This article explores the cultivation of medical knowledge via popular health guides among the Finnish lay populace from the 1890s to the 1970s. By using written reminiscences and newspaper articles as source material, the article discusses the relevance, popularity, and practical use of various printed health guides and manuals throughout Finland. We place particular focus on the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century as the period that experienced a high increase in lay education and literacy. By focusing on individual readers and their experiences of popular health guides, the article examines lay medical and health practices as the number of medical manuals dramatically increased from the late nineteenth century onwards. It also investigates the reception of medical, popular and irregular health movements, such as hygienism, nature cure, and Couéist autosuggestion, and the change in medical culture brought about by the appearance of patent medicines. As the information discovered in popular health guides tended to fluctuate between official and irregular medical theory, we analyse the relationship between learned, alternative, and vernacular medicine through the views and opinions expressed by people who engaged with health literature. Through these materials, we provide a novel understanding of the accessibility of medical knowledge, the spread and impact of health guides, and attitudes towards different medical practices among the Finnish reading public.

The article focuses on the export of cadaveric pituitary glands from communist Bulgaria in the 1980s, used for the production of human growth hormone. The case is explored in the broader context of practices and transnational networks for the supply of pituitaries. Special attention is paid to the changes resulting from the turn to the production of recombinant growth hormone in the mid-1980s, which put an end to the international ‘market’ of pituitary glands. In the last sections, different perspectives are explored to make sense of the case under scrutiny: those of bioethics and biolaw, on the one hand, and of bioeconomy in a globalising world, on the other.

This article analyses the depictions of immunity and immunological functions employed in proprietary medical advertising in British newspapers between 1890 and 1940. Using marketing copy to gain insights into the ways immunity was presented to the public and normalised outside of medical institutions and publications, I offer four main areas of discussion. First, I present an analysis of the ways advertisements evoked both natural and artificial immunity in their marketing copy, thereby affording us insights into the ways immunity was made palatable both to those supportive of and opposed to vaccinations. I then unpack the ways in which this advertising copy often emphasised immunity rather than the immunological, that is, presented immunity as resistance to infection achieved by purchasing particular brands, rather than as part of a defensive process taking place at a cellular level. Third, I examine the ways in which advertisements engaged with futurity and drew on a narrative of social exclusion that pitted created communities of the immune against the non-immune. Finally, I analyse the ways in which immunity was used to connect the biological and the psychological, looking particularly at the ways immunity against worry was sold to the public.

Historians have written copiously about the shift to ‘germ theories’ of disease around the turn of the twentieth century, but in these accounts an entire continent has been left out: Antarctica. This article begins to rebalance our historiography by bringing cold climates back into the story of environmental medicine and germ theory. It suggests three periods of Antarctic (human) microbial research – heroic sampling, systematic studies, and viral space analogue – and examines underlying ideas about ‘purity’ and infection, the realities of fieldwork, and the use of models in biomedicine. It reveals Antarctica not as an isolated space but as a deeply complex, international, well-networked node in global science ranging from the first international consensus on pandemic-naming through to space flight.

We chart and assess the scope and utilisation of state-supplied hospital infrastructure in British Africa, c. 1900–60. Using archival sources, we examine the heterogeneity in colonial administrations’ investment into curative healthcare provision across various regions of British Africa. Our research highlights significant disparities in healthcare provision during the colonial period. These disparities were shaped by a range of observable factors, including differences in colonial policies, budgets, investment priorities, and the availability of medical personnel. We test stylised facts about public goods provision derived from previous literature and highlight the importance of understanding the historical context in shaping healthcare systems in Africa today.

Following the trajectories of vaccines against foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) in France and Britain up to the 1960s, this paper will show how vaccine efficacy has two meanings: 1) technical – or experimental – which refers to test protocols and regimes of evidence, and 2) practical – or experiential – which refers to the experience various actors have of diseases and their direct or indirect impacts on society and the economy, as well as on representations and imaginaries they share about diseases, vaccines, and vaccination. The assessment protocols in the two countries are analysed to show how these two meanings are deeply intertwined and influence the different public policies chosen by each country. Although statistically assessed, the efficacy of the same vaccines appears situated, depending not only on regimes of evidence but also on the reality of agricultural practices, on national stock exchanges, and on various imaginaries about animal health and the absence of disease that differ between and within countries. As a consequence, this analysis reveals how public policies regarding vaccination do not always come from governmental incentives but can also emerge from private and local initiatives.

This article examines the evolution of breastfeeding practices in twentieth-century China, focusing on the complex interplay between medical knowledge, state policies and social transformation. This study demonstrates how medical recommendations concerning lactation timing, intervals and weaning were shaped by factors beyond purely scientific developments. Mid-twentieth-century biochemical studies validated traditional practices while revolutionising attitudes towards colostrum, marking a critical juncture in Chinese infant nutrition science. Following the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949, maternal and child health initiatives underwent fundamental changes. Drawing on new understanding of breast milk’s nutritional value, health benefits, and economic advantages, healthcare professionals and state authorities actively promoted scientific breastfeeding methods. Their multifaceted approach reflected both the dissemination of medical knowledge and the state’s strategic consideration of female labour force participation. This study analyses how women’s liberation from feudal constraints, changing employment patterns, Soviet medical influence, and advances in artificial feeding technologies shaped breastfeeding practices. Through examining the intersection of medical advice, health policies, and women’s labour liberation, it provides fresh insights into the evolution of breastfeeding discourse within Chinese medical circles. Situating these developments within broader medical, social and cultural contexts, this research not only illuminates the multiple factors that shaped modern Chinese infant feeding practices but also contributes to our understanding of the complex relationships between medical practice, state policy, and social change in twentieth-century China.

