Circulation Of Medical Knowledge Research Articles

A Medieval Daoist Drug Geography: The Jinye Shendan Jing as a Novel View on the Circulation of Medical Knowledge in Asia

This article studies the Taiqing jinye shendan jing 太清金液神丹經 (Grand Clarity Scripture of Divine Elixir Made from Liquid Gold, hereafter Scripture of Liquid Gold), attributed to Ge Hong 葛洪 (283–343 CE), to examine the intersection of religion, science and medicine in China. Passages from the Scripture of Liquid Gold describe the healing powers of drugs and highlight ways medieval writers imagined the transmission of medical knowledge, as well as the specific places producing potent substances. The text provides a view that contravenes standard narratives of foreign medical migration that vector into China via Buddhist channels. As such, we argue that it provides a novel view of medical migration in its time period. As one of the early sources on physical geography and trade goods from Southeast Asia, it is an important resource for early knowledge of the region and is one of the earliest examples of possible Daoist religio-technical continuities between the regions.

Bureaucratizing Medicine: Creating a Gender Identity Clinic in the Welfare State

This essay considers the creation of a gender identity clinic at Rikshospitalet, the National Hospital of Norway, in the early 2000s and its implications for the production of medical knowledge during that era. In the preceding decades, medical transition was overseen by an informal, self-organized, multidisciplinary team of medical experts, but this situation changed when a centralized gender identity clinic was established under psychiatric control. The essay argues that shifting institutional, societal, economic, legal, and bureaucratic circumstances redistributed expertise and authority on trans medicine. Economic framing, institutional frictions, patient activism, and media attention restricted the doctors’ room for maneuver and created a scientific crisis of legitimacy in trans medicine. These processes changed medical knowledge regarding medical transition; eventually, “sex change” and, therefore, all that is denoted by “sex” became intertwined with and inseparable from the politico-bureaucratic processes of reforming a modern public health-care system and welfare state. By anchoring the analysis in the history of science and expertise, this inquiry offers a new focus on the role of bureaucratic practices in the production, structuring, and circulation of medical knowledge in the welfare state.

The transit of plants: circulation of medical knowledge and practices in South America during the Modern Era.

From records on plants and herbs made by doctors, healers, missionaries, and colonial administrators in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this article explores ways of constructing knowledge about flora using the concept of circulation proposed by Kapil Raj. The distinct experiences and documents analyzed demonstrate the process of observing, collecting, systematizing, and circulating knowledge, and the influence of natural history and the Hippocratic tradition on the classification of herbs and plants and on the descriptions adopted in these texts. From printed books to notes scattered through travel diaries, usefulness of these species to humankind was the element valued by those who directly observed the potential of American plants, fruits, and herbs.

Recommended for “frequent perusal” and “improving the science of medicine”: Benjamin Rush’s American editions and the circulation of medical knowledge in the early Republic

Between 1809 and 1813 leading American physician Benjamin Rush (1745–1813) devoted a significant portion of his time to the production of “American Editions” of four British and colonial medical texts by Thomas Sydenham (1624–1689), Sir John Pringle (1707–1782), William Hillary (1697–1763), and George Cleghorn (1716–1789). This occurred during a period where Rush might have written a textbook detailing his preferred medical system for students outright. Instead, he opted for a different form of knowledge production and proliferation that focused on creating fictive conversations and encouraging critical reading rather than rote memorization. He dedicated these heavily annotated documents to the medical students of the United States of America and set them up as a pedagogical tool. Analysis of these texts helps uncover the reading practices of Rush and the manner in which he expected Americans to mediate their usage of foreign texts and theories after the American Revolution.

