This article investigates the array of techniques used in the Roman Imperial period to induce menstruation - techniques such as cupping, bloodletting, inserting pessaries, ingesting or applying materia medica, or wearing amulets - and seeks to understand the range of social contexts in which they might have been used. This study focuses particularly on how menstrual induction technologies could be deployed in agonistic settings within the medical marketplace, such as competitions between healthcare providers or conflicts between different healthcare consumers who sought to control women's reproductive health. This category would have included not only menstruators themselves, but also menstruators' family members, enslavers, employers, and physicians. By examining the positive evidence for menstrual induction in the Roman period and using the methodological tools of critical speculation and reading against the grain to explore the interpretive possibilities that evidence presents, this paper demonstrates how menstrual induction technologies could be deployed both to grant and to deprive menstruators of agency over their own bodies, as well as to fortify or undermine hierarchies of gender, class, and civic status.

The trajectory of condurango, an Andean vine, included a meteoric global rise in the 1860s as a cancer specific, a fall from grace, an enduring phase as a cancer adjuvant, and a return to various national pharmacopeias as a stomachic, all the while continuing to elicit laments from clinicians who insisted into the 1920s that the vine's anti-cancer properties never got a fair trial. This article contextualizes condurango's unsettled relevance by highlighting the phenomenally diverse and globally connected health cultures of the nineteenth-century Andes. Faith in and disappointment with condurango pivoted on the momentum of a national modernization project, the appeal of non-surgical therapeutic options for cancer, and the consideration of sustained improvements and positive unexpected outcomes as beneficial by healers, patients, and their caregivers. Condurango thus makes for a valuable case study about the influence of policies enacted in/by former colonies on the availability and significance of certain resources; the national and professional variations that shaped the consideration of new therapeutic options; and the importance of family caregivers as stakeholders in cancer care.

In the 1950s, the Soviet psychoprophylactic method (PPM) of childbirth was introduced to the People's Republic of China, eliciting widespread enthusiasm. It was promoted through a top-down approach, and underwent a degree of localization intertwined with the concurrent acupuncture fever (zhenjiure) that characterized China's medical and cultural landscape during this period. PPM's spread can be understood as a result of ideology, political discourse, international politics, and specific healthcare demand, including the institutionalization of childbirth. Notably, the Soviet PPM also spread to the United States via France. Within the context of rising feminism, de-medicalization, and commercialism in American society, it became known as the Lamaze method, named after the French doctor and stripped of its Soviet associations. In the late 1970s, the so-called Lamaze method re-entered China quietly, but met with a lukewarm reception in the context of China's market-oriented healthcare reform. Compared to caesarean sections and obstetrics anaesthesia, the Lamaze method was less favourable in terms of performance and cost-effectiveness. This article examines why the Soviet PPM and the American Lamaze method showed divergent diffusion paths and outcomes, despite their shared underlying principles and historical origins. By situating these developments within international and Chinese political and sociocultural contexts, it explores how medical technologies are reinterpreted across cultures.

From the time of Classical Greek medicine through Early Modernity, sadness was considered both a mood and a diagnosable disease. Sadness was closely related to the physiological condition of melancholia, as both sadness and melancholia stemmed from a common etiology (excess of black bile), and both conditions could result in death. Sadness and melancholia had a symbiotic relationship; either one of the two could trigger the other. Because sadness was melancholia's foremost symptom and catalyst, medieval physicians often referred to melancholia and sadness as interchangeable notions and sometimes as synonyms. Influenced by Hippocratic-Galenic systems of thought that dominated the discipline of medicine well after the Renaissance, premodern doctors and natural philosophers conceived the idea that excessive sorrow greatly harmed the human body. They believed that sadness was more than a mood. This paper probes the physiological dimensions of sadness, arguing that from ancient Greek medicine to the Early Modern period, some physicians and natural philosophers believed that because of its inherent relationship with the caustic and cold substance of black bile, sadness had the power to physically shrink the heart. To support my argument, I analyze the medical traditions that developed from the Hippocratic-Galenic system of humorism, zeroing in on the humor of black bile as the main agent of corrosion and contraction. Because the shrinking-heart theory transcended the discipline of medicine, I also investigate this principle in the disciplines of theology, philosophy, and amatory literature in order to demonstrate the impact that the theory of the shrinking heart had on the European imaginary from the Middle Ages to Early Modernity.

Following the Holocaust, many women rejoiced when able to reproduce; children represented a return to normalcy, a stake in futurity, and even reproductive revenge against the Nazi regime. The consequent baby boom in Displaced Persons camps demonstrably reaffirmed this return to life and resignification of values. In the following decades, however, this demonstrated fertility was cast aside in favor of reparation politics. Though amenorrhea (cessation of women's menstrual cycles) was a common occurrence during wartime, the discourse around infertility became a symbolic way to articulate a range of claims about gendered, bodily damage stemming from Nazi persecution. Concerned with national indemnification and national repopulation, physicians in the formerly occupied countries leaned into new roles as political-medical actors in varying degrees and contexts. Between 1946-1951, physicians from marginalized identities and formerly occupied countries opposed those who had been affiliated with the Nazi party, claiming that amenorrhea was a war-related condition worthy of compensation. From 1952-1967, sympathetic physicians seeking to counter West German rejections linked amenorrhea with psychic trauma - the latter of which the government denied as grounds for reparations. The last group of studies, 1963-1978, stemming exclusively from Poland, demanded reparations for the Polish people - research that gradually dovetailed with Poland's modernization efforts of the 1970s. None of the studies pointed to any singular consensus. This article seeks to illuminate how points of contention in the history of German reparations were met by physicians whose role, by virtue of West German reparations processes, was charged politically and whose findings, by virtue of this political valence, took definitive stances.

Alcohol consumption was a prominent biopolitical issue in the early Soviet Union that was shaped by various factors, including ideological dictates, health-policy objectives, economic constraints, and strong popular demand for alcohol. While the Bolshevik purists around Trotsky preached that alcohol and socialism were incompatible, amongst the party leadership there were also advocates of moderate alcohol consumption. The Soviet elite nevertheless agreed that a profound transformation of national culture was necessary to tackle the rampant alcoholism that plagued the country. Various measures were deployed to enlighten and educate the masses, one of which was anti-alcohol theatrical propaganda. The article aims to trace the changing discourse on alcohol in the early Soviet Union based on the texts of sanitary theatrical productions as well as archival documents of the Moscow Theatre for Sanitary Culture. It will show how malleable this form of art and propaganda was in communicating the changing political agendas of the 1920s and 1930s. Anti-alcohol trials and plays, acting on an emotional level, could clearly explain to the audience in an accessible and entertaining way the reasons for prohibition or the norms of alcohol consumption. Thus, the article also addresses aspects of emotional experience and shifts in society's emotional standards.

In 1966, the sexual murder of an eleven-year-old in Prague occupied the media and broader public, reinforcing expert debates about child sex offenders. In this article, we trace changes in medical experts' understanding of child sex offenders in socialist Czechoslovakia between the late 1950s and mid-1970s. We show that psychiatrists and sexologists discussed forensic evaluation and the need for specialized treatment years before the 1966 case, but therapeutic practices lagged behind. As the networks of expertise shifted after this key crime, medical experts made up new kinds of people - deviant and non-deviant sex offenders - and gradually standardized treatment procedures. We argue that in addition to experts, the media and the lay public represented key agents who contributed to the establishment of a complex system of sexological protective treatment in Czechoslovakia. This system has remained almost unchanged to this day.