History of Medicine

WHILE PHARMACOPOEIAS like the Parisian Codex medicamentarius governed the world of apothecaries in ancien régime France, there also existed a parallel and more loosely organized tradition whereby pharmaceutical innovators were granted exclusive royal privileges for the sale of novel therapeutic preparations, called “secret remedies.” These privileges in effect granted legal monopolies over the sale of a given drug. Many privilege holders held no formal medical credentials and were not members of the medical corporations—the faculties and colleges of physicians, or the guilds of surgeons and apothecaries.

Objective: Throughout history, gout has been referred to as the " disease of the kings " , and has been clearly associated with the lifestyle of the aristocratic social classes. According to the written sources, several members of the famous Medici family of Florence suffered from an arthritic disease that contemporary physicians called " gout ". A paleopathological study carried out on the skeletal remains of some members of the family, exhumed from their tombs in the Church of San Lorenzo in Florence, offered a unique opportunity to directly investigate the evidence of the arthritic diseases affecting this elite group. Methods: The skeletal remains of several members of the family were examined macroscopically and submitted to x-ray investigation. Results: The results of the study allowed us to ascertain that the so-called " gout of the Medici " should be considered the clinical manifestation of three different joint conditions: diffuse idiopathic skeletal hyperostosis, rheumatoid arthritis and uratic gout. In particular, uric acid gout was diagnosed in the Grand Duke Ferdinand I (1549-1609). Recently, a new case of this disease was diagnosed in Anton Francesco Maria (1618–1659), a probable illegitimate member of the family. Conclusion: With this new case, uratic gout was observed in 2 out of 9 adult males, leading to suppose that the disease should have been a common health problem within the family. The aetiology of the disease has to be searched in environmental factors, since both historical and paleonutritional studies demonstrated that the diet of this aristocratic court was rich in meat and wine.

This article analyses how nineteenth-century medical science
apprehended the eye and its functions. It disputes Jonathan
Crary’s claim of the alleged mistrust towards human vision as
a source of reliable information from the 1830s onwards. It is
based on the analysis of scholarly and popular scientific publications
from the early 1850s to the first decades of the twentieth
century, a typology of sources overlooked by Crary as well as by
most of the works in the field of Visual Studies. It focuses on French
documents because of the progress undertaken by medical
research on the eyesight in the country at the time and the number
and scope of both scientific and popular publications. In the first
part, I analyse the new set of knowledge about the anatomy and
physiology of the eye that physicians developed at the time –
notably through the use of newly introduced instruments such as
the ophthalmoscope and the ophthalmometer. In the second part,
I describe how contemporary medical research led to the acknowledgment
of the subjectivity of visual perceptions and the fragile
nature of human visual capacities. In the last section, I show how,
through a process of classification and rationalisation of the newly
acquired knowledge, physicians managed to reinstate the objective
character of visual perceptions on the basis of their research.

A group of medical historians and paleographers has teamed up informally to create a "Medicine in the Long 12th Century Working Group."  More than 500 extant manuscripts from this period have been identified as containing Latin medical texts.  Adding in citations from 12th-century catalogs, we have at least 650 witnesses to the “common library” that made up learned medical knowledge throughout Europe in the long 12th century:  around 150 different texts in circulation, in some cases found in a single copy but in others in several dozens.  A revolution in medicine did indeed happen in this period.  But it was not a “revolution” based on wholesale absorption of new work made suddenly available in Latin from Arabic.  Nor was it a "revolution" based entirely at the southern Italian city of Salerno, which has long been centrally featured in narratives about medicine in this period.  This project aims to use the collected expertise of the contributors, and the ever-growing availability of digitized manuscripts (many made freely available on the Internet by their holding libraries), to create a comprehensive picture of medicine in this crucial period of change.  Our hope is that many subsidiary projects will emerge out of this, whether they be studies of individual texts, centers for copying manuscripts or studying medicine, or larger questions about the modes or impacts of programs of medical and scientific translations.

The first full-time professorship for urology at a German university was established in 1937 and in 1942, a rare teaching qualification (Habilitation) for urology was granted, both at the prestigious Berlin University. At the same time, nearly a third of all physicians who worked in the field of urology were classified as “non-Aryan” according to Nazi race laws and were forced out of their profession and their homeland. Many of them committed suicide or, if they refused to flee, were murdered in concentration camps. German urologists also contributed to compulsory sterilization of men according to the “law for the prevention of hereditarily diseased offspring” between 1934 and 1945.

