Biennial Conference of the European Association of History of Medicine and Health: Health Beyond Medicine (Berlin, 26-29 August 2025)

J.B. Collip and the Development of Medical Research in Canada: Extracts and Enterprise. By Alison Li. McGill-Queen's/Associated Medical Services Studies in the History of Medicine, Health, and Society no. 18. Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2003. 256 pp. $55.00 (cloth) ISBN 9780773526099. Women, Health, and Nation: Canada and the United States since 1945. Ed. Georgina Feldberg, Molly Ladd-Taylor, Alison Li, and Kathryn McPherson. McGill-Queen's/ Associated Medical Services Studies in the History of Medicine, Health, and Society no. 16. Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2003. 448 pp. $80.00 (cloth) ISBN 9780773525009. $29.95 (paper) ISBN 9780773525016. An Element of Hope: Radium and the Response to Cancer in Canada, 1900-1940. By Charles Hayter. McGill-Queen's/Associated Medical Services Studies in the History of Medicine, Health and Society no. 22. Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2005. 288 pp. $70.00 (cloth) ISBN 9780773528697. The Struggle to Serve: A History of the Moncton Hospital, 1895-1953. By W.G. Godfrey. McGill-Queen's/Associated Medical Services Studies in the History of Medicine, Health, and Society no. 21. Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2004. 256 pp. $75.00 (cloth) ISBN 9780773525122. Nutrition Policy in Canada, 1870-1939. By Aleck Ostry. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2006. 160 pp. $85.00 (cloth) ISBN 9780774813273. $34.95 (paper) ISBN 9780774813280. Aboriginal Health in Canada: Historical, Cultural, and Epidemiological Perspectives. 2nd ed. By James B. Waldram, D. Ann Herring, and T. Kue Young. 2006. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. 352 pp. $70.00 (cloth) ISBN 0802087922. $29.95 (paper) ISBN 0802085792. The social history of medicine in Canada is healthy and fit, judging by the new titles published in the past few years. Scholars have developed important new work that widens and deepens the historiography. Moreover, these new books also address the history of some of the most pressing health concerns today: medical research, transnational studies of women's health, cancer and its treatment, hospitals and health-care funding, diet and nutrition, and the history of Aboriginal health. Historians of medicine in Canada are fortunate to have solid publishing support from the partnership of McGill-Queen's University Press and Associated Medical Services (Hannah Institute) in their Studies in the History of Medicine, Health, and Society series, which published all but two of the titles under consideration. The Hannah Institute also provides generous research funding for students and scholars in the history of medicine. Such substantial assistance is rare for scholars in Canada and bodes well for the continued strength of the field. The books reviewed below all address the historic roots of contemporary health-care issues. Although historians are generally cautious about applying the lessons of the past to current concerns, they will agree that understanding something about how things came to be may indeed illuminate how things might be changed. Medical research in Canada today is a multi-million dollar enterprise, but its roots are humble. Alison Li's J.B. Collip and the Development of Medical Research in Canada charts this history by linking the major events in one man's career to the bigger story of the development of institutional research in Canada. Frederick Grant Banting and Charles Best, as the developers of insulin, are familiar to most Canadians, but the other member of the team, J.B. Bert Collip is not so well-known. Collip was the young biochemist who purified the extract and made the development of insulin possible. Alison Li's book is not so much the biography of a man as it is the story of a career that spanned the most important developments in medical research in Canada. Collip was one of the few who were able to earn a PhD in Canada at the University of Toronto before the First World War. …