Circulation of Medical Knowledge and Techniques through Film in Japan, 1929–1941

Several historians have analyzed the various uses of medical films and have examined how cinematography changed the epistemology of medical doctors, or how governments and private companies utilized moving pictures for promoting ideas of hygiene among the general public. But historians have paid little attention to those medical films that were circulated in Japan. Some Japanese surgeons recorded their operations and screened surgical films in academic meetings to convey their techniques effectively. Others used moving pictures to educate medical students, who had limited opportunities to observe professors’ skills in schools. In 1929, this type of medical film began to circulate in Japan: a pharmaceutical company imported German medical films while one film company collaborated with a medical professor to record the first surgical film in the country. The 1930s witnessed the wide dissemination of medical films that followed the introduction of small-gauge film to Japan, and a flourishing medical film production continued until the outbreak of the Pacific War in 1941. This article examines why and how these medical films were domestically circulated in Japan and internationally screened outside Japan by looking at not only how medical practitioners used films but also how they successfully cooperated with a pharmaceutical company, filmmakers, technicians, and government.

Rethinking biomedicine in the age of translational research: Organisational, professional, and epistemic encounters

AbstractIn the most recent decade, translational research (TR) has played a pivotal role in the production and circulation of medical knowledge and technologies, thus redefining biomedicine's moral force, its cultural authority, and its status in society. As a major component of contemporary life sciences, TR—or more commonly, translational biomedicine—aims to transfer more quickly and effectively the findings of basic science into therapeutic interventions for patients by means of innovative organisational arrangements, research methodologies, protocols, and professional roles. This article brings together sociological research examining translational biomedicine from different perspectives to accomplish two goals. First, it offers a comprehensive introduction to the social science debate concerning the growing adoption of a TR framework in biomedicine, with a special focus on the organisational, professional, and epistemological issues. Second, the article has an operational purpose to raise questions about the main methodological repercussions for social scientists facing the investigation of TR as a complex and multi‐sited phenomenon that challenges traditional qualitative/quantitative research approaches.

Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World 1780–1840 by Rana A. Hogarth

Reviewed by: Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World 1780–1840 by Rana A. Hogarth Tara Inniss (bio) Hogarth, Rana A. Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World 1780–1840. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017, 290 pp. 6.125 x 9.25, 12 halftones, notes, bibl., index. US$90.00, hardcover. ISBN: 9781469632865. Also Paperback and eBook. The circulation of medical knowledge, particularly during the colonial period, is a vast field of potential study for the Caribbean historian of medicine. Given the number of publications in various languages across the region over the period, it is regrettable that more of the region’s scholarship has not been dedicated to knowledge formation and exchange among physicians in the region and beyond. Rana Hogarth’s comparative study of the racialization of medicine and the African body provides careful insight into the medical construction of race in Jamaica and South Carolina during the period of slavery. Organized into three parts, Hogarth demonstrates how physicians, and planters, in Jamaica and South Carolina were engaged in an iterative process to construct not only medical definitions of race, but also to racialize the African body, particularly the enslaved body, and ailments “peculiar” to black bodies in the tropics. Another useful comparison is her evolution of public institutions, such as hospitals and workhouses, for the surveillance and control of sick black bodies in both Jamaica and the Antebellum South—or what she terms as the “Greater Caribbean”. In Part I, Making Difference: Race and Yellow Fever, Hogarth traces some widely accepted views on the perceived race-based immunity of enslaved Africans to yellow fever. Even in the midst of dissenting views on the widely accepted notion that enslaved Africans were immune to the lethal effects of mosquito-borne yellow fever epidemics that swept the Greater Caribbean, leaving thousands dead, there was a consensus on the inalienable issue of racial difference between how disease afflicted the black versus the white body. Part II, In Sickness and Slavery: Black Pathologies, Hogarth examines [End Page 221] the perplexing racialized discourse around the disease Cachexia Africana (also known as dirt-eating, mal d’estomac, geophagy and pica). This was a well-known illness affecting enslaved African populations in the Caribbean, and described by enslavers/physicians. There have been many explanations for the descriptions and interventions that physicians have made about the disease. But Hogarth goes beyond these to establish that the very construction of the disease was one based on racial difference, helping to consolidate the medical authority of white men over other practitioners, including Obeah men and women, even though African practitioners were constantly contesting that authority. Part of the knowledge exchange among Jamaican and Antebellum Southern practitioners was over the diagnosis and treatment of the disease. There was a deepening sense that Africans were engaging in resistance to white authority over their own health and bodies. Therefore, there was less of an effort to “treat” the illness, and more to control and discipline the black body. One of Hogarth’s most convincing discussions of the racialization of enslaved health is in Part III, Disciplining Blackness: Hospitals. Hogarth frames the evolution of public institutions for the treatment of black bodies within a continuing discourse of surveillance and control in slavery, even as the care and treatment of enslaved workers shifted from private estate-based plantation medicine to state/public intervention. This discussion is particularly useful in providing more insight into the systemic place of race in medical institutions. Hogarth layers racialization of the black body from observation to pathologization to its ultimate surveillance and control, so at no point is the enslaved “patient” “object” “subject” ever free from the gaze of the white male physician conducting his research. Her examination of race-making in medicine in the Greater Caribbean provides fertile ground for further explorations of medical knowledge exchange both within and beyond the region. It is interesting that she pulls the Antebellum South into the ambit of influence of Caribbean-based physicians publishing on common diseases affecting enslaved populations. Contrary to our twenty-first-century notions of globalized medicine that often depict the balance of power in medical research weighed in favour...