Historical sources on the history of urology in Nazi Germany were reviewed and analyzed. These include textbooks and medical journals from the 1930s and 1940s, as well as files from different state and university archives.

For urologists, the changing political environment in Germany after 1933 offered possibilities to assert their personal and professional interests. Unfortunately, in many cases, moral principles were thrown overboard, and physicians advanced their own careers and the specialty of urology at the expense of their patients and their Jewish colleagues.

Under national socialism, German urologists backed Nazi health and race policies and in exchange gained further professionalization for their specialty, including university positions and increased independence from surgery. Only in recent years has this chapter of German urology’s past become a topic of debate among members of the professional society.

Los ensayos que integran el libro que el lector tiene entre sus manos se plantean como objetivo contribuir a desentrañar las ambiguas relaciones existentes entre demonología cristiana y cultura folklórica en un escenario específico –España y el mundo ibérico- y en un período determinado –la modernidad clásica. Para ello, la primera parte de Strix Hispanica se dedica al análisis de la historiografía de la caza de brujas europea, manteniendo como hilo conductor los debates en torno a la compleja mitología del sabbat. La segunda parte incluye una serie de estudios de caso en torno a dos figuras paradigmáticas del folklore ibérico tradicional: la bruja y el saludador. A poco que el especialista se aboca al análisis del complejo de la bruja peninsular detecta una superposición idiosincrásica de mitologemas que pone a prueba las más elaboradas herramientas teóricas y metodológicas al alcance de los historiadores profesionales. En efecto, el problema de la profunda originalidad del estereotipo de la bruja ibérica no puede abordarse sin recurrir al apoyo de otras disciplinas, llamadas a cubrir las lagunas, los silencios, que la historia académica no puede, no osa interpelar. El saludador, por su parte, es una de las figuras más irreductiblemente originales del folklore vernáculo. Aún cuando los saludadores no integraron de manera permanente el sistema de la brujería popular española, durante gran parte de la Edad Moderna hicieron de la detección de brujas y de la neutralización de maleficia una de sus actividades más lucrativas -más allá de su convencional virtud para curar la hidrofobia y de su espectacular dominio sobre el fuego. El complejo del saludador constituye un tema particularmente apropiado para encarar el estudio de las interacciones entre demonología erudita y cultura local, pues sus trazos específicos exigieron hasta sus mismísimos límites a los más sofisticados dispositivos diseñados por la teología tardo-escolástica.

After beginning his historical work in Switzerland in the 1950s and then continuing it in the United States at the Menninger Foundation, Henri Ellenberger (1905–1993) became the leading historian of " dynamic psychiatry ". This expression commonly denotes mental medicine that draws from psychotherapeutic practices and psychological theories to improve our understanding of mental diseases and to cure them. Although still used today, usually in juxtaposition to 19th century alienism or to biological psychiatry, the origin and meaning of this expression are unclear. An unpublished lecture (1956) by Ellenberger on this subject, accompanied by an explanatory introduction, is reproduced here to shed light on Ellenberger's interpretation of that term. This article additionally aims to draw certain parallels and distinctions between Ellenberger, Michel Foucault and George Devereux's teaching in the 1950s. Considering that the history of psychiatry is now a well-established speciality in the academic world, Ellenberger's lecture is also an original document which enables us to trace the professionalization of psychiatric historiography as an academic discipline back to its beginnings after World War II.

Matsumoto, Naomi. 'The Operatic Mad Scene: Its Origins and Early Development up to c. 1700' (PhD Dissertation, University of London, 2005).

