The role of bioethicists amidst crises like the COVID-19 pandemic is not well defined. As professionals in the field, they should respond, but how? The observation of the early days of pandemic confinement in Finland showed that moral philosophers with limited experience in bioethics tended to apply their favorite theories to public decisions with varying results. Medical ethicists were more likely to lend support to the public authorities by soothing or descriptive accounts of the solutions assumed. These are approaches that Tuija Takala has called the firefighting and window dressing models of bioethics. Human rights lawyers drew attention to the flaws of the government’s regulative thinking. Critical bioethicists offered analyses of the arguments presented and the moral and political theories that could be used as the basis of good and acceptable decisions.

There are two main trends in the field of nation-building studies. One subset of the field focuses on democratic nation building, seeking to answer questions of how people can live together in divided societies and presenting institutional recommendations. The other subset examines autocratic nation building, or how those in power utilize nation building to maintain their position of dominance. Scholars examine both types of nation building from above, examining government policies and elite action, and from below, analyzing the practices and emotions of non-elites. While there has been much progress in the field of nation-building studies, I suggest that we focus more on the conceptual differences between democratic and autocratic nation building, address the interactions of elites and non-elites in nation-building practices, and disaggregate analyses to take into account in-country variation in nation building.

Since Charles Jones referred to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as the ‘Cinderellas of English historical linguistic study’ (1989: 279), there has been a great deal of progress in research on this period, but, as Beal (2012: 22) points out, much of this has been in the fields of syntax, morphology, lexis, pragmatics, sociolinguistics and the normative tradition. Beal argues that the availability of corpora of Late Modern English texts has greatly facilitated research in these areas, but, since creating phonological corpora for periods antedating the invention of sound recording is a challenging proposition, the historical phonology of Late Modern English has benefited much less from the corpus revolution. To redress this imbalance, the editors of this issue, with technical support from the Humanities Research Institute, University of Sheffield, created the Eighteenth-Century English Phonology Database (ECEP), which is freely available at www.dhi.ac.uk/projects/ecep/

This article examines how international organisations with mandates in health and development interpret global economic crises and respond to disease. It contributes the perspective of World Bank to emerging scholarship on the various factors leading to the decline of the World Health Organization (WHO) and its Health for All (HFA) mission during structural adjustment. It does so by telling a story of collaboration and conflict between WHO and World Bank’s Population, Health and Nutrition (PHN) Department following the ambitious Alma Ata Declaration in 1978 until the initial global AIDS response. As debt crises emerged in Latin America in the early 1980s, WHO tried to find a way forward for HFA. However, the African crisis of 1985 fractured the international community’s support, causing WHO and PHN to dialogue more closely regarding health sector financing. As AIDS became a global crisis, this culminated in their 1987 joint research on the disease’s macroeconomic and demographic impact. However, observing WHO’s continued hesitance regarding financing and its decision to act as a donor gatekeeper, the Bank ultimately opted to work separately in AIDS. Thus, the themes of the Alma Ata versus Selective Primary Health Care debate of the late 1970s continued throughout the 1980s into the early years of the global AIDS response: a perennial conflict of financing within resource constraints and the appropriate role of donors in the grand project of health and development.

Individuals often face administrative hurdles in attempting to access health care, public programmes, and other legal statuses and entitlements. These ordeals are the products, directly or indirectly, of institutional and policy design choices. I argue that evaluating whether such ordeals are justifiable or desirable instruments of social policy depends on assessing, beyond their targeting effects, the process-related burdens they impose on those attempting to navigate them and these burdens’ distributive effects. I here examine specifically how ordeals that levy time costs reduce and constrain individuals’ free time, and how such time-cost ordeals may thereby create, deepen and compound disadvantages.

The history of dentistry during the Third Reich is still a neglected chapter in medical history; especially with a view to the concentration camps. Beyond the theft of dental gold, we actually know very little about the number of camp dentists or even about their activities and how these changed in particular in the final phase of the war. By using as a case study the biography of Willi Schatz, 2nd SS dentist at Auschwitz from January 1944 till autumn 1944, this paper examines the tasks of SS camp dentists in Auschwitz. It points out to what extent the scope of action of the camp dentists changed under the impression of extraordinary events, and clarifies that using the example of the Ungarn Aktion, in which more than 300 000 deportees were immediately murdered. It illustrates that such situational dynamics were an essential driving force for the expansion of dentals tasks. Despite the fact that Schatz was acquitted during the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial (1963–5) for lack of evidence, we show that dentists were not only part of the selection personnel but also high profiteers of the accelerated extermination actions. It can be demonstrated that participation in the selection process – originally reserved for physicians – offered SS dentists access to further SS networks. The study is based on primary sources supplemented with relevant secondary literature, and combines a biographical with a praxeological approach.

