This paper examines competing treatments—surgery and radioactive iodine (RAI, I131)—for hyperthyroidism in the context of post-colonial Cold War nuclear science in Taiwan. Although the U.S.-led Cold War Atoms for Peace project pushed for the globalization of nuclear medicine, it had to compete with the Japanese colonial legacy in Taiwan (Republic of China). This government-in-exile embraced nuclear science and ushered in RAI with staged rituals. However, this modern procedure failed to overtake the surgical approach (thyroidectomy); in fact, as late as the 1990s, well after RAI had become a standard procedure throughout the world, surgery was still the major treatment option for this common disease in Taiwan. The tension between the global and the local is rooted in infrastructure as well as the materiality, regulation and availability of the Iodine 131 isotope, and, finally, the customary practice of the surgical tradition, established since the colonial period. Thyroid diseases, especially endemic goiter, were an important issue in colonial medicine, and the study, diagnosis, and treatments of thyroid diseases were an integral part of colonial surgeons’ identity. Surgical clinics had been a fixture of institutional medicine throughout Taiwan by the mid-twentieth century. In contrast, with the exception of a few prestigious hospitals in Taipei such as the National Taiwan University Hospital, most medical institutions and clinicians were not equipped to use isotopes. The availability of I131 was also limited, as the nuclear reactor did not become active until the 1960s. The preference for surgery thus points to the significance of material and social conditions of medical practice in Taiwan, amid the backdrop of the haunting images of the atomic bombs dropped by the U.S. on nearby Japan which the Atoms for Peace Project had aimed to overcome.

During World War II, the Japanese Kwantung Army’s Unit 731 secretly conducted large-scale, inhumane, and unethical human experimentation in China, culminating in one of the most heinous medical atrocities, crimes against humanity, and war crimes in the Asia-Pacific theatre of the war. Despite the gravity of the subject matter and its historical significance, research on Unit 731 has, for a long time, been rather limited, but has gradually increased in recent decades. In this article, we identify several important characteristics and trends in research activities related to Unit 731, with a view to providing a general overview of the existing scholarship and to providing recommendations for future research.

From the 1950s to the 1970s, academic research started to accumulate. The second stage was one of rapid development from the 1980s to the 1990s. During this period, research efforts in Japan had a far-reaching influence and began to spread to China, Europe, and the U.S. Scholars from scientific, medical, and educational communities began participating in Unit 731 research successively. The third stage of multi-dimensional development began at the onset of the twenty-first century. Research expanded into comparative inquiries of Japanese medical atrocities and their Nazi counterpart; at the same time, research on many topics in diverse disciplines was also deepened and intensified. In addition to focusing on pragmatic issues such as reflections and actions of modern society and reconciliation, researchers have also been concerned with historical writing and collective memory.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, Poland faced immense public health challenges amidst widespread destruction and political transformation. This article explores the largely overlooked medical mission of the Unitarian Service Committee (USC) in Poland, situating it within both humanitarian and geopolitical contexts. Drawing on archival research and press accounts, the study reconstructs the USC’s multifaceted aid efforts, including its Medical Teaching Mission, the establishment of the Piekary Śląskie hospital, and tuberculosis control initiatives. The analysis highlights how the USC combined direct medical assistance with educational outreach, aiming to support long-term recovery. However, operating behind the Iron Curtain, the Committee’s activities were subject to both surveillance and propaganda, revealing the entanglement of health and politics in Cold War Europe. This case offers new insights into the role of non-governmental actors in shaping postwar public health and diplomacy in Eastern Europe.

Torri’r Llech (TLl) (Welsh for ‘breaking the rickets’) was a bloodletting practice which remained popular in Wales from at least the mid-nineteenth up to the mid-twentieth centuries. The practice involved cutting the ear (pinna) to induce bleeding. Indications were numerous and dynamic. Vernacular medical practices, including bloodletting, have enjoyed a long history in Wales and were influenced by a multitude of conceptual paradigms over the centuries. By drawing on original oral histories, newspaper accounts, as well as existing secondary source material, this article aims to situate TLl within the wider framework of bloodletting practices in Wales and Britain more broadly. In doing so, this paper also considers the ways in which TLl changed over time and how this dynamism proved a persistent threat to the authority of official medical institutions in Wales. By then discussing how TLl itself appeared to draw on diverse conceptual frameworks, it is argued that it may more accurately be defined as a practice within the confines of popular humoralism – a syncretic medical paradigm influenced by humoralism, astrology, Christianity, as well as local belief systems. Ultimately, TLl exhibited remarkable longevity and may have been practised as late as the 1970s–80s in parts of the Upper Swansea Valley, potentially representing the latest example of a humoral bloodletting practice native to the British Isles. This analysis challenges more linear narratives of biomedical ascendancy, showcasing how TLl coexisted with orthodox medicine in a pluralistic medical marketplace in which Welsh patients consistently exercised agency over their own care.

