Twentieth Century Medicine Research Articles

COVID-19 in Perspective: A Witness Seminar1.

In June 2023, we brought together leaders who responded to the emergency phase COVID-19 pandemic in Ontario as part of a "Witness Seminar." This approach to studying history was developed by the Institute of Contemporary British History. It has been extensively used in the history of science and medicine by the Wellcome Trust History of Twentieth Century Medicine. A witness seminar provides a collective oral history, in which participants can express diverse perspectives, build on each other's thoughts, and create a documentary record for policy makers and future historians. The published transcript provides an intimate look at how the pandemic played out in the eyes of some of key responders and raises many questions about the history of public health funding and administration in the province of Ontario, the failures in long-term care, and the need to improve pandemic communication. This article documents the success of the pandemic response.

Illness and death of Sir William Osler

The article presents the pathographic data of the famous doctor and scientist William Osler. The possible causes of his last illness, the features of the course, diagnostic approaches, and the methods of treatment used in medicine in the early twentieth century are discussed. Ironically, William Osler was a victim of a disease he studied almost all his life, becoming the author of one of his famous aphorisms: "Pneumonia is a friend of old people".

Buying into Reproductive Modernity: Tracing the Transnational History of Two Contraceptives in Britain and China

Summary Set in the early twentieth century, this article maps the parallel histories of two popular contraceptive pessaries: ‘Wife’s Friend’ in Britain and ‘Lady’s Friend’ in China. Despite their limited efficacy, both products became commercially successful in their respective markets. Drawing on news articles and opinion columns, this article investigates how these two similar products were marketed to different demographics and adapted to meet the needs of local consumers, highlighting the ways in which medicines take on new meanings in different social and historical contexts. At the same time, the case of ‘Wife’s Friend’ and ‘Lady’s Friend’ pessaries also exposes the blurriness between the categories of Western and Traditional Chinese Medicine and the shortcomings of both types of medicine in the early twentieth century. Ultimately, this research shows that interrogating medicine from a comparative transnational perspective can yield new insights into the relationship between commercialisation, modernity and perceptions of health.

August Sander’s Portfolio “The Doctor and the Pharmacist”: German Patients between Professional and Lay Medicine

This article takes photographer August Sander’s portfolio “The Doctor and the Pharmacist” as an opportunity to reflect on tensions and fractures in German medicine in the modern era. This group of twelve portraits, which includes both professional and—in the person of three practitioners of alternative medicine—non-professional physicians, draws attention to the complex and often contradictory process of boundary formation that accompanied the emergence of scientific medicine in the early twentieth century. The article also considers the complex relation of the photographic medium itself to this process of boundary formation.

Burden of the Beast

Burden of the Beast

How blood met plastics, plant and animal extracts: Material encounters between medicine and industry in the twentieth century

Twentieth-century medicine saw the remarkable rise of complex machines and infrastructures to process blood for medical purposes, such as transfusion, dialysis, and cardiac surgery. Instead of attributing these developments to technological ingenuity, this article argues for the primacy of material encounters as a promising focal point of medical historiography. In fact, blood's special properties consistently clashed with most materials used in medical practice, provoking a series of material exchanges. Drawing on a combination of epistemological and network approaches, three exemplary cases are presented to examine blood's encounters with plastics, plant and animal extracts: William M. Bayliss's (1860–1926) injections of dissolved gum acacia to expand diminished blood volume; Charles H. Best's (1899–1978) production of the anticoagulant heparin from animal organs; and the preservation of fragile blood cells by silicone coatings inside of John H. Gibbon Jr.‘s (1903–1973) heart-lung machine. The case studies demonstrate how the complementarity of blood and these materials produced hybridizations between medicine and a range of industrial branches, from colonial forestry and meatpacking to commercial chemistry. In this light, the paper concludes by discussing the dependencies of today's healthcare environments on globally distributed, capitalistically appropriated resources in the face of crises like the COVID-19 pandemic.

