Medical acculturation forms a crucial part of the process of migration, and equally, the influx of migrants can shape how medical structures develop in receiving societies – nowhere is that more evident than in the American metropolis. In the late nineteenth century, few ethnic groups caused such sustained bio-hazard concerns as the Irish in America. Poverty and the sheer numbers migrating in the post-Famine (1852-) era, caused the immigrant Irish body to be pathologised, or described in medical terms, to a much greater degree and for longer than their Anglo-Saxon or German counterparts. With a particular focus on Irishwomen’s use of maternity services in New York and Boston, this article aims to elucidate the potential of medical records to flesh out the understandings of how immigrants navigated healthcare. By adopting a case study approach to hospital records in tandem with other data sources, it shows what is being lost through restrictive data protection legislation. It discusses how Irishness was politicised in the contexts of immigration, the social history of medicine and medicalisation.

The Ospedale Maggiore, known as Ca’ Granda, was founded in 1456 by will of Francesco Sforza, Duke of Milan, and was considered for almost five centuries a model for Milanese, Italian and even European healthcare. Attracting patients from all over Europe, the Ca’ Granda distinguished itself for the introduction of new treatments and innovative health reforms. In the burial ground of the hospital still lie the bodies of the deceased patients, who came from the poorest strata of the population. The study of their remains aims to give back a general identity and a story to each of these persons as well as reconstruct a fraction of the sixteenth century population of Milano as concerns lifestyle and disease and examine practises and therapy of this exceptional hospital. It is estimated that about two million commingled bones and articulated skeletons rest in the crypt, together with other types of findings (e.g., ceramic, coins, clothing). These remains are the object of a large project involving various disciplines ranging from humanities to hard sciences. The aim of this paper is to bring this historical gem to the attention of scholars and provide a glimpse of what its contents have already revealed.

This article aims to demonstrate how researchers from different South American countries took part in the process of globalisation of the tropical medicine paradigm, through research on leishmaniasis found in this region. The main objective of the present article is to highlight the role of these researchers, as well as of their scientific institutions, in a global history of tropical medicine which surpassed European borders and its imperialistic practices. At the same time, it will be identified the renewal of the tropical medicine paradigm in the South American context. During the beginning of the twentieth century, leishmaniasis became an important health issue in tropical areas, whereas the mere usage of the repertoire of the medical knowledge, produced in Europe up until that time, revealed itself as an insufficient instrument to help solve the problem. Hereupon, this matter was, above all, an open discussion, which required great skills and refined techniques of tropical medicine for its study. For this reason, it enabled the members of the regional medical communities to establish vigorous communication channels with medical centres, located in other continents, that had already been giving much deserved importance to leishmaniasis as an exciting scientific theme.

Divided Germany became one of the focal points for international disputes over sovereignty in the late 1960s and early seventies. In a period that is commonly associated with West German Ostpolitik and the diplomatic recognition of German division, the international community disputed how the sovereignty of “divided nations” should be framed under international law. The German-German battle over the terms of détente unfolded within these politics of sovereignty surrounding conflicts over “national divisions” along Cold War front lines as well as the simultaneous confrontations over postcolonial sovereignty. At the United Nations, the issues of German and Chinese division converged at the height of decolonization when East German concepts of sovereignty and self-determination challenged the UN foundational principle of “one nation, one seat” rooted in ethnic nationality. Eventually, the United Nations accepted a German exceptionalism in admitting both German states as members in 1973 based on historical rather than legal explanations for divided German sovereignty, while conflicts around “divided countries” in Asia remained unresolved. In turn, these clashes over international law transformed older German legal traditions of sovereignty and self-determination and opened up Staatsrecht frameworks to legal concepts originating from decolonization.

This paper examines some neglected aspects of Hippocratic medicine, drawing special attention to certain methodological questions concerning the role of sense perception in the acquisition of medical knowledge. I argue that there is greater epistemological uniformity among the texts of the Hippocratic Corpus than is sometimes assumed. I provide a careful reading of seemingly inconsistent Hippocratic treatises in the light of a plausible and coherent epistemological model. The impression that we are dealing with different, indeed inconsistent, epistemological views can be explained away by the specific dialectical contexts of each work and their historical background. Most importantly, a proper justification of this model will require us to delve into the epistemological foundations of Hippocratic medicine.

Research shows that racism and xenophobia soared during the Covid-19 pandemic and this was certainly the case with the Roma in Romania. In this article, using critical discourse analysis, we analyse comments left below a television news clip posted on YouTube early in the crisis. This gives us valuable access to the way racism and xenophobia are linguistically expressed in social media, particularly in this Romanian context. It yields insights into how more overt forms of racism can sit alongside others which are less so, all united by a sense of shared embittered victimhood on behalf of Romanian citizens. We show how this takes place as the affordances of social media allow for a collective expression of frustration and mobilisation, reflecting on how social media may increase exposure to more extreme forms of racism. (Critical discourse analysis, Covid-19, online racism, Roma, social media, white victimhood)

This article examines the means by which perceived threats of sleeping sickness epidemics were used to justify extensive population resettlement through the formation of ‘concentrations’ in Ulanga District, Tanganyika, between 1939 and 1945. Underlying this specious spatial reordering of communities were ulterior motives that interpreted and pushed broader colonial development agendas of social engineering. The prominent role of leading colonial officers, notably A. T. Culwick, is emphasised and reexamined, especially in relationship to paternalism and the coercive aspects of closer settlement. This article explores the nature of legitimised coercion, contested meanings of the League of Nations mandate, and tensions within the administration. Local resistance to concentration challenged colonial hegemony and the self-fashioned form of benign autocracy constructed by officials like Culwick, who relied on a projection of prestige for political authority in his district and among his peers. Concentration was therefore a contested and contingent process with dissent evidenced both against and within government.