This article explores the data entry labour demands of electronic death registration systems (EDRS), the jurisdiction-specific software systems developed in the United States in the 1990s and 2000s to ‘reengineer’ the process that informs vital statistics officials of deaths. Over decades of deliberations about how best to design and implement the tools, officials knew of two key issues that challenged death registration historically: the system moved slowly, and the data it produced was not always accurate. This article explores the techno-solutionism that led to the framing of EDRS as a tool that could solve these two issues simultaneously, improving both ease of data entry and the data’s integrity. But this flawed optimism about EDRS’s dual affordances, the paper argues, contributed to the tool’s sluggish implementation.

After years of focussing on infectious and degenerative illnesses, U.S. public health turned to the problem of accidents. Over the course of the twentieth century, safety practitioners repurposed the models of infectious disease control, risk-factor medicine, and biomechanics to improve the precision of injury data and to guide its applications. The resulting set of frameworks, methods, and practices, collectively referred to as ‘the epidemiology of accidents’, changed how health professionals analysed injuries but never produced a lasting consensus on appropriate safety interventions. This article uses the understudied history of home accident prevention to explain why mid-twentieth-century public health failed to prioritise injury control and what made home accidents especially intractable. During the 1940s, the American Public Health Association and U.S. Public Health Service collected statistics from communities across the country to determine the causes of home accidents and to inform local safety campaigns. These investigations were comprehensive but nonspecific, seeking to educate families about all the dangers of domestic space. After John Gordon published his influential study on accidents in 1949, this approach shifted from counting cases associated with risky behaviours and conditions to quantifying the extent to which isolable risk factors contributed to injuries. From the 1960s to 1970s, William Haddon changed accident prevention again, defining injuries as ‘abnormal energy exchanges’ and finding ways to minimise harm when accidents happened. Across these iterations, the epidemiology of accidents tried to identify, classify, quantify, and control the causes of home injuries but fell short of translating research into policy.

In 1970, Ted Williams – a medical missionary who had been running a small hospital at Kuluva in the West Nile region of Uganda for decades – was approached by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) to help establish a major study on the possible role of Epstein–Barr Virus in the aetiology of Burkitt’s lymphoma (BL). At the time, there was intense global interest in BL, as the cancer promised to be the first shown to have a viral aetiology. IARC centred its project at Kuluva Hospital and in the West Nile district because of Williams’ unusually detailed and accurate records. Williams was a meticulous record-keeper, who relied on various methods of data collection, from collecting and comparing to selecting and sorting. His paper-based archives and recording practices provide a rare window onto epidemiological knowledge production in East Africa in the decades before computing reshaped medical record-keeping. By tracing the ‘sociomaterial paper trail’ of Williams’s work, this paper examines how persona, place, and paper intersected in the making of medical knowledge, and how the researcher’s persona shapes the kinds of epidemiological data that are ultimately produced.

This article studies the relation between research reactors, the development of nuclear research centres and the pharmaceutical industry in the recent history of nuclear medicine. While existing scholarship has rightfully highlighted how medical applications served as a useful argument to de-militarize the image of large-scale nuclear research infrastructure during the Cold War, this study extents this perspective beyond the Cold War era. Using the Belgian Nuclear Research Centre as a case study, this article highlights how their orientation was negotiated within economic and political considerations. From the 1990s onwards, therapeutic radiopharmaceuticals experienced increasing attention, while the amount of radioisotope-producing reactors was decreasing. In an era that had become more critical of nuclear infrastructure, this article shows how the production of radioisotopes became a social-political argument in the preservation of test reactors.