This thesis investigates the origins of the operatic mad scene, its development up to c.1700, and questions of its definition and meaning. Chapters 1 and 2 trace the traditions behind musico-theatrical portrayals of insanity from ancient times through to the Renaissance, and in Chapter 3 seventeenth-century Italian examples of “mad” operas are codified and examined. Chapters 4 – 6 discuss the dissemination of the “mad” opera through France, England, Spain, Germany and Austria, and the relevant indigenous musical and theatrical conventions of each country are discussed.
        Having reconstructed the surviving repertory, in Chapters 7 and 8, the textual, prosodic, behavioural and musical topoi used in association with such works are examined. The difficulties of attempting to establish purely musical signifiers for operatic insanity are demonstrated, and other means of approaching a definition are suggested. In Chapter 8, the forms and uses of aria, recitative, recitative soliloquy and arioso are analysed, and their contributions to the musical characterisation of the insane explored. In Chapter 9 the insights already gained are brought together in a case study of Iro from Monteverdi’s Il ritorno di Ulisse in patria.
        The final chapter attempts to construct a typology of madness in seventeenth century opera based partly on literary criteria. It theorises the notion of fictive truth as a contract between the audience, the composer and librettist, and the protagonist on the stage. Next, the functions of mad characters within the plots are analysed in relation to the distinctive dramaturgical effects achieved by “fictive personalities”, “roles” and “character-types”. Finally, there is an attempt to locate our understanding of madness in opera within wider critical horizons, and to explain the cultural work that mad scenes do for us, as we listen to examples from the historically situated traditions of opera.

El trabajo analiza la creación en la Argentina, entre los años 1930 y 1954, de una
estructura administrativa nacional, orientada a la prevención y el tratamiento de las enfermedades
venéreas. Dicho esfuerzo responde a un proyecto político de un grupo de médicos,
quienes intentaron dar respuesta a los problemas sociales desde el ámbito de la higiene y
colonizar la estructura burocrática del Estado en su calidad de expertos. Por otro lado,
indaga acerca del proceso de especialización de las disciplinas encargadas de estas enfermedades
y su reconocimiento oficial como especialidades médicas.
PALABRAS CLAVE: Enfermedades venéreas, profilaxis, legislación, burocracia, especialidades médicas.

Henry, archdeacon of Huntingdon, England (ca 1088–ca 1154) has been admired for centuries as the author of the monumental Historia Anglorum. The recent discovery of the Anglicanus ortus opens a new window onto this important English author as well as onto the uses of poetry and the knowledge of medicine in medieval England. Written in Latin verse, the Anglicanus ortus describes the medicinal uses of 160 different herbs, spices and vegetables. Henry drew on centuries of learned medicine to compose this work, employing the medical knowledge of ancient authors like Pliny the Elder and Dioscorides and of medieval scholars like Walahfrid Strabo, Macer Floridus and Constantine the African. But this is no ordinary herbal: the work is staged first as a discussion between a master and a student walking around a garden, inspecting the plants in their separate beds, and then as an awkward performance by the same master before Apollo and a critical audience, seated in a theatre at the garden’s centre. Beyond its didactic and performative aspects, the entire work is framed as a prayer to God’s generative capacity and the rational order of nature. The search for that order is virtuous: as Henry himself says, ‘Happy is he who can know the causes of things, especially whatever will be the cause of health.’ This critical edition is based on the five extant manuscripts and includes a complete English translation on facing pages and a commentary on every poem. An extensive introduction traces the history and relation of the manuscripts, examines Henry’s poetic skill and use of sources, and establishes the place of the Anglicanus ortus in a pivotal era in the history of medicine and natural philosophy.

Sir William Osler is celebrated today not only for his contributions to the advancement of medical education, but also for the humanism he brought to the practice of medicine. He was a doctor whose bedside skills and manners were emulated, and can legitimately be called an infectious diseases specialist. Nonetheless, he was also a humanist in the broader sense of the term, a student of human affairs and human nature, who emphasised compassion for the individual. To what extent, if any, are today's challenges influenced by departures from the paradigms created by Osler? In this paper we sought to ascertain whether such a tradition is still relevant to current practice and may foster a new perspective. We analysed two features of Osler's legacy that may be useful to clinicians: the first is his vision of the patient-physician relationship; the second is his approach to humanities. William Osler saw medicine in its wider scope, with the right and duty to be concerned with the h...