Literacy and healers’ tactics in Finnish folk medicine, 1850–1950

ABSTRACT Folk medicine inevitably declined and was pushed into the margins with the spread of literacy and the proliferation of modern, scientific biomedicine. However, it remained the primary route to health in peripheral regions of Europe, such as rural Finland, well into the twentieth century. The spread of literacy affected folk medicine in ways that enhanced many folk practitioners’ healing resources. Drawing on newspaper articles, reports by medical doctors and journalists, written reminiscences by lay informants, and court records, this article argues that literate healers prescribing pharmacy medicines were far from a rare phenomenon in the Finnish countryside up to the early twentieth century. Finnish folk medicine became increasingly a hybrid medical practice, combining herbalism with methods learned from popular health guides and scientific literature. By discarding superstitious practices and employing hybrid methods, folk healers sought to enter modernity as peasant intellectuals. This article presents a novel analysis of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Finnish folk medicine not as a tradition passed from generation to generation but as a modernizing undertaking with literacy as a key resource.

Temperance, Feminism, and Phrenology in Lydia Fowler's Nora: The Lost and Redeemed.

In both the U.S. and Britain, Dr. Lydia Fowler was a leader in women's political and health reform organizations and temperance associations. Her publications, which targeted a popular audience of women and children, included self-help medical lectures and guides, a book of poetry, and the temperance novel Nora: The Lost and Redeemed (1853). Nora represents the broader political fight surrounding temperance, but also the medical arguments about alcohol abuse itself. Fowler's phrenological writings, including Nora, served as a bridge between the nineteenth-century construction of "intemperance" as a moral failing and the disease model of "alcoholism" that came to dominate medicine in the early twentieth century. With Nora, Fowler employs the power and reach of Victorian fiction to dramatize the dangers of alcohol and the hopeful remedies of feminist-driven reform.

What's in a Gland? Sexuality, Reproduction and the Prostate in Early Twentieth‐Century Medicine

AbstractThis article presents a case study about how norms relating to masculinity, sexuality and reproduction were produced in relation to the healthy, ailing, or aging prostate in early twentieth century medicine. It shows how the ailing prostate tied in with norms about healthy, abnormal or illicit sexual and reproductive practices. Engaging with insights from the history of medicine, feminist science studies, and men and masculinity studies, it highlights how the prostate became a diagnostic catch‐all for a wide range of physical and mental conditions, producing demarcations between femininity and masculinity, manliness and unmanliness, health and illness, and moral and vice.

Claire Fraser, RN, MD, OMG: history of medicine in the Outlander novels and series.

This article discusses how Claire Randall, RN, MD, the fictional protagonist of Diana Gabaldon’s widely popular Outlander series, uses her knowledge of twentieth century medicine in her adventures in eighteenth century Scotland, France, and America.

Transport Phenomenon of Nanoparticles in Animals and Humans

Nanoparticles (NPs) are microscopic objects with at least one dimension less than 100 nm. These were first discovered by Michael Faraday in 1857 when he prepared gold nanoparticles and observed that nanostructured gold produced red color. This distinct feature of nanoparticles could be due to very small size. NPs are very small compared to the wavelengths of light, hence absorb light in the blue-green portion of the spectrum (~450 nm) and reflect the red light (~700 nm) thus yield a rich red color. NPs also possess very high surface to mass ratio that could be utilized in several application areas wherein a very high surface area is required. Nanoparticles witnessed tremendous growth in research and application areas especially in medicine in twentieth century after discovery of carbon nanotubes in 1991. Nanoparticles have been explored in medicine as targeted delivery carriers to deliver macromolecules such as proteins, enzymes, to the target organ up to cellular levels. Of late, these carriers have been employed to treat several tumors owing to its capacity to deliver chemotherapeutic agents to the tumor cells only thus improving efficacy and minimizing side effects of anticancer agents.