Contributors

Harrison, Globalization, and the History of Health, Medicine, and Disease J. R. McNeill (bio) When I agreed to comment upon Marc Harrison’s article on globalizing the history of health, disease, and medicine I did not realize what a difficult task that would prove to be. Harrison made it hard for me by recommending to his colleagues in the field just what I would recommend: a more global outlook, one that does justice to both comparison and connections across space and time. While reading his essay, each time I thought I had a solid objection to register, such as his initial statement that globalization “spawned an entirely new field of enquiry” in global history (p. 639), I found within a few sentences that Harrison offered it himself, leaving me bereft. He made it no easier by writing generously of my own work. So I am left with only a few meager criticisms, suggestions, and speculative musings. Among Harrison’s failings is that he is too generous in his remarks on my book Mosquito Empires. I wish it were true that “[McNeill] shows how pathogens and disease vectors were shipped from Africa” (p. 648) to the Americas. Alas, I could only assert that it must have been so in the cases of yellow fever and malaria and their mosquito vectors, but found no direct evidence. A few others among Harrison’s statements struck me as wide of the mark, but none of them matter for his general argument: “commercial monopoly” (p. 643) is too strong a term for the Ottoman position in the Indian Ocean at any time in history; the rise of the Soviet Union added a novel ideological dimension to international affairs, but did not introduce such dimensions; Asia did not provide “most of the labor to build railways in Africa and North America” (p. 655). Determined readers can find a few other statements with which to quibble. Harrison’s point of departure is that the history of health, disease, and medicine (HDM hereafter) has been slow to take the global turn. If that is so, it is far from a unique shortcoming, however, as many subsets [End Page 696] of the historical discipline have resolutely resisted the temptation to recognize that the globe is one. HDM historians are hardly laggards compared to historians of law or gender. As Harrison notes, some historians have long noticed that pathogens easily spread across borders—Biraben, Crosby, Curtin among others from a generation ago. If other historians of disease have been slow on the global uptake, there is little to be said in their defense, except that many other historians are slower still. The international and intercontinental mobility of infections is so obvious in both past and present that historians of disease, at least, should be in the forefront of the global turn. Historians of medicine, on the other hand, have a better excuse for not taking the global turn. It is they, more than historians of disease, who fall short of Harrison’s ambitions for the HDM history field. The resistance of systems of medicine to foreign ideas was and is rather more robust than the resistance of human bodies to alien infections. So while there are important stories within the history of medicine that are transnational and intercontinental—cinchona, variolation, and so on—these are more exceptions than rules. That said, it could well be that the time has come when diminishing returns have set in for the history of medicine pursued within national frameworks, and new insight is likelier to come from larger perspectives. But it is less obviously so for historians of medicine than for historians of disease. When showing just how global the history of HDM can be, Harrison concentrates on the surge of globalization in the nineteenth century. Surely he is right to stress the rapid expansion of long-distance trade and migration in the nineteenth century as underlying forces accelerating the circulation of pathogens. One needs to consider this trend against the record of changes to nutrition, public health apparatuses, and portfolios of immunity and resistance to various infections. States and empires acquired greater capacity to blunt the ravages of disease, even as they strove...

European meeting in the field of history of medicine: Biennial Conference of the European Association for the History of Medicine and Health

The Medical Historian, believed to be the first periodical in Britain to deal solely with the history of medicine, was not able in present circumstances to appear as an independent journal. It has therefore been linked with the Medical Bookman, and the first issue of the new combined journal, The Medical Bookman and Historian (Harvey and Blythe, Ltd., 6 Hanover Square, W.1. Monthly, 2s.), has been published. The policy of the Medical Historian will be to link the history of medicine with its current practice and to try to elucidate current problems in the light of past experience and past errors. Everyone who is interested in the history of medicine will wish this new journal well and will hope that it will, before long, be able to stand by itself. Meanwhile, its fusion with the Medical Bookman is complete. The reader of the combined journal will, in fact, scarcely know which of the contributions belong to either partner in this interesting marriage. Eleven of the fifteen items in the list of contents of the November issue (Vol. 1, No. 11) are reviews of books, the other five being original articles; interesting as the kind of book review here printed certainly is, some readers may prefer to see by a glance at the list of contents which are the original articles and which the book reviews. Three of the articles in this issue are the first articles of a series, namely, “Bypaths in Medical Bibliography”, by W. J. Bishop, librarian of the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum, “British Historians of Medicine”, by F. N. L. Poynter and W. J. Bishop, and “Rise, Fall and Revivals of Hospitals”, by Prof. J. A. Nixon. The other article is by the editor of the Medical Historian, W. R. Bett, on “Some Thyroid Pioneers”. A notice on the front cover of the journal briefly reports the inaugural meeting of the new Medical Sub-section of the Library Association, which fulfils a suggestion made by Sir William Osier in 1909. The honorary secretary of this sub-section Is W. J. Bishop, The Wellcome Historical Medical Museum, 26 Portman Square, London, W.1. An exchange system for duplicate or unwanted books and journals, lists of periodicals and rare books, inter-library loans and other services are contemplated. This is a development which everyone engaged in biological work will heartily welcome.