Globalisation Interrupted? The Case of Opium in the Circulation of Medical Knowledge in Ming Dynasty China

The spread of Western medical practices to China, initiated during the Mongol dynasty, is often considered an example of “medical globalisation,” but few studies have looked at the actual level of adoption of Western medicine in the period after the Yuan dynasty. This essay analyses eighteen Ming dynasty medical sources in order to assess the role of opium, a Western drug, in post-Yuan medical practice. This essay concludes that opium was not widely used in the first centuries of the Ming dynasty, and, when finally adopted in the sixteenth century, its use was disconnected from the Yuan dynasty medical tradition. These findings make us question the continuity and even the existence of the “Mongol medical globalisation,” as well as the validity of the use of synchronic methodology for the study of centuries-long processes such as globalisation.

Yaws, Syphilis, Sexuality, and the Circulation of Medical Knowledge in the British Caribbean and the Atlantic World

This history of the disease categories "yaws" and "syphilis" explores the interplay between European and African medical cultures in the early modern Atlantic world. The assertion made by both early modern and modern medical authorities, that yaws and syphilis are the same disease, prompts a case study of the history of disease that reflects on a variety of issues in the history of medicine: the use of ideas about contagion to demarcate racial and sexual difference at sites around the British Empire; the contrast between persistently holistic ideas about disease causation in the Black Atlantic and the growth of ontological theories of disease among Europeans and Euro-Americans; and the controversy over the African practice of yaws inoculation, which may once have been an effective treatment but was stamped out by plantation owners who viewed it as a waste of their enslaved laborers' valuable time.

The anthropologist, the doctors and the transgender experience: an interview with Laurence Hérault

Laurence Herault is an anthropologist and specialist on the transgender experience. She is an Assistant Professor at Aix-Marseille University and a member of IDEMEC, the research center of the Maison Mediterraneenne des Sciences de l’Homme. Her research has led her to carry out observations of transgender persons and hospital doctors. Clio asked to interview her regarding the circulation of medical knowledge and the impact of theoretical debates within the triangle formed by the anthropologis...

