English gentlemen in the early modern period held ultimate responsibility for the health of their households. Building on previous studies which have revealed how both men and women of the gentry participated in remedy-collecting and some forms of caring duties as necessity demanded, this article situates gentlemanly interest in domestic medicine within familial, social and professional networks of knowledge and reading practices. Employing a micro-historical approach, this study explores the interests of Sir Henry Oxinden of Barham and his great-grandson, Lee Warly of Canterbury, who developed their medical knowledge by consulting female relatives, local acquaintances and medical texts. They assessed the value of physicians' advice and the appeal of new ingredients. This article thus contributes a significant case study to the historiography of domestic medicine, presenting the gentlemanly pursuit of medical knowledge for practical and academic purposes as an activity which enhanced male status within the family and community.

This article asks why British mainstream forensic literature and practice did not acknowledge the long-term mental consequences of rape for victims and their need for a sympathetic approach before the 1970s. I argue that this was not simply out of ignorance, considering that in the period 1924-1978 there already were some medical practitioners-women doctors, psychiatrists and gynaecologists-who expressed concern for these matters. However, the forensic expert witnesses, who were influential in the field, considered the virtue of sympathy and the practices of care that women doctors promoted to be incompatible with the judicial virtue of impartiality. To avoid any suggestion of partiality, which would damage their authority in the adversarial courtroom, these men instead employed the epistemic virtue of emotional detachment. This led them to adopt a sceptical attitude towards rape victims and drew their attention away from the psychological care women and children might require.

This article examines the durability of high post-mortem examination rates in Israel between the 1950s-1980s. Previous studies overlooked the issue of medical authority and the social history of autopsy, focusing on policy, technological development, and conflict between science and religion. By contrast, our analysis brings together the medical interest in unlimited research of dead bodies and the power relations between doctors and subaltern groups in Israel. Based on the Israeli State Archives, the Hebrew University Archives, and the daily press, we argue that medical biopolitical aspirations and the public shaped the history of postmortem examinations in Israel. High rates were embedded in the medical construction of doubt regarding the cause of death that only physicians could resolve by autopsy. Civilian protests led to a temporary decrease in the 1960s, while political and medical intervention brought about a gradual resurgence in post-mortem rates in the 1980s.

The question of when dogs became the recipients of veterinary care has long been debated; current scholarship does not acknowledge the long tradition of canine healthcare provided by irregular specialists prior to the late nineteenth century. This article reveals, however, that eighteenth-century Britain was home to a thriving canine medical marketplace. Among its key actors were 'dog doctors'-individuals without formal healthcare training who regularly treated and healed dogs. This article offers the first historical account of the eighteenth-century dog doctor, contextualising and reappraising his identity, clients and services. It focusses on the dynamic career of the celebrity practitioner John Norborn, who proudly self-identified as a 'dog doctor' when the term was considered an insult. In doing so the article considers the conditions in which specialist care for dogs first developed and argues for a new chronology of canine veterinary medicine.

Antwerp's response to the outbreak of plague in the 1570s offers new insights into the effects of epidemics on urban communities in relation to their religious, economic, and spatial fabric. Antwerp's transition from a Catholic to Calvinist government in 1577, and back to Catholicism in 1585, allows us to study its reaction to and the effects of plague across religious boundaries within a short time span. Using GIS, we have compared various rich datasets concerning plague: the register of houses locked in quarantine; the health certificates issued by authorities; plague fatalities recorded in St. Jacob's parish; a wide range of urban regulations; and information about the size of households, their composition, rents and real estate values in Antwerp. Combined analysis shows that Catholics and Protestants, whose houses were concentrated in different city districts and who had distinct professional and economic profiles, experienced plague quite differently, both physically and spiritually.

This paper explains the coexistence of concerns about hereditary degeneration and opposition to reproductive intervention such as sterilisation in Dutch eugenic discourse during the interwar years. Based on an analysis of textbooks, periodical publications and printed lectures, I will show how eugenicists positioned themselves within the domain of public health by framing their domain of inquiry as a pivotal addition to curative medicine and sanitary reform. Dutch eugenicists rendered this symbiotic relationship conceptually plausible by combining criticism of genetic determinism and Lamarckian viewpoints on heredity. This paper explains how this conceptual constellation enabled Dutch eugenicists to claim that the combination of proper (eugenic) education and a healthy environment would stimulate individuals to behave socially responsibly and restrain from reproducing. By doing so, this essay contributes to the historiographical trend to comparatively analyse eugenics as a transnational phenomenon.