The historical epidemiology of global disease challenges

História da saúde no Brasil

Alex Sakula

Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra and Hilary Marland, Cultures of child health in Britain and the Netherlands in the twentieth century, Clio Medica 71, The Wellcome Series in the History of Medicine, Amsterdam and New York, Rodopi, 2003, pp. vi, 317 (hardback 90-420-1054-1), (paperback 90-420-1044-4). - Volume 48 Issue 3

Reviewed by: The Rise of Causal Concepts of Disease: Case Histories Michael Worboys K. Codell Carter . The Rise of Causal Concepts of Disease: Case Histories. The History of Medicine in Context. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2003. ix + 237 pp. $99.95 (0-7546-0678-3). Codell Carter here sets out a revisionist history of nineteenth-century medicine, in which he directly or indirectly attacks almost all received accounts and approaches. His main claim is that in highlighting such developments as pathological anatomy, physiology, and bacteriology, historians have missed the single most important project of the age: the search for universal necessary causes of disease. Methodologically, he criticizes historians for concentrating on empirical discoveries and professional developments, and neglecting the development of medical theory. It is great to have such a challenge, not least because much history of medicine avoids methodological issues and large problems. Carter's approach is based upon the ideas of two philosophers—Karl Popper and Imre Lakatos—who were influential in the 1960s in major debates with Thomas Kuhn over the history and philosophy of science. As is well known, it was the work of Kuhn that went on to influence the history of science, with the influence of Popper and Lakatos waning in the 1970s. In reviving these long-unfashionable ideas, Carter is also reopening questions about the nature of "rationality" and its place in historical analyses of science and medicine. Indeed, an unacknowledged theme in Carter's case histories is that the best medicine was (and should be studied by historians as) a "science." While he takes from Popper the overarching importance of theory and hypotheses (such as that all diseases have universal necessary causes), it is from Lakatos that he takes his main organizing concept—the research program, "a temporally continuous cooperative endeavour" (p. 4) that "consists of (mostly implicit) methodological rules" and a framework of ideas (p. 3). Although shifts in ideas and methods around germ theories of disease and bacteriology loom large in the book, Carter is at pains to stress that these were part of a broader movement in ideas in which disease was thought about causally in rigorous (i.e., rational) ways. He follows the progressive development of causal thinking from early nineteenth-century studies of parasites through to Freud's work on neuroses. The heroes of this book all contributed to what Carter claims, quoting F. Kräupl Taylor, has been "the final hope and aim of medical science . . . the establishment of monogenic disease entities" (p. 197). So, where stands the history of nineteenth-century medicine in the light of Carter's assault? Is he correct that most historians have missed its single most important development and the defining feature of modern medicine? Well, in my view there is no need to throw away standard texts or rewrite syllabi: Carter's account is open to the same objections that led historians of science a quarter of a century ago to reject Lakatosian "research programs" as heuristically useful. The whole approach relies upon the reconstruction of ideas by the philosopher-historian into an asocial "third world" of rational thought. This leads to a blinkered and judgmental approach that focuses on the work of those who followed the progressive rational program and that neglects alternative rationalities and ideas. [End Page 832] Carter is concerned with the development of medicine as a science—indeed, a particular "rational system" of thinking about disease causally. Of course, throughout the nineteenth century doctors were divided over whether medicine should aspire to become a "science," and, if their enterprise was to be "scientific," what type of science it should be. While Carter perceptively traces changes in the types of etiological thinking across the century, his approach obscures the key point—namely, that clinicians and emergent medical scientists were uninterested in etiology for much of the century: their interests lay in nosology, diagnosis, pathology, prognosis and therapeutics. Moreover, when clinicians did think causally—say with tuberculosis after the announcement of the tubercle bacillus in 1882—it was less in terms of the necessary causal organism, whose presence they could do nothing about, and more in terms of the predisposing conditions and ancillary causes that they might be...