The Uses of Print in the History of Science

Next article No AccessThe Uses of Print in the History of ScienceAdrian JohnsAdrian Johns Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America Volume 107, Number 4December 2013 Published for the Bibliographical Society of America Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/680828 Views: 207Total views on this site Citations: 3Citations are reported from Crossref © 2013 by the Bibliographical Society of America. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Sarah Elizabeth Naramore Recommended for “frequent perusal” and “improving the science of medicine”: Benjamin Rush’s American editions and the circulation of medical knowledge in the early Republic, Endeavour 45, no.1-21-2 (Mar 2021): 100765.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.endeavour.2021.100765Marius Buning Reading Practices in Early Modern Period, (Sep 2020): 1–3.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20791-9_321-1Sara Humphreys Creating a Playable Academic Edition of Mourning Dove’s Cogewea or How Games can Decolonize, KULA: knowledge creation, dissemination, and preservation studies 3, no.11 (Feb 2019).https://doi.org/10.5334/kula.48

Health Care, the Circulation of Medical Knowledge, and Research in the Soviet Gulag in the 1930s

This article aims at a historical analysis of medical culture, health care services, and medical research in the GULAG. After presenting a brief history of the GULAG medical service, the study focuses on the specific features and factors surrounding medical knowledge production, implementation, and circulation. The article also investigates medical research conducted within the GULAG, touching upon the situation in which it emerged and the ways it was carried out. It argues that due to several factors, which will be discussed in detail, the GULAG health care proved internally deficient and failed to fulfill its main task, namely the preservation of the health of the prisoners. The circulation of medical knowledge in the GULAG had unique features, which are all explained by the specific character of the semi-military regime of this penitentiary institution, veiled in secrecy, and the severe underfinancing of the medical service. Medical research, conducted in the Soviet GULAG in conditions of professional isolation, nevertheless contributed to the development of medical science in the Soviet Union, especially the diagnostics and treatment of specific diseases caused by malnutrition in extreme climatic conditions.

The Circulation of Medical Knowledge in Eighteenth-Century Hungary

This paper reconstructs the circulation patterns of medical knowledge within the geographic space of the eighteenth-century Kingdom of Hungary. The social fabric of the kingdom was thoroughly intertwined with the religious, ethnic, linguistic, estate constitutional, and professional cultures of knowledge which, accordingly, showed a great abundance of diversity. These multi-level regional differences are disclosed while exploring the extent, rapidity, and quality of contemporary medical knowledge circulation, which were primarily influenced by the operation of Hungary’s educational centers under the auspices of the different churches. Undoubtedly, physicians tended to follow the Habsburg Monarchy’s and Europe’s circulation of theoretical, practical, methodological concepts, which varied though according to the means and orientations of different educational centers aided by the “peregrinatio academica.” In the first half of the eighteenth century, Halle served as a primary source of knowledge elements, whereas the import of Dutch and Swiss university cultures of knowledge had been on the rise from the second half of the century onward. Moreover, Gerard van Swieten’s reforms overriding denominational boundaries, transformed the Medical Faculty of the University of Vienna into an institute of prominence in the second half of the eighteenth century. The reforms had consequences upon the making and evolution of Hungary’s independent medical discourse, self-reflection, and methodology. The foundation of the Medical Faculty of the University of Trnava (Nagyszombat, Tyrnau) in 1770, and its subsequent resettlement in Buda and Pest, brought about a transformation in the long run.

“Esto es lo que yo buscaba (…) el conocimiento de las yerbas, y su aplicación”: sistematização e difusão dos conhecimentos sobre virtudes de plantas medicinais (América meridional, séculos XVII e XVIII).

Neste artigo, apresentamos o significativo processo de trocas culturais que se deu entre indígenas e missionários jesuítas na América meridional, nos séculos XVII e XVIII, com destaque para os saberes relativos às plantas medicinais e às práticas curativas. A análise das Cartas Ânuas da Província Jesuítica do Paraguai e da obra Materia Medica Misionera, escrita pelo irmão jesuíta Pedro de Montenegro em 1710, revelou o importante papel desempenhado por informantes, enfermeiros e copistas indígenas, tanto na identificação, coleta e experimentalismos com plantas nativas, quanto na difusão e circulação dos conhecimentos médicos sistematizados pelos missionários da Companhia de Jesus.

