This article examines the place of habit in the medical thought and practices of 18th-century Britain. Scholars, including Steven Shapin and Phil Withington, have shown that habit was important to the broadly humoral understandings of health, disease, and regimen that dominated in Europe for much of the early modern period. In this article, I offer the first sustained attempt to understand the role of habit in the medical thought of 18th-century Britain, focusing on the influential Scottish physician William Cullen. For the first time engaging with all of Cullen’s work on habit, including his correspondence, pathological lectures, and clinical lectures, I show that medics of the 18th century developed a new understanding of habit, linked to changing ideas about the nervous system. Increasingly, they emphasised the role that habit could play in causing the periodical return of bodily functions, even when there appeared to be no plausible physical cause. In so doing, medics engaged with one of the key debates of the 18th century – the contested notion that human nature itself might be contingent on social and environmental conditions. For them, habit provided the means by which society could quite literally change the body. These ideas come through clearly in the striking suggestion – hitherto unnoticed – that menstruation was the product of habit, arising not from nature but from culture. Discussions of menstruation reveal the political stakes of habit, with links to highly contested debates about the role that bodies of different genders might play in society.

Since Foucault’s seminal work in the 1960s on the consequences of eighteenth-century discursive shifts in medicine, the establishment of hospitals during this period has often been interpreted as a progressive innovation driven primarily by medical scientists. However, less attention has been given to the ways in which the founding of hospitals was intertwined with domestic traditions and the practical challenges inherent in their implementation. By examining the establishment of the Seraphim Hospital in Stockholm, along with subsequent hospital foundations in Sweden, the practical difficulties involved become evident. Some of these challenges, particularly those related to funding difficulties, bear a striking resemblance to contemporary discussions on enhancing the efficiency of healthcare, despite the differing historical contexts. In the Swedish eighteenth-century context, ecclesiastical authority in medical matters persisted and played a role in the establishment process, while the military character of the kingdom also influenced hospital development. The conclusion drawn is that both national and local conditions shaped how medical reforms were conceived and practised. The historiographical emphasis on novelty and change may, at times, obscure the continuity of past practices, which undeniably played a crucial role in shaping the new. The concept of path dependency is thus employed not only to trace these historical connections but also to explore the ways in which they influenced the Swedish context, ultimately shaping the trajectory of hospital development in the country.

The inter-war period was a time of mobilisation against syphilis in France and its colonial empire. The spread of the disease was perceived as a threat to the economic development of its colonies, particularly because of the labour shortages it might cause. In 1916, a new player appeared on the scene of the French efforts to control the disease: the Institut Prophylactique, founded by Arthur Vernes. Its project was nothing less than to eradicate the disease, and its activities in the colonies expanded significantly during the 1920s and 1930s. However, the Institut Prophylactique has been largely forgotten in the history of medicine. Although the project was a failure, this article shows that it played an important role in controlling syphilis, both in France and in its colonies. This historical study thus emphasises the importance of considering alternative and failed projects as part of the complex picture of health history.

Developments such as the opening of the first psychiatric outpatient clinic, the emergence of psychiatric social work, the surge of interest in psychology and psychiatry, and the tightening of notions about sexual hygiene, intersected with the rise of the mental hygiene movement in India from 1930s. There exists little to no discussion on how mental hygiene developed in the colonies. This study is the first to shed light on the lesser-known chapter of psychiatry in India. The dynamics of family, childhood, and nation-state when merged with ideas about racism, caste, and communalism were critical in the making of new nation-states like India. Moreover, the trajectory of India’s participation in international health movements, such as psychoanalysis and mental hygiene, allowed for exchange and participation. India’s participation in the mental hygiene movement allowed the growth of psy-disciplines in innumerable ways. This paper fills in a major lacuna in historical writing by providing an outline of the number of interconnected developments in the colonies, which are often sidelined. The international visibility of India also permitted India to take centre stage in many significant studies that were conducted by the World Health Organization after the Second World War.

This article assesses the impact of the discovery of bacteriophages, which emerged from an investigation into a 1915 outbreak of bacillary dysentery in France, on influenza virus research. Specifically, it details the way in which the phages became a vehicle for importing certain assay techniques into the study of influenza and other viruses that cause infectious diseases in humans and other animals, thereby enabling the scaling up of vaccine production for these diseases. Very soon after his 1917 report of the discovery of bacteriophages, Felix d’Herelle developed an assay technique based on their ability to form countable plaques on solid media when incubated along with the dysentery bacteria. This basic technique was further refined by Macfarlane Burnet in the late 1920s. Still later, in the wake of a 1935 influenza outbreak in Australia, Burnet applied the principles of serial dilution and plaque counting, honed during his work on the phages, to develop a technique for cultivating influenza viruses in fertilised eggs and assaying them by counting the pocks induced on the chick embryo membranes. The ability to grow and assay these viruses proved crucial in developing the first successful vaccines against influenza. In the 1950s, bacteriophage assay techniques were once more carried over to the assaying of viruses on cultured cells by Renato Dulbecco and Marguerite Vogt. The importance of quantification in science, as well as the ability to apply the results of investigations in one area of biology to another, relatively unrelated field, is also discussed.