This paper explores how tales of difficult births found in medieval miracle narratives can contribute to our understanding of the experience of pregnancy and childbirth in twelfth-century England. While rare in the early collections, pregnant and parturient women are increasingly visible in the miracula from the later twelfth century. This paper seeks to explain why childbirth miracles began to appear more frequently and became more medical in character. The discussion centres on the two miracle collections belonging to St Thomas of Canterbury, written by Benedict of Peterborough and William of Canterbury in the 1170s. Explanations for the more frequent appearance of childbirth miracles are found, not in the changing relationship between humans and saintly intercessors, nor in the contemporary interest in the maternity of the Virgin Mary but in the specific context of the cult of St Thomas and the new emphasis given to lay testimony.

"The anatomical body is a body double—the essay calls it a mirror that first anatomists, and later a larger public, peered into. Anatomical illustration and display required collaboration between art and science, and eventually became the terrain on which art and science were defined in opposition to each other. Dream Anatomy invites you to look and think twice about the anatomical body and its relation to self. The appeal of the topic—anatomy, anatomical representation, the anatomical conception of self, whether treated historically, aesthetically, or scientifically—is evidenced by the wave of anatomical exhibitions that currently attract record-setting crowds, the popularity of anatomically-themed art, and the numerous scenes of anatomical dissection which now appear in movies and on TV. The history of anatomy, Dream Anatomy argues, is everybody’s history: we all think of ourselves as anatomical beings."
-- Elizabeth Fee

The phenomenon of the ascendancy of the cult of Asclepius in the civic religion of the Greek polis is closely paralleled with the rise of the Hippocratic tradition. Asclepius manifested himself in the dreams of those in need both as a physician performing advanced surgical procedures and as a healing god who miraculously and effortlessly eliminated the pain and the cause of the disease. This paper focuses on divine epiphanies in the context of disease and healing, as well as on the usage of these divine epiphanies as diagnostic and therapeutic tools in the medicinal thought and practice of classical antiquity in general and in the cult of Asclepius in particular.

The intro is available on my personal website via the link. The Shape of Sex is a pathbreaking history of nonbinary sex, focusing on ideas and individuals who allegedly combined or crossed sex or gender categories from 200–1400 C.E. Ranging widely across premodern European thought and culture, Leah DeVun reveals how and why efforts to define “the human” so often hinged on ideas about nonbinary sex.

The Shape of Sex examines a host of thinkers—theologians, cartographers, natural philosophers, lawyers, poets, surgeons, and alchemists—who used ideas about nonbinary sex as conceptual tools to order their political, cultural, and natural worlds. DeVun reconstructs the cultural landscape navigated by individuals whose sex or gender did not fit the binary alongside debates about animality, sexuality, race, religion, and human nature. The Shape of Sex charts an embrace of nonbinary sex in early Christianity, its brutal erasure at the turn of the thirteenth century, and a new enthusiasm for nonbinary transformations at the dawn of the Renaissance. Along the way, DeVun explores beliefs that Adam and Jesus were nonbinary-sexed; images of “monstrous races” in encyclopedias, maps, and illuminated manuscripts; justifications for violence against purportedly nonbinary outsiders such as Jews and Muslims; and the surgical “correction” of bodies that seemed to flout binary divisions.

In a moment when questions about sex, gender, and identity have become incredibly urgent, The Shape of Sex casts new light on a complex and often contradictory past. It shows how premodern thinkers created a system of sex and embodiment that both anticipates and challenges modern beliefs about what it means to be male, female—and human.

Depuis 1633, date à laquelle Descartes range son Monde dans un tiroir pour éviter d’avoir les mêmes ennuis que Galilée, aucun éditeur n’a jamais publié ce livre comme tel, et dans l’ordre où le souhaitait Descartes.
Cependant, pour Descartes lui-même, c’est un traité à part, même s’il est resté inachevé. L’homme est en effet le chapitre XVIII du Monde. Leur dissociation est dommageable car elle masque le projet même de Descartes, qui est d’articuler la révolution de Copernic à celle de Vésale, et de proposer ainsi une relation nouvelle de l’homme et  du monde, où la médecine joue un rôle éminent.
Cette édition intégrale du Monde est donc un événement - en ce qu’elle procure un  texte complet, scrupuleusement établi (modernisé dans son orthographe et sa ponctuation), introduit par Annie Bitbol-Hespériès et annoté par Annie Bitbol-Hespériès et Jean-Pierre Verdet.

