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.

Cushing argues that government policy in the UK is prescriptive and encourages similar policies at school level (as reported in the press), which in turn encourage the ‘policing’ of language by school teachers. I offer an alternative reading of the evidence in which government policy, as stated in official documents, generally avoids prescriptivism, as do an unknown number of schools and school teachers; where prescriptivism persists it reflects a prescriptive culture in society, not government policy. The conclusion is that government policy is only one influence on teachers’ behaviour, so if government wants to eliminate prescriptivism it needs to take a stronger position than simply avoiding prescriptivism in its own documents. (Education, prescriptivism, policy, Britain)

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.