A Long Term Analysis of Two Undeniable Realities of the XXI Century - Global Economic Crisis and Demographic Aging

The article highlights ideea which said that, in actuals socio-economics conditions, will appear inherently lethal mixture between two undeniable realities of the century, namely, on the one hand, economic and financial crisis, with immediate effects of restricting economic activities and thus drastically reducing job remuneration for work and, on the other hand, the trend of demographic aging in most civilized geopolitical zones, strong or medium economic developed. Mankind has lived a long time with the phobia of population explosion, as well as the phobia of premature death due to incurable medical conditions characteristic of the twentieth century but human medicine and the pharmaceutical industry have made remarkable progress. Life expectancy has increased continuously and spectacularly, especially in economically developed areas in Europe, North America, Asia and Australia. Along with this joyful reality, the civilized world has adopted an unexpected demographic trend, namely a massive reduction in the birth rate. Therefore, along with the trend at the beginning of this millennium - in which the civilized people marry and procreate a maximum of 1-2 children up to the age of 35 - after 2008, the global economic crisis appeared.

To Fix or to Heal: Patient Care, Public Health, and the Limits of Biomedicine ed. by Joseph E. Davis, Ana Marta González

Reviewed by: To Fix or to Heal: Patient Care, Public Health, and the Limits of Biomedicine ed. by Joseph E. Davis, Ana Marta González Joel D. Howell Joseph E. Davis and Ana Marta González, eds. To Fix or to Heal: Patient Care, Public Health, and the Limits of Biomedicine. New York: New York University Press, 2016. viii + 335 pp. (978-1-4798-7824-6). I sat this morning in the staff room of an academic internal medicine outpatient practice. During a brief lull between seeing patients an impassioned discussion broke among attending physicians, house staff, and medical students about which diseases were “real.” Chronic fatigue syndrome? Fibromyalgia? Chronic Lyme disease? More interesting was the dispute over how we would decide the answer to the question. What sorts of evidence would “count”? Would we need an anatomic abnormality, perhaps evidenced on a scan of some sort? Or a metabolic anomaly? [End Page 230] Perhaps a set of antibodies? This discussion went directly to the heart of the issues explored in To Fix or to Heal. While not directing their critiques explicitly at historians or clinicians, the authors of the book’s essays explore the questions that underlie tensions between a holistic or a reductionist view of medicine. As well as shaping much of the history of twentieth-century medicine, these tensions have become part of the quotidian life of any twenty-first-century clinician (as well as the clinician’s patients). The issues also shape our approach to health and medicine on a larger scale, being an essential part of debates over how best to improve public health and to reduce global health disparities. As the authors make clear, there is rarely a simple answer to the conflict between these two models—the medical world always exists in a state of varying degrees of emphasis. As the authors also make clear, no matter how hard those wishing for a more reductionist view may try to analyze them out of the picture, the moral and social implications of the dichotomy need to remain central to any analysis of health and health care. The impetus for the creation of this book came from a 2010 conference, at which early drafts of four of the chapters were presented. The essays come from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives (including history, philosophy, sociology, bioethics, and psychology) and take on a similarly wide range of subjects. While the book is not explicitly historical, many of the authors take a historical approach to their subject, and there is much here from which historians can learn. The one essay by a historian, Anne Hardy, insightfully traces the history of state policy and how ideas about curing disease and disease prevention relate to each other. Other authors offer historical introductions to their chapters. Bruce Alexander looks at the history of ideas about addiction old and new, and Ana Gonzalez weaves in writers from Aristotle to Nietzsche to Henry Sigerist in her discussion of the dangers of conflating ethical questions with health questions. The collection is bookended (and to some extent held together) by a pair of nicely done essays written by one of the editors, Joseph Davis. In the concluding chapter he attempts some proscriptive musings, calling for a more balanced approach. For example, he warns against the dangers of an unchecked reductionist approach to medicine, and sees physicians as playing a key role in that resistance. Bioethics has moved too far from some of its underlying theological roots, and could become stronger (and less biomedical) were it to exist outside of major medical centers. (The institutionalization of bioethics is addressed in an insightful chapter by John Evans, and another chapter by Jeffrey Bishop looks briefly at the rise and fall of theology in bioethics discourse.) Public health, especially if linked to a social medicine tradition, could offer a counter to an overly reductionist philosophy of health and health care. This is not primarily a historical book. But insofar as many chapters place contemporary policy issues into historical perspective, it may help to enlighten those interested in policy to appreciate the historical dimensions of contemporary debates. Conversely, it could be useful reading for historians who want to...

