Situating the Iberian Peninsula as the key point of connection between Europe and the Americas, both epidemiologically and discursively, The Spanish Influenza Pandemic of 1918-1919 sheds new light on what the World Health Organization described as "the single most devastating infectious disease outbreak ever recorded." The essays in this volume elucidate specific aspects of the pandemic that have received minimal attention until now, including social control, gender, class, religion, national identity, and military medicine's reactions to the pandemic and relationship with civilian medicine....

Since the eighteenth century, chronic diseases have superseded acute infectious diseases as the predominant cause of morbidity and mortality; age at death has shifted from childhood to older adult ages; and life expectancy, population, and the proportion of older people continue to increase. This transition constitutes a fundamental change in the human condition, and thus an understanding of the historical process behind it is of major importance. This book is the first to document this ongoing, worldwide epidemiological transition in a single country, drawing on records of cause-specific...

Intrusive Interventions is a history and critical study of public health in the Victorian and Edwardian period. Drawing on an array of archival sources from across provincial England and London, it investigates the emergence and consolidation of a set of government policies that came to be known as infectious disease surveillance, including compulsory infectious disease notification, domestic quarantine, mandatory removal to a hospital, contact tracing, and the disinfection of homes and belongings. Although these were a set of spatialized practices implemented in diverse settings such as...

In 1968, at the height of the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese Communist Party endorsed a radical new system of health-care delivery for the rural masses. Soon every village had at least one barefoot doctor to provide basic medical care, creating a national network of health-care services for the very first time. The barefoot doctors were portrayed nationally and internationally as revolutionary heroes, wading undaunted through rice paddies to bring effective, low-cost care to poor peasants. This book is the first comprehensive study to look beyond the nostalgia dominating present scholarship...

Drawing from original correspondence penned by lobotomy patients and their families as well as from the professional papers of lobotomy pioneer and neurologist Walter Freeman, The Lobotomy Letters/ gives an account of the widespread acceptance of this controversial procedure.

A new release, with a new preface, of Richard A. Meckel's classic history of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American campaign to reduce infant mortality.

Most people today celebrate vaccination as a great achievement, yet many nineteenth-century Americans opposed it, so much in fact that states had to make vaccination compulsory. In response, antivaccination societies formed all over the United States, lobbying state legislatures and bringing lawsuits to abolish these laws. One such lawsuit ultimately arrived at the United States Supreme Court, which upheld the laws in a landmark decision, Jacobson v. Massachusetts (1905). In this study, Karen Walloch examines the history of vaccine development in the United States, the laws put in place...

This book argues that the legacies of nineteenth-century public health in England and Wales were not just better health and cleaner cities but also new ideas of property and people. Between 1815 and 1872, the work of public health activists led to multiple redefinitions of both, shifting the boundaries between public and private nuisances, public and private services, taxable and nontaxable property, cities and suburbs, the state and the individual, and, finally, between different kinds of individuals. These boundary-making processes were themselves inflected by different material, political,...

Toward the middle of the twentieth century, African Americans in New York City began to receive increased access to mental health care in some facilities within the city's mental health system. This study documents how and why this important change in public health-and in public opinion on race-occurred. Drawing on records from New York's children's courts, Harlem's public schools, Columbia University, and the Department of Hospitals, Dennis Doyle tells here the story of the American psychiatrists and civil servants who helped codify in New York's mental health policies the view that blacks...

This book explores the interactions between French medicine and Vietnamese childbirth traditions, examining how these interactions shaped maternal and infant health care in Vietnam. Armed with the language and expertise of modern medicine, French physicians and administrators set out on a mission to relocate Vietnamese childbirth to a clinical setting. But as the French ventured into indigenous communities, they found themselves negotiating with a myriad of Vietnamese cultural practices relating to childbirth and infant care. Thwarted by local resistance, cultural misunderstanding, and...