This paper provides an account of a specific operation – the removal of the thymus gland (thymectomy) to treat the rare neurological condition myasthenia gravis – from its first performance in 1936, by the American surgeon Alfred Blalock, to the publication in 2016 of an international multicentre randomised controlled trial (RCT) of the technique. Thymectomy was the subject of a transatlantic controversy in the 1950s, in which the main players were the English surgeon Geoffrey Keynes, and American neurologists and surgeons from New York, Boston, and the Mayo Clinic. The resolution of this controversy involved the use of increasingly sophisticated statistical techniques, but also crucially other influences including the social transformation of thoracic surgery, and competition between the leading American centres. The consensus achieved after this controversy was challenged in the late 1970s, eventually prompting the implementation of a trial acceptable to twenty-first-century evidence-based medicine. This account will demonstrate that surgical innovation in the period covered required increasing attention to the statistical basis of patient selection and outcome evaluation; that the processes of technical innovation cannot be regarded as separate from developments in the professional culture of surgery, and that one of the consequences of these changes has been the gradual eclipse of the prestigious autonomous surgeon.

In the first months of the Spanish Civil War, the Spanish doctor Frederic Duran Jordà developed a new method of blood transfusion which overcame the era of direct arm-to-arm transfusions. While Duran was experimenting in Barcelona and the Aragon front, hundreds of foreign doctors came to Spain with the help of internationalist associations and offered their services to the Republican government. The Czechoslovak Dr Karel Holubec entered Spain in May 1937 and practiced in a mobile hospital funded by the Czechoslovak Committee to Aid Democratic Spain, receiving blood from Duran’s laboratory. This article aims to study how Duran and Holubec transferred the method of blood transfusion to Czechoslovakia through interpersonal contact, conferences, and performances. This paper argues that while individual actors played a crucial role in the diffusion of medical practices, this circulation was determined by a unique historical and socio-political framework. The Spanish Civil War, the International Brigades, and the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Nazi Germany were not only the historical context of medical innovation but an integral part of it.

This article explores the intersection of Cold War geopolitics, cultural psychiatry, and migration in Taiwan from the mid-1940s to the 1970s. Building on recent scholarship in cultural psychiatry and Cold War science, it examines how geopolitical tensions shaped psychiatric knowledge production in East Asia. Focusing on the psychological and social impact of the 1949 mass migration, when over a million Chinese immigrants arrived in Taiwan, alongside the clinical and academic work of Taiwanese psychiatrists, the study highlights how migration and societal upheaval became central research concerns. Operating under the authoritarian Kuomintang regime and within the constraints and opportunities of international politics, Taiwanese psychiatrists – most of whom were native-born with colonial backgrounds – drew on intellectual traditions from imperial Japan, fascist Germany, and the Cold War Western bloc. Navigating both global psychiatric discourses and local concerns, they positioned themselves as key contributors to the international development of psychiatric research. While their portrayals of Chinese character structure and family dynamics sometimes reflected essentialist views, their work also demonstrated a nuanced awareness of historical change and contemporary realities during a period of intense political repression and uncertainty. By analysing archival sources and medical texts, this article illuminates the complex interplay between geopolitics and psychiatric knowledge production in Cold War Taiwan.

Surgical sterilisation practices significantly increased in contraceptive capacity as the twentieth century unfolded. Despite this prolific uptake, sterilisation is markedly absent from histories of birth control and family planning and instead has remained addressed within histories of eugenics and coercion. The purpose of this article is twofold: firstly, to demonstrate a voluntary, contraceptive history of sterilisation that is distinct from, though connected to, involuntary and eugenic sterilisation; and secondly, to explain the integral role that individual doctors and their private practice played in the rise of contraceptive sterilisation in twentieth-century Australia. Through a combination of archival material and oral history interviews with twentieth-century practitioners of tubal ligation and vasectomy, this article reframes the history of surgical sterilisation, situating it firmly within the history of birth control.

Ghostwriting autobiographies has gained so high a profile that novels and films focus on the ghost. To deepen understanding of such collaborations in science and medicine, this article reconstructs the making of A Matter of Life (1980), ‘the sensational story of the world’s first test-tube baby’. Although critiqued by feminist scholars, revised through research and embellished in fiction, this double autobiography of Robert Edwards and Patrick Steptoe is still the standard history of the British team’s work to achieve in vitro fertilisation (IVF). It is thus high time to investigate the debt acknowledged only by ‘gratitude for his invaluable help’ to the physician and poet Dannie Abse. I use previously unexploited manuscripts to illuminate relationships among authors, rewriter, and editor, and among those they cast as involved in the research. The records show that Abse rewrote underwhelming drafts for a publisher that had bought and sold the doctors’ story of the ‘baby of the century’ and needed a bestseller. To engage readers, he reworked the text so that alleviating infertility appeared as a career-long quest. As a result of adding vivid scenes with characters and expository dialogue, Abse began to give women—wives, assistants and patients—larger roles in the drama. The objections of Edwards and his circle to various literary references and factual claims were overruled. Yet the authors came across more sympathetically, and IVF was promoted more effectively, than in their own drafts. The process puts recent retellings of the story into perspective and exemplifies how collaboration can shape scientific and medical autobiographies.