Between the Mind Twist and the Brain Spot

This paper explores the material and visual practices that defined studies of psychopathology in early twentieth-century American medicine, through a close look at the work of neuropathologist Elmer E. Southard (1876–1920). As a discipline sitting at the intersection between laboratory and clinical practice, neuropathology has received little attention from historians of the brain sciences. Unlike the neurologist, who was interested in treating patients and saving lives, the neuropathologist often encountered patients following death, and studied the brain for signs of pathology during autopsy. Trained in a German tradition of laboratory pathology, Southard has been cast as a somaticist with respect to psychopathology. By examining Southard’s medical and philosophical writings, I present a more nuanced analysis of the role of brain pathology in Southard’s vision of disease etiology, his views on the foundations of psychiatry, as well as a more vivid picture of the sorts of material practices that defined the work of the neuropathologist.

Weighting for Health: Management, Measurement and Self-surveillance in the Modern Household.

Histories of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century medicine emphasise the rise of professional and scientific authority, and suggest a decline in domestic health initiatives. Exploring the example of weight management in Britain, we argue that domestic agency persisted and that new regimes of measurement and weighing were adapted to personal and familial preferences as they entered the household. Drawing on print sources and objects ranging from prescriptive literature to postcards and ‘personal weighing machines’, the article examines changing practices of self-management as cultural norms initially dictated by ideals of body shape and function gradually incorporated quantified targets. In the twentieth century, the domestic management of health—like the medical management of illness—was increasingly technologised and re-focused on quantitative indicators of ‘normal’ or ‘pathological’ embodiment. We ask: in relation to weight, how did quantification permeate the household, and what did this domestication of bodily surveillance mean to lay users?

The Electronic Health Record Paradox: Observations of a GI Consultant.

‘‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,’’ wrote Charles Dickens in the Tale of Two Cities. He could well have been talking about the electronic health record (EHR) and medicine in the twenty-first century. My career has spanned a remarkable transformation from a paper medical record system to an electronic system. To understand this transformation, we must recall the common frustrations of the paper era. Handwritten, illegible records, lost laboratory test results and reports, prescription errors, and little systematic documentation of anything were the norm. Reflecting back on twentieth century medicine, it seems remarkable that we were able to muddle through and help our patients. This may have been a tribute to the resiliency of our patients, but there may be another explanation. I think we spent more time with patients, focused more on the medical history, had more continuity of care with fewer ‘‘hand-offs,’’ and did not rely on a ‘‘cut-and-paste’’ method of constructing the patient narrative. This is my thesis, and I fear it makes me seem old and out of date, so let me elaborate. I am hardly a technology Luddite. In the hope of introducing a totally electronic medical record, I helped develop an electronic report generator for endoscopy reporting to enable endoscopic research (Clinical Outcome Research Initiative, CORI). I envisioned that the easy availability of laboratory and testing data, prior records, and notes would reduce the time physicians spend trying to locate key records and enable them to spend more time in face-to-face contact with patients. ‘‘Smart’’ systems would reduce medical errors in prescribing and testing. A medical problem might be identified, and evidence-based algorithms would appear to help direct the clinician toward the most effective approach to the issue. Clinical reminders would be embedded so that crucial anniversary dates for preventive measures would easily be recalled. It is exciting that so many of these features are now in place. Nevertheless, the electronic era has not lived up to its potential, due in part to failures of the electronic system and in part to human adaptation to the system.