In this article, I examine the history of the concept of herd immunity, beginning with British epidemiologists in the 1920s and ending with the controversy surrounding it during the COVID-19 pandemic. I argue that competing historical and contemporary understandings of herd immunity reveal an underlying tension between observing the effects of infection-acquired herd immunity on the population dynamics of infectious diseases and actively cultivating it through immunisation. Originally offering an explanatory mechanism for the rise and fall of epidemics, the concept soon became entangled with strategies of disease control and technologies for producing immunity, particularly as mass vaccination became more common in the postwar era. This tension between observing herd immunity and cultivating it has produced diverse interpretations ranging from the temporary abatement of an outbreak due to the accumulation of infection-acquired immunity to the principle undergirding disease elimination through mass vaccination. I close by suggesting that the scientific debates and uncertainties regarding the relevance of herd immunity to public health strategies during the COVID-19 pandemic reflect this long-running tension between observing and cultivating immunity in populations.

With this paper, I suggest focusing on diplo-scientific actors as a fruitful approach to study how certain actors have helped to shape international organisations through their diplomatic activities and scientific practices. Using the example of the Swedish medical physicist Rolf Sievert, I show how Sievert’s personality and preferences came to decisively shape the post-war trajectory of the International Commission on Radiation Protection (ICRP) and more broadly the international landscape of radiation protection. In the inter-war period, Sievert was engaged in the ICRP and its mother organisation, the International Radiological Congress (IRC), dealing with the interwoven questions of how to formulate international radiation standards and radiation protection initiatives. Following the Second World War, Sievert became concerned with the proliferation of nuclear technologies and the spread of radioactive fallout following nuclear test bombings. Because of this concern, Sievert set out to separate the ICRP from the IRC and form a new, independent group that could deal with the dangers of the new ‘Nuclear Age’. While Sievert was ultimately unsuccessful, his attempts would decisively change the purview and trajectory of the ICRP. This had large ramifications, as the ICRP continues to be the prime international organisation on radiological and medical radiation protection, formulating recommendations that are used by international, regional, national, and local groups, informing epistemic judgements on radiation research.

This article is concerned with the history of eugenic sterilisation in Britain through the 1920s and 1930s. In this period, the Eugenics Society mounted an active but ultimately unsuccessful campaign to legalise the voluntary surgical sterilisation of various categories of people, including those deemed ‘mentally deficient’ or ‘defective’. We take as our explicit focus the propaganda produced and disseminated by the Eugenics Society as part of this campaign, and especially the various kinds of data mobilised therein. The parliamentary defeat of the Society’s Sterilisation Bill in July 1931 marks, we argue, a significant shift in the tactics of the campaign. Before this, the Eugenics Society framed sterilisation as a promising method for eradicating, or at least significantly reducing the incidence of, inherited ‘mental defect’. Subsequently, they came to emphasise the inequality of access to sterilisation between rich and poor, (re)positioning theirs as an egalitarian campaign aimed at extending a form of reproductive agency to the disadvantaged. These distinct phases of the campaign were each supported by different kinds of propaganda material, which in turn centred on very different types of data. As the campaign evolved, the numbers and quantitative rhetoric which typified earlier propaganda materials gave way to a more qualitative approach, which notably included the selective incorporation of the voices of people living with hereditary ‘defects’. In addition to exposing a rupture in the Eugenics Society’s propagandistic data practices, this episode underscores the need to further incorporate disabled dialogues and perspectives into our histories of eugenics.

In the late 1930s, children in three Malawian villages were subjected to a peculiar test for vitamin A deficiency devised by Dr. Benjamin Platt, director of the Nyasaland Nutrition Survey and a leading colonial nutrition scientist. Platt constructed a makeshift adaptometer, appropriate for field conditions, that could be placed over a subject’s head to measure retinal adaptation to light. He built this contraption from simple materials, including a five-pound tea-box and sticking plaster. This article takes the curious commingling of commodity objects and scientific materials (where a discarded tea-box finds new life as an experimental technology) as an entry point for examining how scientific practices are woven from semiotic and material threads, demonstrating how heterogeneous social and material elements overlap and influence one another. The article first analyses how Platt’s tea-box adaptometer – and the discourses and ambitions framing the Survey – imagined a new kind of nutrition research hinged to the space of the field rather than the laboratory. It then proceeds to consider how the tea-box, an incipient manifestation of ‘appropriate technology’, points us towards the more tacit ways that tea wove itself into the fabric of the Survey and colonial society, as a gustatory discourse steeped in racial anxieties. Attending to the ‘stuff’ of scientific work cued me to broader imperial circuits and interests that shaped colonial nutrition research.