This article explores the fundamental role of Lancashire's medical voluntarism in providing restorative orthopaedic treatments to the region's First World War, disabled ex-servicemen and assisting in their return to society. It offers a case study of orthopaedic treatments and schemes of rehabilitation provided at Grangethorpe Hospital, Rusholme, between 1914 and 1918. Forming a regional comparison to existing histories of First World War disabled ex-servicemen, which focus primarily on the interwar period, this article traces continuities in pioneering medicine and examples of Lancashire-based medical individuals and institutions. In doing so, this article demonstrates how the region's response to disablement during the Industrial Revolution underpinned the construction of charities and the advancement of orthopaedic treatments required to provide rehabilitative care during the First World War. Moreover, this paper situates Lancashire and its commitment to medical voluntarism and the reconstruction of disabled ex-servicemen as a key site in the UK's history of voluntarism.

This article focusses on the 'plague debates' which took place in the British parliament in 1819 and 1824, where the opinions of non-medical experts were also taken into account; particularly those of officials who had acquired relevant practical experience. Such opinions were crucial in politicising the medical debate from one of the nature of plagues, towards an evaluation of the impact of quarantine more broadly. Paying closer attention at the correspondence between the colonial governor of Malta and the Ionian Islands, and the colonial secretary, it reveals a different aspect of the contagion inquiry in Britain-one considering medical knowledge about plagues that was highly speculative. While most historical works illuminate the establishment of what was considered to be medical evidence, there is less work about the political, economic or even personal motives which underlined interventions in these debates.

This article explores civilian responses to the British army's blood donor recruitment campaign in wartime Britain, revealing it to be an underexplored medium for the examination of the contribution of women to Britain's war effort. However, despite extensive gender-targeted propaganda, it reveals evidence of a significant disparity between levels of volunteering to donate and actual donation throughout the war. Wartime donor behaviour was influenced by perceptions of personal or familial risk, with donor recruitment propaganda emphasising kinship ties to those in military service and promoting blood donation as a mutual insurance policy. Ultimately, this article argues that evidence of donor behaviour further undermines the mythologised narrative of Britain's 'People's War' and provides nuance to the understanding of blood donor motivation.

During the 1970s, the National Childbirth Trust (NCT) began to provide information and support to women experiencing postnatal mental illness, building on its promotion of natural childbirth and emphasis on the emotional wellbeing of women around birth, which had occupied the organisation since its establishment in 1956. This article argues that, alongside emotional, social and medical factors, the NCT attributed postnatal depression to the shift to hospital deliveries, involving high levels of intervention and frustrating women's choice and agency. While sharing ambitions to improve care in childbirth and giving women a voice in describing their experiences, it is suggested that the NCT's relationship with the feminist health movement remained ambiguous. The article also explores the NCT's collaboration with a variety of experts and advisors, some of whom emphasised the risk of postnatal depression to the bonding process and infant's development, potentially exacerbating the mental distress of new mothers.

I argue that in the early twentieth-century Netherlands, fathers regularly attended the birth of their children, and that this attendance was generally accepted or even encouraged by doctors. My findings contrast with existing historiography on the Anglo-Saxon countries, where, at the time, fathers were usually not present at births. I explain this difference between the Netherlands and the Anglo-Saxon countries through the ideal of the harmonious family that permeated Dutch society at the time. I show how birth was seen as a family event, in which the father should be emotionally involved. Men had to manage this emotional involvement carefully: they had to display emotions without losing control of these emotions. My findings show that we need to study doctor-led births in order to fully understand the slow rise of hospital births in the Netherlands.

The article examines the contemporary satiric treatment of a new transatlantic drug, guaiac, in a sixteenth-century poem by the Castilian writer Cristóbal de Castillejo, entitled (). The article contributes to the body of scholarship on the history of medicine in general and the history of herbal medicine in particular. The investigation of the poem embraces historical contextualisation, early modern rhetoric and classical reception. The article demonstrates the two-way relationship between early modern satire and medicine, arguing that the special significance of satiric productions that engage with medical themes lies in the inventive combination of the literary reality and empirical reality.

This article explores the 'the moment of patient safety'-the period around 2000 when patient safety became a key policy concern of the British National Health Service (NHS), and other healthcare systems. While harm caused by medical care (iatrogenic injury) had long been acknowledged by clinicians and scientists, from 2000 a new systemic language of patient safety emerged in the NHS that promoted novel managerial and regulatory approaches to patient harm. This language reflected the state's increasing role in regulating healthcare, as well as the erosion of medical autonomy and the rise of new forms of bureaucratic management. Acknowledging a transnational, intellectual context behind the rise of policy interest in patient safety-for example, the application of insights from the industrial safety sciences-this article examines the role played by domestic cultural factors, such as medical negligence litigation and healthcare scandals, in helping to define the new language in Britain.