Reviewed by: Garrison Lecture: How the Concept of Profession Evolved in the Work of Historians of Medicine John C. Burnham (bio) Most medical historians working with primary sources have run across references to the profession of medicine. The word profession is found, with varying frequency, in the literature of medicine from medieval times to the present. Nor would it be easy to miss: all of the European languages have equivalent expressions for “profession.” 1 [End Page 1] From ancient times, medical writers occasionally referred to the expertise of physicians as a profession. 2 In addition to this idea of profession as special knowledge, however, a second meaning developed: a collectivity of those who defined themselves, and were defined by society, as practitioners who followed the vocation of medicine. Moreover, the identity of “professional” took on historical and social meanings. It is those meanings, so important in very modern discussions, and the accompanying spirit of professionalism, that I propose to track in the writings of medical historians. Over many generations, such scholars in fact viewed allusions to profession in a collective social sense as a distraction to be ignored. Eventually, late in the twentieth century, a few historians of medicine did take note of the idea, and by the mid-1990s, writers were using the modern concept of profession routinely. 3 Indeed, the prominence of scholarship dealing with professions in recent years has led one scholar to observe ironically that investigators have found “the structural form of professions . . . more interesting than the work they do.” 4 Earlier historians of medicine therefore employed the term profession much less frequently than did those of the late twentieth century. Moreover, for earlier scholars, especially before World War II, the concept had different connotations than it had later. Such changes in usage of course indicated changes in society in general, and among physicians in particular. The whole idea of “the profession” in fact became urgent only as the Eurocentric countries became industrialized and organized or bureaucratized and (after some delay) thinkers began to believe that the professions were central to civilization and progress. But my enquiry focused more narrowly on the ways in which medical historians who dealt with the idea of profession over the centuries approached their subject. Implicit is another question: the extent to which medical historians resisted or advocated following particular thinkers, both in the history of medicine and outside of the field—notably the [End Page 2] sociologists and more general historians who in the twentieth century, for their own reasons, took a special interest in the concept. At some point, then, historians of medicine, in whose hands lay the remembered past of what was becoming the model profession, had to decide how the sense of profession, which Bernice Hamilton identified in 1951, would fit into medical history. 5 What I found was that many medical historians never did recognize professional forces as historical determinants. Furthermore, other scholars chose to view any idea of profession as incidental to a developing social history of medicine. Still other medical historians, however, especially after the mid-1960s, made professional phenomena a special field of inquiry and borrowed conceptualizations from the sociologists. Finally, another era began in the late 1970s, when new sociological thinking about professions ceased to serve as a major inspiration to historical investigators. Founders of the History of Medicine Later writers have depicted the work of Daniel Le Clerc, first published in 1696, as the model that established the traditional format of the history of medicine. 6 Le Clerc himself spelled out what he was doing. Unlike some predecessors, he wrote, he was not just compiling a chronology of physicians and writings; instead, he was going “to set forth the opinions of the Physicians, their Systems, and Methods and to trace step by step all their discoveries.” 7 Even though Le Clerc’s narrative did not go past the ancient Greeks, in his day the medical ideas that he described still had a direct bearing on medical practice. History therefore served to filter out the practical knowledge base of medicine. Not that Le Clerc failed to mention the profession. He did use the term: he noted that some ancients made physick “their...