The U.S. National Library of Medicine holds two collections by Adolf Nichtenhauser (1903–53) that have become important sources for historians of medical and health films: an unpublished book-manuscript in which he surveys the history of medical and health films to around 1950, primarily in Europe and North America; and the valuable collection of documents he amassed partly during his research for this book-manuscript. Such is the richness of these collections that it is difficult to imagine a history of medical and health film that is not in some way indebted to Nichtenhauser. Indeed, his book-manuscript has become a standard citation in the historiography of medicine, health and film. Yet very little is known about Nichtenhauser himself, other than that he was a European immigrant to the United States who wrote this key history and died before its completion. This article seeks to do three things: to provide the first English-language biography of Nichtenhauser from his early life in Austria to his career in the United States; to use this biography to explain how he came to write this book-manuscript; and to explore the relationship between his historiography and efforts in the 1940s and 1950s to identify and solve problems with application of film to medicine and health.

In this article we trace a biography of vacuum aspiration in Spain between the 1960s and 1980s. Analysing the local but transnationally connected history of vacuum aspiration during late Francoism and the democratic transition, we argue that this technology was since the mid-1960s reincarnated in mainstream medical discourse as vacuum curettage, presented as a major medical innovation in diagnosis and therapy. While abortion activists working at the end of the 1970s emphasized the group and political components of a technique they called the ‘Karman method’, doctors performing illegal abortions within the family planning network defined vacuum aspiration in terms of safety and medical innovation. As we demonstrate, this technique embodied meanings that at times overlapped, at others conflicted, contingent on whether aspirations were linked to medical innovation, pro-abortion activism, or social justice.

This article explores how psychiatrists conceptualised the role of family relations and emotional atmospheres in the context of schizophrenia research in the second half of the twentieth century. It traces how families became the primary site to be mined and measured to explain schizophrenia’s onset, course and outcome, and zooms in on global psychiatric investigations of expressed emotion in families of schizophrenic patients, which aimed to offer a theoretical framework for understanding one of the most intriguing and influential findings of transcultural psychiatry: that schizophrenia appeared to have a shorter course and favourable recovery rates outside the Western world. The article engages with a wealth of research materials from schizophrenia and expressed emotion studies, and a variety of voices – clinicians, patients, families – which shaped these investigations. It also draws a comparison between this discussion of ‘traditional’ families as a beneficial environment for schizophrenia, and critical psychiatric and psychoanalytic discourses from the middle decades of the century which focused on the reportedly extreme psychopathological potential of ‘schizophrenogenic’ family relations in the Western world. Analyzed through this prism, expressed emotion research constructed the Global South as a preferable, even romanticized, alternative to the Western model of family interaction. On closer inspection, however, this idealization of the traditional family involved a variety of essentializing and romanticizing ideas which reinforced the ever-present binary of the modern West versus backward Global South, and perpetuated the belief in the decolonising and developing world’s cultural and intellectual simplicity.

HIV/AIDS posed a significant health threat in Denmark from the early 1980s until the end of the 1990s, claiming approximately 2,000 lives. Gay men, hemophiliacs, drug users, sex workers and migrants were overwhelmingly among the victims of the disease. They also constituted the groups most associated with it. This led to a raised level of public attention to these groups; a heightened visibility that ambiguously resulted both in improving the life conditions of some while also increasing the stigma of others. This article analyses the roles of different cross-sector actors in shaping the responses to HIV/AIDS in Denmark, with each group influencing and being influenced by the epidemic. Yet despite the clear connection between HIV/AIDS and the minoritized, often marginalized, groups, the article argues that the overarching and dominant response objective during the crisis in Denmark was to prevent a heterosexual epidemic. Throughout the crisis, other responses, aims and objectives concerning the groups most affected by HIV/AIDS could be, and did become, contingent with this dominant objective. The strengths and positions of those subresponses depended on, however, the perceptions of them as logical and tangible means to the primary end of preventing the heterosexual epidemic. Pulling together different and changing responses from different and changing actors serves to crystallize what objectives or logics are the mutual ones, and the significance of this analysis is that what appeared to be a very heterogeneous set of responses to the disease in Denmark, was in fact rooted in the same objective. Notably, the perceived pertinence of preventing the heterosexual epidemic was not rooted in actual rates of infection or spread of the disease.

Throughout the twentieth century, senior roles in UK public health were reserved for doctors. Local authority medical officers of health were replaced in 1974 by NHS community physicians and from 1989 by medical directors of public health. Over the last decade of the century, an increasingly vocal group of non-medical public health professionals sought to break the glass ceiling that restricted them from advancing to senior roles; although they received encouragement from some leaders within the Faculty of Public Health Medicine, there was also significant resistance from many members. A number of factors came together around the year 2000, which culminated in a ground-breaking decision by the English Department of Health to allow non-medical appointments as directors of public health and consultants in public health in the NHS, with the then Secretary of State memorably declaring it was time to ‘take public health out of the ghetto’. At the same time, the leadership of the Faculty of Public Health Medicine overcame opposition from some of its members and opened its training, examinations, and membership to non-medical candidates. By the early 2020s, half of the renamed Faculty of Public Health members were from backgrounds other than medicine as well as 90% of directors of public health in England. This paper explores the complex history behind this unprecedented opening of a medical specialty to non-medical membership, the factors that enabled it, and the continuing legacy of tensions and inequalities within an occupation that is both a medical specialty and a multidisciplinary profession.