António Ribeiro Sanches and the Circulation of Medical Knowledge in Eighteenth-Century Europe

António Ribeiro Sanches and the Circulation of Medical Knowledge in Eighteenth-Century Europe

Willem de Blécourt and Cornelie Usborne (eds), Cultural approaches to the history of medicine: mediating medicine in early modern and modern Europe, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, pp. xxiii, 241, £50.00 (hardback 1-4039-1569-5).

Moving away from outmoded theories of “medical imperialism”, this collection seeks to reconstruct the “complex web of communications and re-configurations” in medical history. Addressing issues as diverse as heart dissection, masturbation, animal care, hermaphroditism and orthopaedics, in Europe between the 1600s and the present, it uses the concept and role of “mediation” to explore theories of sickness and healing. As identified by Roy Porter's foreword, the contributors seek to isolate the meanings of medical knowledge and expectations, rather than relying on filter-down or Foucauldian approaches to the development of modern medicine. Each of the essays claims to offer images of medical knowledge and practice that are more “rich”, “complex” or “comprehensive” than those currently in vogue. The eclectic range of subjects studied is promising, though its successes are mixed. Several contributors focus on “mediation” in terms of the construction and circulation of medical knowledge between texts and audiences, and between patients, practitioners and the wider community. Thus Louise Hill Curth draws parallels between human and animal medical theory and treatment to demonstrate the importance of “one medicine” in the humoral tradition. Micheline Louis-Courvoisier and Severine Pilloud, and Michael Stolberg use the extensive archival resources of the Genevan doctor Samuel Auguste Tissot. The former contributors focus on the formal and contextual composition of the letters and examine the social embeddedness of healing concepts. Michael Stolberg's account takes direct issue with the themes of “popularization” and “public understanding” that have become so central to medical history. Yet the stated aim of Stolberg's piece—to understand the impact of medical advice literature on the lay readership, rather than simply taking for granted that “dominant medical discourse will automatically be accepted”—is surely a standard objective of modern medical history research. A more promising approach to letters is suggested by Alfons Zarzoso's account of lay decisions over medical care and treatment in eighteenth-century Catalonia. That self-medication and advice from relatives and friends was commonplace during the period is well-known. Less extensively studied is the vocabulary of afflictions, and the accommodation of illness and disease within a specific socio-economic and political climate. In letters attributing disease to the localized impact of French Revolutionary disruption, rumour and fear became vocabularies for the transmission of disease theories. The remaining essays focus more explicitly on the problems of competing truth-claims and the limits of medical authority. Yarrah Bar-On draws on the memoirs of Louise Bourgeois to explore the functioning of medical knowledge as a form of “gossip”. Claims to (and the limits of ) medical certainty is also addressed by Palmira Fontes da Costa and Constance Malpas. Logie Barrow's story of nineteenth-century English vaccination shows how debates over medical authority did not take place in a vacuum, being embedded in (or mediated by?) wider political and social debates. This was no less so in earlier times, as illustrated by Catrien Santing's article on the heart in Counter-Reformation Italy. The remaining articles by Hera Cook and Toin Pieters on twentieth-century issues highlight the conflicts between individual desires for health- (or self-)improvement, and available medico-scientific resources. Each writer shows how the medical world responds with varying degrees of success to the needs and demands of the lay public. We are back to the theme of community participation in the world of the sick. In the modern age, however, that means taking account of, and using, a global media amidst the hum of rising public expectations about medical ability and advance. The revision of concepts like “mediation” is doubtless important to the expansion of meaning in medical history. It draws attention to what Zarzoso calls “medical pluralism”, and the historically-complex rituals of medical knowledge and practice. Yet the theoretical potential of “mediation” remains uncertain. Although the editors try to stabilize the term by focusing on the themes of transmission and reconciliation, its potential for generalization arguably disrupts influence and agency.