It is commonly argued that the decision to introduce a new vaccine is properly based on objective and measurable criteria, including disease burden and efficacy of the vaccine. Moreover, new vaccines are to be introduced rapidly and globally: delay is difficult to justify. Historical studies of new vaccine introductions paint a rather different and more complex picture. The few studies comparing new vaccine introduction in different countries suggest that ‘evidence’ for the efficacy of a vaccine was commonly subjected to varying interpretations. This paper, based on analysis of the introduction of the measles–mumps–rubella (MMR) vaccine in Denmark and the Netherlands, takes this argument further. Though both countries are – and were – small welfare states with well-organised national immunisation programmes, both adopted MMR a full decade after its introduction in the USA. The paper suggests that the reasons for delaying, in each case, are a reasonable reflection of each country’s concerns, perceptions of the three diseases, and technological approaches already adopted. There were differences in each of these respects. The decision to adopt MMR, which each country eventually took, was significantly influenced by the political and ideological changes taking place in the 1980s, including a growing emphasis on costs and benefits, as well as the growing influence of the international context.

This article is the first to explore Norwegian HIV/AIDS policy and activism. Drawing on a range of archival material and oral history interviews, it does this along two lines. First, it analyses how AIDS unfolded in the changing political landscape and health bureaucracy of the 1970s and 1980s. The question is addressed of how AIDS challenged and shaped social medicine, an important ‘thought style’ of the postwar health bureaucracy and an important factor in the creation of the welfare state. Second, the article contributes to a growing AIDS historiography tracing the genealogy of AIDS activism in gay and lesbian health activism in the preceding decades. At the advent of AIDS, formal and informal networks already existed between gay and lesbian communities, activist organisations and the authorities. The roles of gay and lesbian medical professionals and activists are traced, together with how they challenged paternalistic and heteronormative notions of social medicine and homophobic attitudes in the public healthcare system. By having one foot in the medico-political world and one in the queer communities, they were able to mediate and translate different kinds of expertise and knowledge to the authorities, the public and the affected communities. This ‘amphibious’ role gave them credibility with both the authorities and the communities when addressing public health issues and preventive work. However, this story demonstrates that gay AIDS activists were not immune to the reproduction of exclusionary or hierarchical mechanisms within the queer communities. It shows how the juggling of different roles sometimes posed difficult dilemmas for the activists and how challenging but important this amphibiousness was to them.

Between 1880 and 1920 the medical quest to unearth the causes of disease saw two pathbreaking discoveries. One was the bacteriological revolution – the identification of specific germs as causal agents of specific diseases (anthrax, tuberculosis, diphtheria, cholera and so on), and the simultaneous effort to develop disinfection techniques and immunisation measures to combat these diseases. The other was the rediscovery of Mendel’s laws of heredity and the resulting emergence of medical genetics, where an entire set of medical maladies (deafness, blindness, bodily deformities, haemophilia, Huntington’s chorea, feeble-mindedness and many mental diseases) were identified – rightly or wrongly – as genetically determined. The ‘germ theory of disease’ and the ‘gene theory of disease’ shared striking, all-too-often overlooked similarities. Both theories built on shared epistemological assumptions that influenced their explanatory mechanisms and their overall conceptual frameworks; both mobilised similar visual and linguistic vocabulary; both appropriated – and enforced – prevailing cultural and gender norms; and both enshrined broadly parallel hygienic practices. Reflecting similar social concerns, medical bacteriology and medical genetics acquired kindred scientific and societal configurations, which this paper highlights and scrutinises.

The COVID-19 pandemic has necessitated a rapid escalation in the use of telepsychiatry. Herein we revisit some of the ethical issues regarding its use, including patient benefice, distributive justice, privacy, and autonomy. Based on these considerations we would hold that telepsychiatry is a vital aspect of providing psychiatric care, and ethically should be offered as a format for treatment, likely beyond the pandemic period. Investigative and advocacy efforts will need to continue to determine its exact role within psychiatric care, and expand its availability for those most in need.