What is “colonial” about medieval colonial medicine? Iberian health in global context

Colonial medicine is a thriving field of study in the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century medicine. Medicine can be used as a lens to view colonialism in action and as a way to critique colonialism. This article argues that key debates and ideas from that modern field can fruitfully be applied to the Middle Ages, especially for the early empires of Spain and Portugal (mid-fourteenth to mid-sixteenth centuries). The article identifies key modern debates, explores approaches to colonization and colonialism in the Middle Ages and discusses how medieval and modern medicine and healthcare could be compared using colonial and postcolonial discourses. The article ends with three case studies of healthcare encounters in Madeira, Granada and Hispaniola at the end of the fifteenth century.

Charles V. Roman and the Spectre of Polygenism in Progressive Era Public Health Research

Author(s): Keel, TD | Abstract: The influence of polygenismover twentieth-century medicine andracial science has been an underdeveloped area of study. During the period referred to by historians as the 'eclipse of Darwinism', assumptions about separate human ancestry often structured debates across the USA over whether racial heredity was responsible for 'innate dispositions' toward certain diseases. This article explores how polygenist carryovers made their way into early twentieth-century medical and public health studies on the links between race and venereal disease during the American social hygiene movement (1910-40). It also recovers the work of the African-American physician, ethicist, and social hygienist, Dr Charles V. Roman, who stressed during this period that the idea of common human ancestry should push public health researchers to think more creatively and critically about the social and environmental factors shaping health outcomes and black susceptibility to sexual diseases.

Spirit Cure: A History of Pentecostal Healing. By Joseph W. Williams. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. xi + 226 pp. $55.00 cloth.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Spirit Cure: A History of Pentecostal Healing . By Joseph W. Williams . New York : Oxford University Press , 2013. xi + 226 pp. $55.00 cloth.Book Reviews and NotesHistorians of pentecostalism have wrestled to understand how a movement that began in the early twentieth century with a pronounced antipathy to many features of modern American culture transformed into one that moves easily in culture's broad terrain, even as it retains distinctive elements. In the realm of healing, in particular, early pentecostals advocated divine healing by faith through Christ's atonement while ardently rejecting physicians, drugs, and all other aspects of modern medicine. But within two generations, leading pentecostals proclaimed God's superintendence of medical advances and promoted a union of spiritual and medical healing. By the turn of the twenty-first century, prominent pentecostal voices urged the faithful to embrace naturopathic healing regiments, weight-loss and other dietary innovations, and mental healing programs with deep roots in metaphysical religiosity, all baptized with the power and presence of the Holy Spirit and the ongoing conviction that God could bring healing directly through prayer. What had been a movement radically set apart from the world had come to embrace the world's practices and values and combine them with their own. Or so it seemed.In Spirit Cure: A History of Pentecostal Healing , Joseph Williams offers a fresh, nuanced, and dynamic reading of pentecostal healing. Williams argues that the divine healing of early pentecostals was not so separate as the faithful liked to think. Instead, it contained areas of meaningful overlap with alternative healing programs rooted in metaphysical spirituality. The mental healing of New Thought and Christian Science resonated with pentecostals' conviction that divine healing was guaranteed to those who had faith, which entailed pronouncing and acting out healing after prayer despite contrary symptoms. In concert with naturopathic healing, early pentecostals warned against dietary overindulgence and promoted fasting as a spiritual discipline with significant health benefits, including as a preparatory step for divine healing. Like metaphysical believers of various stripes, pentecostals tended to depersonalize the divine and minimize the gulf between nature and supernature. In relation to healing, God's declared intentions to heal the faithful were fixed in his Word, so the issue became how to tap into this source and actualize divine health. The pentecostal conception of the Holy Spirit as an immanent source of power and abundance often relied on natural and impersonal metaphors, like hydraulics and electricity, further emphasizing shared convictions with metaphysical believers. Although early pentecostals routinely anathematized metaphysical healers along with regular doctors, Williams highlights significant commonalities that linked their healing programs.Many historians have noted that treatment via orthodox medicine in the early twentieth century remained a crapshoot, but by mid-century diagnostic and therapeutic advances had enhanced the social and cultural standing of physicians. Simultaneously, pentecostals were climbing the social ladder and beginning to make peace with the surrounding culture. In this context, Oral Roberts played a crucial mediating role by envisioning the union of divine and medical healing. Even as the Latter Rain movement and postwar healing revivals hearkened back to radical early days of pentecostalism, rife with demonic etiology and anti-medical rhetoric, Roberts represented a larger development in pentecostalism that sought not only peace but union with medicine. …