In early modern Venice, a city replete with professionals of intelligence conveniently located mid-way between East and West, pharmacies were amongst the most important centres where people met to exchange news, discuss current affairs and occasionally criticise political trends. Parallel to their main activities, many apothecaries sold illicit pamphlets and newsheets behind the counter, offering their premises as a convenient – and comfortable – shelter for those wishing to discuss the news. Medical shops hosted different kinds of sociable activities, as reflected in the arrangement of space and furniture, as well as in the timing of the shops’ activities. As can be traced in contemporary descriptions, in inquisitorial records, and in intelligence reports, political and religious topics combined with medical ones in the pharmacy conversation of elites as well as ordinary people. The study of pharmacies reveals a different centre for the exchange of news than the coffee-houses made famous in Jurgen Habermas’ study of the “public sphere” – and it also allows us to revise that famous account by grounding communication and the exchange of ideas in their material context.
Contents:
Pharmacies and the Inquisition
The Inquisitors of State and the Pharmacy at the Sign of the Sun
Well-Known Meeting Places
A Socially Diverse Clientele
Information and the Apothecaries’ Business"

MW 2:30-3:45 Office Hours: MW 11-12 or by appointment Spring 2020 Race and Medicine in U.S. History Af. Am 497I/Hist. 497I By the end of this course, you should be comfortable discussing how American physicians approached race from the colonial period to the present, as well as the response of everyday people to those unequal practices. Moreover, this class urges us to think about medicine as not simply the product of objective science, but as a set of practices influenced by and influencing the culture of the United States. This course argues that medical practice, medical thought, and public perception of the medical profession are contingent on the interaction of the American populace and the health sciences. In this sense, physicians and patients should be understood as consumers and producers of medical racial ideologies. As well as analyzing the history of medical racism, we also will study how people sought to reform medicine and even revolted against it. We will track the long relationship of distrust and opposition to the white medical professionals, studying cases such as formerly enslaved people exposing inhumane experimentation on plantations in their slave narratives to the construction of black hospitals at the turn of the twentieth century and into the present. To build an understanding of the historical relationship between medicine and race, we will spend much of the course steeped in primary and secondary sources (Ask about what these are, if you are not sure. The humanities think about this distinction differently than the sciences J) which considers various aspects of race in American medicine. These works will look at the roles of identity, discrimination, and the means of distributing medicine in shaping health

Nel ricordo della studiosa americana scomparsa a Firenze nel maggio 2012, il testo ripercorre il tema delle fonti cui attingeva Boccaccio per l'introduzione del Decameron, per sviluppare poi un confronto fra la situazione di Firenze durante l'epidemia del 1348 e quella di Bologna, come emerge dalle fonti testamentarie di quell'anno.

It is sometimes argued that the non-therapeutic, non-consensual alteration of children’s genitals should be discussed in two separate ethical discourses: one for girls (in which such alterations should be termed ‘female genital mutilation’ or FGM), and one for boys (in which such alterations should be termed ‘male circumcision’). In this article, I call into question the moral and empirical basis for such a distinction, and argue that all children—whether female, male, or intersex—should be free from having parts of their genitals removed unless there is a pressing medical indication.

This dissertation traces the transnational praxes of contemporary Chinese artists Cai Guo-Qiang, Chen Zhen, and Huang Yong Ping. Initially trained in painting, these three artists reinvent Chinese metaphysics in France, Japan, and the United States through site-specific practice to transgress cultural and linguistic limitations brought on by identity politics characteristic of 1990s art. Rooted in a mid-1980s fascination with metaphysics, the three artists materialized ephemeral, idiosyncratic cosmologies in their respective sites of “spiritual exile” to contest reified identity. While contemporary Chinese art has been well studied in surveys that create taxonomies to map out artist groups and movements, I suggest that closer analyses of these individual cosmologies, projected through particular biographies and iconographies, are necessary to nuance studies of Chinese contemporary artists, who are too often portrayed as politically driven to play the Chinese card and inflate their success in the global art market.

Departing from narratives of activism highlighted in previous scholarship, I take up issues of metaphysics historians of Chinese art tend to underplay for fear of reinforcing orientalist attitudes that plagued the initial reception of Chinese contemporary art. I argue that placing their cosmologies in focused historiographies of contemporary art and science reveals the artistic agency exercised by Chinese artists to achieve parity as individuals on a global scale. Cai, Chen, and Huang aimed to rewrite the teleology of canonical art histories through praxes that embrace energetic languages and non-linear time.