Medical schools rely on a wide range of tools, technologies and materials for their teaching, on books, and bodies, and on the buildings which house them. This article considers the histories of this material culture in the three oldest medical schools operating in Ghana today. Borrowing theoretical concepts from Science and Technology Studies, medical anthropology and postcolonial political economy, this article takes that the material culture of modern medical education often binds contemporary pedagogy to outdated ideas and faraway places. The agential, proselytising nature of these historied materials agitates against the localisation of biomedicine and contributes to a distracting scientific imaginary which remains centred around historical, often imperial centres of knowledge production in Europe and North America.

This article surveys the experiences of historical actors labelled 'mentally defective' and 'mentally handicapped' in Britain in the first half of the twentieth century. It decentres institutions and experiences of segregation, and instead foregrounds employment as a way to historicise and make visible the experiences of individuals with intellectual impairments who lived in communities. The article discusses significant opportunities for paid employment, both formal and informal, for disabled people. Periods of economic growth or recession rendered such workers visible, as did efforts to regulate labour markets and wages. The article argues that rather than 'mental age' becoming dominant in framing intellectual disability, vernacular and negotiable categories of 'wage age' predominated in workplaces to the mid-twentieth century. Intellectually disabled people adopted precarious strategies of 'getting by' and while they commonly experienced low wages, could also sustain degrees of community inclusion at the margins of the economy.

Using the journal of the Dutch Diabetics Association (), the article provides insight into the role of an early patient organisation in conceptualising the chronic disease diabetes and its management in the Netherlands between 1945 and 1970. The dual aims of discipline (steered by health professionals) and independence (steered by diabetics) were reconciled through the concept of balance during the 1940s and 1950s. Organised diabetics played a particularly large role, and independence got particular emphasis as a consequence. This made it possible for organised patients to reconfigure their disease and identity in terms of social health in relation to labour, family and society in the post-war reconstruction period. In the late 1960s, this social concept transformed into a personal concept of health in which the concept of balance lost its prominence, despite a short intermezzo of medicalisation in the early 1960s.

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Leagues of Friends are charities that provide 'personal service to patients' and 'supply hospitals with equipment not likely to come from the budgeting of authorities'. Hundreds continue to exist, and many trace their origins to before the NHS's foundation in 1948. Despite the rich and growing historiographies of voluntarism and the NHS, Leagues have received little attention. This article uses case studies of Leagues in the English West Midlands to show how 'friendship' symbolised the relationship between local NHS institutions and the communities they served. The cases show that voluntarism in British healthcare has not always been based around activism and consumerism, two areas that recent scholarship has rightly highlighted, especially from the 1960s. This allows historians to interrogate the regional and local differences within, ostensibly, a highly centralised national health system.

The worldwide 'Spanish' influenza pandemic of 1918-19, which extended into the 1920s, infected more than a third of the world's population and killed an estimated 50-100 million people, more than the civilian and military casualties of World War I. Present-day medical scholars, journalists, and other commentators have often ignored, downplayed or treated with scepticism the role of bacterial vaccines in reducing mortality during the pandemic. There have been repeated claims in this century that these vaccines were 'useless', 'concocted', and possibly harmful. Focussing on the Australian scene, I show that bacterial vaccines from reputable sources did indeed reduce mortality, perhaps to a greater extent in some cases than modern anti-viral influenza vaccines.

This study examines the initiation and administration of Mercy Hospital in Republican Shanghai. It explains the protracted negotiations that underpinned the collaboration between the Chinese founder Lu Bohong, the Shanghai Municipal Council (SMC) of the International Settlement and the Municipal Administration (FMA) of the French Concession. Despite mutual needs for a psychiatric hospital, the collaboration was undermined by disputes over funding shares and administrative direction. While Lu expected a symbolic modern philanthropy, the SMC and FMA saw it as an economic tool to relieve the responsibility of regulating refugees and the increasing mental patients. They repeatedly forced Lu to make concessions with financial instruments, but ended up non-cooperation, leading the patrons to compromise to keep their problem solver. However, after Lu's murder and the subsequent dysfunction of the Chinese municipal government, the SMC and FMA could not help but take on this task to protect their settlements from the threat.