Healing Gods: Complementary and Alternative Medicine in Christian America. By Candy Gunther Brown. New York: Oxford University Press2013. 336 pp. $29.95 hardcover.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Healing Gods: Complementary and Alternative Medicine in Christian America . By Candy Gunther Brown . New York : Oxford University Press 2013. 336 pp. $29.95 hardcover.Book Reviews and NotesOne summer not long ago I passed many hours in a public library reading through shelves of popular books on complementary and medicine (CAM). Before long, their arguments became recognizable and familiar as positions in a high stakes discursive field. Were alternative and integrative modalities--herbs, homeopathy, yoga, Reiki, Alexander Technique, acupuncture--scientifically or medically sound? Liberating or harmful? Religious or spiritual? Helpful or harmful? Authors sporting letters after their last names (M.D., Ph.D., MSW, M.Div., etc.) occupy the various agreed-upon positions in this field. There were debunkers, the voices of reason, true believers, feminist and scientific and religious critics of biomedical excess, and cautionary skeptics. Despite their differences in opinion they all agreed broadly on what CAM was and what they were arguing about. There was also broad agreement in the genre on what expertise entailed, how scientific, popular, and historical literature could be used, and even on favored interpretive tropes and themes. It was an interesting exercise to read these books and I learned quite a bit about the stakes of contemporary health and body politics in the United States. But it taught me little about the history, religion, or sociology of complementary and medicine.Candy Gunther Brown's Healing Gods: Complementary and Alternative Medicine in Christian America falls squarely within this genre of popular writing about CAM. It exemplifies the caveat emptor genre. Brown inhabits the role of a scholarly expert who exposes the hidden religious origins of medicine and explains why knowing about these origins matter. In participating in this genre, Brown also adopts its language of expertise, choosing to shed the historian's metier of close reading and textual analysis in favor of more expansive claims to knowledge. As a consequence, Healing Gods has little to offer to a scholarly audience interested in learning more about American Christians' uses or experience with complementary and medicine. Scholars of American religious history, yoga and traditional Chinese medicine, the history of medicine and science, constitutional law or patients' rights will find Brown's treatment of these topics inadequately supported by conventional scholarly argumentation or interpretation. This is not the only measure for a book (and arguably not the appropriate measure for this one) but its publication by Oxford University Press suggests that such an assessment is not completely inappropriate.Brown's argument can be summarized as such: Complementary and medicine is religious (chapter 1) and, moreover, not Christian in its origins (chapter 3). These non-religious CAM therapies were banished from the halls of medicine in the early twentieth century but have been revived and brought into mainstream biomedicine (introduction, chapter 7). This has happened as promoters of CAM have repackaged and marketed CAM to unsuspecting Americans who are unaware of their real religious roots (introduction, conclusion). CAM continues to thrive even as most CAM therapies have been shown to have little or no positive effect in medical studies (chapter 5). Brown states that Americans are largely unaware of their religious origins, and she thus offers in her even-numbered chapters brief historical overviews of yoga, acupuncture, energy medicine, and chiropractic therapy. Brown further argues however that knowing this history is not enough. She argues that because Americans tend to associate religion with belief and doctrine rather than the body or action, they are unaware of the ways that CAM can carry religious meaning through enactment. …