The Records of Stannington Childrens Sanatorium: Charting Half a Century of Tuberculosis Care
This article explores the historic records of Stannington Children’s Tuberculosis Sanatorium focusing largely on the 5,041 patient records and 14,660 radiographs that make up the bulk of the collection and span from the 1930s to the 1960s. By taking a handful of illustrations from within the collection, it aims to demonstrate the various avenues of research available as well as the unique nature of the collection owing to its focus on children, with the comprehensive nature of its records making it invaluable. The sanatorium’s records are made particularly pertinent by the fact that they span the pre- to the post-antibiotic era charting changes in treatment as well as offering details on a range of other issues such as social background and stigma.
Quelle: http://shm.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/29/4/829?rss=1
Histories of Medicine in the Household: Recovering Practice and ‚Reception
Introducing the essays in this special issue on medicine in the household, Bivins, Marland and Tomes briefly sketch the existing historiography and argue for the enduring importance of the household as a site of medical decision making and practice. The household as explored by this collection also offers a valuable space within which to test new methodologies addressing the challenges that face historians and other scholars seeking to trace the reception, adoption and adaptation of new knowledge, practices and products.
Quelle: http://shm.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/29/4/669?rss=1
The Age of Scientific Gynaecological Masseurs. ‚Non-intrusive Male Hands, Female Intimacy, and Womens Health around 1900
The closing decades of the 19th century saw the dawn of a new and popular trend in scientific Gynaecology: genital- or uterine massage. The method was invented by a Swedish Army Major and was extremely intimate, even judged by gynaecological standards. In retrospect the method can be understood as something that helped clear away the last traces of resistance preventing physicians to, in an obvious a non-shameful manner, approach women's reproductive organs and their associated problems. In an attempt to understand the method's popularity and scientific success better, it is related to a larger tension-filled debate found in the history of science. Its place in the anti-modernistic movement is also touched upon. Also added to the picture is a previously unnoted conflict displaying an inter-professional gender trouble found among the gynaecolocial masseurs, which illuminates how complicated the medical professions way to scientific supremacy sometimes was
Quelle: http://shm.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/29/4/802?rss=1
‚A Plea for the Lancet: Bloodletting, Therapeutic Epistemology, and Professional Identity in Late Nineteenth-century American Medicine
Despite the declining use of bloodletting, American physicians vigorously debated its therapeutic value throughout the final decades of the nineteenth century. This debate was a terrain upon which physicians expressed deeply held ideas about professional identity and clinical epistemology. Many bloodletting proponents saw its continued defence as a way of affirming the superiority of mainstream physicians over irregular practitioners as well as the epistemological priority of clinical experience over laboratory knowledge; others sought to reconcile the practice of bloodletting with the latest physiological and bacteriological discoveries. This paper contributes to historians’ ongoing reassessment of what it meant for medicine to become ‘scientific’ at the turn of the twentieth century. ‘Scientific medicine’ encompassed not only the search for new remedies and research practices, but also the attempt to put older therapies like bloodletting on a sound footing for the future.
Quelle: http://shm.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/29/4/781?rss=1
Weighting for Health: Management, Measurement and Self-surveillance in the Modern Household
Histories of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century medicine emphasise the rise of professional and scientific authority, and suggest a decline in domestic health initiatives. Exploring the example of weight management in Britain, we argue that domestic agency persisted and that new regimes of measurement and weighing were adapted to personal and familial preferences as they entered the household. Drawing on print sources and objects ranging from prescriptive literature to postcards and ‘personal weighing machines’, the article examines changing practices of self-management as cultural norms initially dictated by ideals of body shape and function gradually incorporated quantified targets. In the twentieth century, the domestic management of health—like the medical management of illness—was increasingly technologised and re-focused on quantitative indicators of ‘normal’ or ‘pathological’ embodiment. We ask: in relation to weight, how did quantification permeate the household, and what did this domestication of bodily surveillance mean to lay users?
Quelle: http://shm.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/29/4/757?rss=1