This article maps the entangled (re-)birth of pathological gambling as a medical issue in 1980s West Germany, exploring how self-help group members and ‘psy’ scientists negotiated expertise on excessive gambling behaviour. Taking into account transnational contacts and transfers, it argues that self-help groups played a crucial role in the construction of pathological gambling as an illness. First, the article shows how it was gamblers who – supported by transnational connections and media coverage – were a driving force in the pathologisation of their own behaviour by establishing ‘experiential expertise’ through self-help groups. Second, it demonstrates how professionals reinforced their authority of interpretation over the topic of excessive gambling against the backdrop of the already existing self-help movement by either rejecting or embracing the illness concept prevalent among Gamblers Anonymous. Finally, the article shows how, on the one hand, self-help groups relied on psy-knowledge and its producers, and how, on the other hand, the groups as well as the notion and practice of experiential expertise were integrated into professional therapies, thereby creating a fusion of experiential and scientific expertise into a larger therapeutic health system.

The article explores the transnational circulation of sound-based expertise that came together in the establishment of audio forensics in Cold War Poland and Czechoslovakia. It is the first to study the Polish Phonoscopy Lab, the first ever audio forensic police department, founded in 1963 to carry out original research on speaker identification and distorted speech. It shows the complexity of sound dissection science behind the Iron Curtain, where detailed methodology, the use of precision technological equipment, and the application of up-to-date phonetic, acoustic, and linguistic knowledge, as well as practical guidelines for trained group listening, were developed. It argues that by developing such methodology, the Polish and Czechoslovak phonoscopy labs were leading the way in reformulating the notion of sound-based objectivity in forensics. By examining the transfer of methods, theories, technological devices, and visions between the Cold War East and West, the article shows that from the point of view of the development of expertise, there were specific advantages of the embeddedness of forensics in the structures of the totalitarian state, which granted access to technologies, ensured a steady supply of cases, and simplified investigation procedures.

This paper demonstrates the important role that Oswald Spengler's skeptical philosophy played in motivating Edmund Husserl's The Crisis of European Sciences (1936). To date, almost no scholarship has considered the place of Spengler in Husserl's critique of philosophical skepticism and his philosophy of history. To underscore the relationship between Spengler and Husserl, this paper draws extensively from a previously ignored and untranslated source in English scholarship: the Spenglerheft (1921), published in the journal Logos , which Husserl co-edited. These essays, published during the Spengler-Streit , anticipate many of the arguments which Husserl would develop a decade later in the Crisis . They thereby evidence that Husserl's turn to the philosophy of history in the Crisis participated in a broader effort to overcome a Spengler's philosophical skepticism, and that Husserl's method clearly builds on arguments being levelled explicitly against Spengler in the Spenglerheft . The Spenglerheft emerges as a critical moment in advancing a philosophically robust dialogue between Spengler and Husserl.

This article tracks the influence of the Soviet school of gerontology and geriatric medicine on international science and medical practice during the second half of the 20 th century. Beginning with the initial development of this school of gerontology in the 1930s, this article shows how the Soviet influence on international ideas of ageing, geriatric medicine, and biological gerontology was significant, especially through the institutional scientific-medical networks established by the United Nations and the World Health Organization. This influence, moreover, was based on work conducted over the decades by the Kyiv-based Institute of Gerontology, which established itself as the centre of Soviet research on ageing and its application to medical and social care for older persons. By considering how the doctors and scientists in Kyiv were able to access international scientific networks and influence global gerontological discourses in the 1960s–1980s, this paper shows the enduring influence of Soviet concepts of biological ageing and related medical practice.

In my study, I examine, through Hungarian examples, how self-help books in the 1960s introduced responsibilization in addressing ‘nervousness’. Originally interpreted in a neoliberal context, self-help can also be applied in socialist conditions because it does not aim for societal transformation but rather addresses issues on an individual level. I argue that responsibilization, as a form of governing technology, appeared early in relation to nervousness because it concerns a well-defined problem area and state healthcare was unable to provide an effective response, emerging as part of a smaller-scale psycho-boom that preceded the broader expansion of psy-knowledge traditionally associated with the 1970s. The individual's responsibilization goes hand in hand with the irresponsibility of the state, and the concept implies that rather than providing freedom to address the problem, it offers a repertoire of behaviors expected within the given framework, to which the individual must voluntarily commit (self-governance). There were specific characteristics of the Hungarian context that supported the emergence of self-help literature, partly rooted in political factors (like the revolution of 1956), and partly in psychiatric professional traditions. Alongside psychoanalysis, Marxist concepts and practical Pavlovian techniques played important roles, creatively psychologizing socialist citizens and proposing solutions to their psychological issues. All this, in addition to responsibilization, also signifies the development of a more caring relationship with the human body and psyche, compared to the earlier cult of self-control.