News and Events Elin Wolfe and Dick Wolfe Call for Papers, 2009 Annual Meeting The American Association for the History of Medicine invites submissions in any area of medical history for its 82nd annual meeting, to be held in Cleveland, OH, 23–26 April 2009. The Association welcomes submissions on the history of health and healing; history of medical ideas, practices, and institutions; and histories of illness, disease, and public health. Submissions from all eras and regions of the world are welcome. Besides single-paper proposals, the Program Committee accepts abstracts for sessions and for luncheon workshops. Please alert the Program Committee Chair if you are planning a session proposal. Individual papers for these submissions will be judged on their own merits. Presentations are limited to 20 minutes. Individuals wishing to present a paper must attend the meeting. All papers must represent original work not already published or in press. Because the Bulletin of the History of Medicine is the official journal of the AAHM, the Association encourages speakers to make their manuscripts available for consideration by the Bulletin. The AAHM uses an online abstract submissions system. We encourage all applicants to use this convenient software. The Web site is: http:// histmed.org. If you are unable to submit proposals online, send eight copies of a one-page abstract (350 words maximum) to the Program Committee Chair, Howard Markel, M.D., Ph.D., University of Michigan, 100 Simpson Memorial Institute, 102 Observatory, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-0725 (tel.: 734 647-6914; e-mail: howard@umich.edu). When proposing a historical argument, state the major claim, summarize the evidence supporting the claim, and state the major conclusion(s). When proposing a narrative, summarize the story, identify the major agents, and specify the conflict. Please provide the following information on the same sheet as the abstract: name, preferred mailing address, work and home telephone numbers, e-mail address, present institutional affiliation, and academic degrees. Abstracts must be received by 15 September 2008. E-mail or faxed proposals cannot be accepted. [End Page 421] In Memoriam Saul Benison, 1920–2006 Saul Benison, a pioneer oral historian and long-time member of the AAHM, died of pneumonia on 5 October 2006 at the age of 85. For several years prior, he had been treated for dementia and other medical problems in various health care institutions in Baltimore under the watchful eye of his nephew, Dr. Ken Berger. A native New Yorker, Saul graduated from Queens College in 1941 and spent part of the war years as a historian for the War Production Board. He went on to earn a Ph.D. under Allan Nevins's direction at Columbia University in 1953, during which time and after, he taught at CCNY, Sarah Lawrence College, and Long Island and Brandeis Universities. He also was employed by Columbia's Oral History Research Office, the American Jewish Tercentenary Committee, and the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis. While serving at the last named, he developed a lifelong interest in the history of polio and gradually made it his specialty. In 1969, Saul accepted an appointment as full professor in the history department of the University of Cincinnati (and later, a joint appointment in its School of Public Health). An incentive for him to leave the safety of his New York habitat was an opportunity to work on an oral history memoir with the renowned polio researcher, Albert Sabin. It was a happy choice, and he remained in Cincinnati until retirement in 1990. Although Saul's long-awaited work with Dr. Sabin was never published, his oral history interviews produced two other memoirs: one, by the Harvard social historian, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr., in the 1950s and his own highly praised Tom Rivers, Reflections on a Life in Medicine and Science (1967). While working at Rockefeller before it had its own archive, Saul interviewed several other researchers and virologists there and arranged for their correspondence and papers to be transferred to the American Philosophical Society, where they are preserved to this day. Yet another of his oral histories was later edited and published by J. Gordon Scannell in 1990: Wanderjahr, The Education of a Surgeon, Edward D. Churchill, with a...

The field of Middle Eastern history began as an attempt to understand how Europeans came to dominate the region. As a result, when medicine and the environment were discussed, they were used to highlight European technological and scientific advances in these fields, and describe the processes through which Islamic medical and scientific concepts were replaced. The first wave of scholarship on the history of medicine in the region focused primarily on 19th‐century Egypt, where the state sponsored the development of a public health system to protect military readiness and combat epidemic diseases such as cholera and plague. This article highlights recent scholarship in the history of health, medicine, and the environment during the 19th and early 20th centuries, and illustrates how this lens (the “environmental‐medical turn”) provides new perspectives on the social and political history of the Middle East. I argue that the environmental‐medical turn provides a new avenue for locating illiterate members of society—the peasant and middle classes—in the archive; by exploring moments of crisis leading to protest and rebellion, and examining data revealing hardship and suffering, Middle Eastern historians can explore the complex roots of social and political events, and historians of medicine and the environment can include the region in transnational and comparative studies.

Notes on Contributors

Histories of family health