
This article investigates a novel type of war neurosis defined by Yugoslav psychiatrists in the aftermath of the Second World War. This uniquely Yugoslav war trauma—‘partisan hysteria’—was diagnosed exclusively in Communist resistance soldiers—partisans—and did not manifest itself in the form of battle exhaustion or anxiety, as was the case in other armies. Rather, it demonstrated a heightened willingness to fight, and consisted of simulations of wartime battles. Yugoslav psychiatrists argued that ‘partisan hysteria’ most frequently affected uneducated and immature partisans, who were given important political responsibilities but experienced severe trauma due to their own inadequacy. I argue that ‘partisan hysteria’ served as an opportunity for upper-middle-class psychiatric professionals to criticise the increasing upward social mobility after the socialist revolution of 1945. Surprisingly, this touched upon an issue that had already provoked deep disquiet within the Communist Party, and resonated with the Party's own concerns regarding social mobility.
Quelle: http://shm.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/27/2/349?rss=1
Making Global Health History: The Postcolonial Worldliness of Biomedicine
In imagining the ‘global’ as the product of unprecedented flows and circulations, do we tend to ignore its uneven terrain, heterogeneity, and contestation? How might we resist taking the hydraulic turn and instead write critical histories of ‘global’ health? Postcolonial analysis can offer critical and realistic histories of scale making in biomedicine, of the configuring of the local and the global in global health. Thus we might hold within the same analytic frame biomedical colonial patriotism in the Philippines, biocolonial collecting in highland New Guinea, and the technoscientific nationalism of Biopolis in contemporary Singapore.
Quelle: http://shm.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/27/2/372?rss=1