Introducing the special issue of History of the Human Sciences on ‘Socialist Governmentality’, this article sketches out the potential of transferring Foucault’s governmentality concept to the state socialist societies of Cold War Eastern Europe. In six case studies from Poland, the GDR, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and a Romanian ex-pat community in Libya, we focus on health-related practices between 1960 and 1989–1990. Given the rather diverse scope of the special issue, this introduction aims to unfold the conceptual framework and discuss the possibilities and limitations of sending Foucault across the Iron Curtain. First, it outlines some of the challenges late modernity posed to both hemispheres of the Global North: The ‘crisis’ of governability in the age of the ‘scientific-technical revolution’ and advanced welfarism seemed to call for alternative ways of governing complex societies, including a shift of responsibilities to the individual. Thus, in a second step, Foucault’s concept of the liberal ‘conduct of conduct’ is recaptured. Adaptions of his theorising for other than Western contexts are outlined, which called for inquiries into concrete, local practices of governing oneself. Following this imperative, our case studies are, lastly, situated in the multi-faceted landscape of state socialist health care and health-related self-techniques.

Even before the reality TV show The Biggest Loser became popular in the 2000s, similar weight loss formats already existed in the 1970s and 1980s – and not only in West Germany (FRG), but also in state socialist East Germany (GDR). In 1977, the popular West German show Practice Health Magazine ( Gesundheitsmagazin Praxis ) organised a six-month weight loss programme; 10 years later, in 1987, the East German show Man, Stay Healthy! ( Mensch, bleib gesund! ) followed suit. This article analyses both programmes and their ways of addressing fatness from a comparative perspective, while also considering transnational contexts and long-term developments. By asking how the programmes governed individuals classified as ‘overweight’ and how these individuals governed themselves, the article argues that both programmes were rooted in liberal governmentality. Nevertheless, significant differences emerge, raising the question of whether the GDR show articulated a distinct state socialist governmentality, while its FRG counterpart tended to manifest a neo-liberal mode of governing.

This article explores the evolution of medical discourse on women's industrial labour and health in the Soviet Union during the 1920s and early 1930s. Using a transnational and comparative approach, it situates Soviet debates within broader international discussions, focusing on German developments. The study examines how Soviet medical professionals investigated the impact of industrial work on women's physical and mental health, influenced by institutional frameworks and political agendas. In the 1920s, labour protection institutes, occupational physicians, and the People's Commissariat of Labour collaborated to collect data on women's working and living conditions, as part of an endeavour to integrate women into industry. This involved an analysis of how production affected health, influenced by German social hygiene and occupational medicine. However, by the late 1920s, political priorities shifted. With forced industrialisation and healthcare restructuring in 1930, the focus moved to labour productivity and economic efficiency. Soviet experts were increasingly expected to prove that women's labour was compatible with industrial demands. Earlier studies highlighting risks – domestic or foreign – were criticised, and medical discourse emphasised industrial work's benefits. The article pays special attention to the exchange of knowledge on women's occupational pathology between Soviet and German specialists, and its reshaping by political and institutional change. It provides new insight into the entanglement of gender, medicine, and labour policy within domestic and transnational contexts during the early Soviet period.

European and North American epidemiology changed in critical ways in the first half of the 20 th century, as experts increasingly turned to quantitative modelling and experimentation to answer key questions about virulence, endemicity, and immunity. As this article explores, however, British epidemiologists remained wedded to and advanced field-based epidemiological methods, developing these far beyond their origins in Victorian era outbreak investigation. Central to the advance of what I call community epidemiology was the work of William Pickles, who pushed epidemiological methods in data-gathering and visualisation through a long career as a rural general practitioner (GP). I demonstrate that in the period from 1930 to 1960, GPs created and adopted data-rich epidemiological ways of knowing that answered statisticians’ and modellers’ need for detailed spatial and temporal information, and that aimed to secure a place for GPs in the new system of national healthcare and research under the National Health Service (NHS) and the Medical Research Council.

Recovery and rehabilitation are highly charged terms in contemporary mental health, with their meanings and implications contested by professionals and survivors alike. A loose ‘recovery movement’ with radical reformist aims, which emerged across Britain and the United States in the later decades of the 20 th century, has, some argue, been co-opted by ‘neoliberal’ political and clinical interests. Most of these narratives begin with the emergence of the recovery movement as a result of service-user/peer activism in the 1970s: few consider the longer history of ideas and practices of recovery and rehabilitation. In turn, recovery and rehabilitation have been strangely marginal in the works of historians of psychiatry, madness, and mental health. This article traces some of the key literatures and concepts in relation to recovery and rehabilitation, and introduces this special issue of History of the Human Sciences , with contributions on Britain and the United States from the late 19 th century to the turn of the 21 st century.