My study sheds light on a cultural trend that attempted to scientize paranormal phenomena as a means to reconcile art, science, and spirituality toward the end of the Cold War. Doing so remedies the imprecise connections previous scholars drew between Chinese contemporary art and pre-modern Chinese art, histories, and metaphysics that falsely privilege a sinological entry into this body of work. Instead, I suggest that these cosmologies are constructs of contemporaneity, practical strategies devised to spark creativity in contemporary situations rather than wholesale, uncritical deployments of ancient metaphysics.

Part I of the dissertation, Earth, introduces a synchronic analysis of the intellectual milieu of the mid-1980s in China and Europe. It situates Chinese contemporary art in an intersection of primitivist “root-seeking” cultural movements and a popular somatic therapeutic qigong fever marking 1980s China to trace the sources of metaphysics informing these artistic systems. This revival of metaphysics in China coincides with utopian efforts in Europe to mitigate the failures of capitalism through artistic and spiritual practice that culminated in the Magiciens de la Terre exhibition in Paris, setting stage for a global reception of metaphysical themes deployed by Chinese contemporary artists. Part II, Water, traces Huang Yong Ping’s deployment of anti-metaphysical, anti-utopian stances through paradoxical implementations of Chinese metaphysics in France in order to construct a formal language of time and teleology as intervention. Part III, Fire, examines the way technology and art in Japan shaped Cai Guo-Qiang’s position as an “artist of the East” who shifts the discourse of art from the global to the cosmological through volatile, time-based sculptures. Part IV, Air, unravels the microcosms and macrocosms of the human body and social metabolism Chen Zhen generated from the therapeutic efficacies of Eastern and Western medicine. Although each part of the dissertation forms its own autonomous cosmology, together, they cohere into a larger narrative of how contemporary expatriate artists negotiate their praxes in a globalized art system to dispel rather than reinforce orientalist readings under the aegis of the Beuysian “artist-as-shaman” thesis.

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Humans around the globe probably discovered natural remedies against disease and cancer by trial and error over the millennia. Biomolecular archaeological analyses of ancient organics, especially plants dissolved or decocted as fermented beverages, have begun to reveal the preliterate histories of traditional pharmacopeias, which often date back thousands of years earlier than ancient textual, ethnohistorical, and ethnological evidence. In this new approach to drug discovery, two case studies from ancient Egypt and China illustrate how ancient medicines can be reconstructed from chemical and archaeological data and their active compounds delimited for testing their anticancer and other medicinal effects. Specifically, isoscopoletin from Artemisia argyi, artemisinin from Artemisia annua, and the latter's more easily assimilated semi-synthetic derivative, artesunate, showed the greatest activity in vitro against lung and colon cancers. In vivo tests of these compounds previously u...

This book is OPEN ACCESS and available for download on JSTOR and other online repositories (see attached link to Cornell Press page and JSTOR DOI).

Institutionalizing Gender analyzes the relationship between class, gender, and psychiatry in France from 1789 to 1900, an era noteworthy for the creation of the psychiatric profession, the development of a national asylum system, and the spread of bourgeois gender values.

Editor's Note Want to learn more about the great master? Explore our interactive timeline here and discover what Leonardo was doing at your age. he Mona Lisa is arguably the world's most famous painting-and yet, like many of Leonardo da Vinci's works, it's also considered unfinished. Half a millennium after his death, new research has identified a potential explanation behind the Renaissance artist's series of uncompleted projects: attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD. Researchers from King's College London and the University of Pavia in Italy consulted historical evidence, including accounts from Leonardo's contemporaries, and concluded that his issues with time management, concentration and procrastination could be attributed to ADHD. Marco Catani, professor of neuroanatomy and psychiatry at King's College London, and Paolo Mazzarello, a professor in the University of Pavia's brain and behavior sciences department, said the disorder could explain "aspects of his temperament and the strange form of his dissipative genius." "It would be historically incorrect to accept the biographical account elaborated by the Romantic authors of Leonardo as a solitary genius who remained unappreciated by his contemporaries owing to his ideas being too advanced for his time," they wrote.