Prior to Darwin's masterworks, a university professor of medicine's purview generally included the professorship of botany and direction of the botanical gardens. Yet from the landmark 1876 Johns Hopkins model and especially after the 1910 Flexner Report, botany was limited at certain medical schools to (exaggerating somewhat) "decorating their lobbies!" Darwinian-era scientific paradigms spread from continental Europe through promulgators such as Huxley and Osler, transforming laboratory research, disease aetiology, biochemical therapeutics, and clinical "bedside" teaching. Unintended consequences at universities with medical schools might include altered loyalties and resources among competing disciplines. At the University of Toronto, botany vis-à-vis medicine was gradually treated as passé or secondary to zoology for modern, scientific platforms. This pattern was not universal; botany strongholds at universities such as Harvard continued to flourish. Where a negative perspective took hold with evolutionary impacts, botanists' careers became limited and the impetus for maintaining botanic research and teaching facilities such as a university botanical gardens was impaired.

This article aims to reconstruct and analyze debates centring on normal eye and vision standards during the second half of the 19th century in Europe. It particularly addresses the creation of ophthalmology charts, one of the main tools for measuring visual acuity. Having briefly described the historical context in which modern eye charts were developed, we will present the better known examples of these and their characteristics. We will then analyze ophthalmologists' debates about what constitutes a normal eye and normal vision, and show the discrepancy between established definitions and clinical studies. Finally, we will consider the issue of measuring eyesight while focusing, on the one hand, on specialists' desire to create a standardized framework to measure visual acuity and, on the other hand, on the multiple hurdles that hindered achieving that goal.

Although the general course, possible transmission routes, and actual sociodemographic destruction of the 1918 influenza pandemic in the Western world are well documented, the literature lacks similar data about the Middle East. On the calamity's centenary, this article aims to contribute to filling this gap, investigating the presence and effects of the pandemic in Istanbul, the city bridging the West and East, then as the capital of the Ottoman Empire. After the retrieval of the most relevant articles in Vakit, a daily Istanbul newspaper active throughout the pandemic, a variety of items, including articles with firsthand pronouncements from contemporaneous medical authorities and a clinical account of supportive autopsy findings, are scrutinized and interpreted. The reviewed data are concluded to indicate no epidemiological or factual exception, showing significant parallelism with the Western experience of the pandemic in terms of increased influenza mortality and morbidity, severe clinical presentation, common misinformation and misdiagnosis, and failure to provide effective prevention and medical treatment.

The stethoscope was invented in 1816 by the French physician R.T.H. Laennec, who, after three years of clinical observations, published his treatise Mediate Auscultation in 1819. In his treatise, Laennec included details of his new method of using the stethoscope to provide physiological and pathological evaluation of patients. American physicians attended lectures and clinics at Paris hospitals and carried this information back to their respective medical schools and practices. This was accomplished by a relatively limited number of elite American physicians who were able to take advantage of travel abroad and whose practices were academically affiliated. However, it is a well-substantiated historical claim that the adoption of the stethoscope by most American physicians was slow. There are many reasons for slow adoption of the stethoscope in America, among which are lack of formal education, including bedside training in the stethoscope, complexity of interpretation of auscultatory information, hesitancy of the patient and physician to have an instrument placed between them, and lack of opportunities for continuing education for physicians after leaving medical school. As the nineteenth century progressed, scientific ideas and rhetoric related to auscultation and the stethoscope became more widespread, reflecting gradual acceptance and adoption of the stethoscope by American practitioners. In this article, I examine the ideas and rhetoric in medical journal articles, advertisements, and medical school textbooks to learn what was thought by physicians to be important in their practice. Advertisement of medical school curricula with mention of specific course work or lectures related to auscultation or the stethoscope is noted, reflecting increased interest in the stethoscope as an adjunct to physical examination. This information introduces evidence to test and bolster the existing historical claims of slow adoption of the stethoscope by addressing in more detail when and why adoption by American physicians became widespread.

Treatment of the bleeding disorder hemophilia in the nineteenth century was empirical, based on clinical experience. Medications, transfusions of human or animal blood, and injections of blood sera were utilized in an attempt to halt life-threatening hemorrhages. After 1900, the application of clinical laboratory science facilitated the utilization of anti-coagulated blood and donor blood compatibility tests for safer emergency transfusions. But repeated transfusions produced blood incompatibility that limited future utilization. Investigation of hormones and snake venom as coagulants appeared hopeful during the 1930s, but plasma globulin research during World War II resulted in the isolation of antihemophilic factors that promptly reduced hemorrhage. Their application to bleeding episodes resulted in a more normal life for hemophiliacs after 1950.

Clinical cancer research in Canada entered a new phase in 1971. In that year, the National Cancer Institute of Canada agreed to initiate and support a multidisciplinary cooperative clinical trials program. The first collaborative randomized controlled trial (RCT) for the treatment of advanced Hodgkin's disease was launched in medical centres across the country in December 1971. Simultaneously, in the United States, the National Cancer Act came into effect. To what extent were these Canadian and American developments coincidental? I argue that the cooperative clinical trials program in Canada was timed to coincide with the US declaration of war on cancer, but it was not its corollary. Against the background of this American anti-cancer campaign, the cooperative clinical trials program emerged as a link between the strong radiotherapy tradition in Canada and the new trial infrastructure of chemotherapeutic regimes in the United States. The evolution of the Hodgkin's disease trial serves as a good example to demonstrate how growing collaboration among Canadian and American physician-investigators brought about a large-scale national study. The latter became a prototype of further cooperative oncological RCTs in Canada during the 1970s.

Access to birth control and abortion was a contentious issue for university students throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Despite liberalized legislation regarding access to contraception and abortion, young, single women were often limited in their ability to access contraception. In response to this, university students initiated programs on campus in attempts to promote safe and accessible methods of contraception. This article examines birth control and abortion policy and activism at the University of Waterloo and Waterloo Lutheran University. Through an analysis of the student newspapers at both universities, this article illustrates the ways in which students lobbied their universities and initiated their own organizations to further women's access to contraceptive services. Acase study of these universities illuminates the different experiences of two schools within the same community and considers the impact that religion and university administration can have on student activism.

The nursing studies narrative of the role of masculinity can be summarized as follows: hegemonic masculinity prevents men from doing care work. An analysis of public relations efforts to recruit male nurses in West Germany during the 1960s does not provide evidence for such a link. Representing nursing as compatible with hegemonic masculinity was also able to legitimize the existence of male nurses, while the idea of promoting gender equality in nursing was advocated by exactly those institutions that enabled the eventual gender inequality within the profession. Finally, the thesis of hegemonic masculinity as some kind of anti-caregiving agent comes into question because of the success of the civilian service in West Germany, despite the gender shaming used to deter men from enlisting in it.