Concerned with the intersection of early Indian medicine and religion, this article examines the scope, scale, and influence of the medical philanthropy undertaken by Śaiva Hindu communities in medieval South Asia. It begins first with a non-exhaustive survey of epigraphs in Sanskrit, Tĕlugu, Tamiḻ, and Kannaḍa from various regions of South Asia during the Śaiva Age. Doing so, it identifies a substantive pattern of Śaiva monasteries, temples, and patrons building hospitals, donating medicines, establishing endowments for physicians, and/or teaching medical texts. It then proceeds to recognise the Śivadharma corpus, especially the Śivadharmaśāstra and Śivadharmottara, as a key theoretical guide that almost certainly informed and incentivised Śaiva medical interventions through its conceptualisation of the ārogyadāna (gift of health) as a highly meritorious act of dharma. The article also speaks to how the Śivadharma corpus helped nurture among Śaivas a broader concern for therapeutic interventions and longevity, which I suggest was also reflected in their engagements with alchemy and in their development and circulation of curative Sanskrit tantras. Finally, using philology, this article identifies the impact that the Śivadharma corpus had on both influencing the conceptualisation and normative importance of medical philanthropy in broader Hindu (esp. Smārta) discussions of charity in late medieval digests on dharma.

Richard Norris Wolfenden (1854–1926) had a remarkable and varied career in both medical practice and marine biology. As a laryngologist, he was involved in the controversial treatment of the Crown Prince of Germany with Morell Mackenzie in 1887 and later undertook oceanographic research in the North Atlantic as a founding member of the Challenger Society for Marine Science. In 1896, he created a striking series of X-ray images of marine echinoderms taken from the seabed of Scapa Flow in Orkney. These beautiful images, created with the assistance of fellow physician John Macintyre, were published in the inaugural issue of the Archives of Skiagraphy. In this work, we give a brief appreciation of Wolfenden’s contributions 100 years after his death and take the opportunity to offer a correction to two minor inaccuracies in a previously published account of Wolfenden’s life.

This article examines how scientific research on lactose digestion from 1950 to 1980 became entangled in shifting discourses on race, heredity, and population. It traces how scientific framings of lactose digestion changed during this period—initially racialized as a disorder (lactase deficiency) affecting Black Americans, later reclassified as an ethnic trait, and ultimately reinterpreted as a biomarker of European ancestry. Drawing on medical research on “lactose science” and archival sources, this study explores how geneticists, medical researchers, and anthropologists jointly navigated the complexities of race and human variation in the postwar period. Using Peter Galison’s concept of trading zones, the paper traces how ethnicity and population emerged as strategic alternatives to race, facilitating interdisciplinary collaboration while preserving racialized assumptions about biological difference. The paper argues that despite efforts to align with UNESCO’s post-racial scientific agenda, research on lactose digestion came to produce a normative discourse around whiteness. In doing so, it raises a critical question: how did an ostensibly anti-racist science inadvertently revive older racial biologisms?

This study examines overlooked or underexplored fragments from Rufus of Ephesus’ On Melancholy, as cited in Abū Bakr Muḥammad b. Zakariyyāʾ al-Rāzī’s seminal medical work, The Comprehensive Book (Kitāb al-Ḥāwī fī al-Ṭibb). Through an analysis of Arabic texts and Latin translations, we present two previously unexamined fragments and one of doubtful authenticity which reference Rufus’ understanding of melancholy. Preserved across diverse linguistic and cultural contexts, these fragments illuminate the transmission of ancient Graeco-Roman medical knowledge into the Islamic Golden Age and Renaissance Europe. Arabic texts are compared with corresponding Latin editions to verify their authenticity and trace their historical transmission.

In the annual presidential address to the American Society of Church History (ASCH), Esther Chung-Kim discusses the pivotal role of pastors, physicians, and lay healers in responding to poverty and illness in early modern Europe. She offers that their involvement shaped both social welfare and medical care. Reflecting the values of biblical examples, both Catholics and Protestants established institutions to support the sick and poor. Promoting practices of care for the sick, religious leaders, pious physicians, and lay healers promoted charity through medicine, in various efforts to expand access to care. Protestant reformers sought to shift responses to illness away from saintly intercession and instead toward direct appeals to God and natural medicine, seen as a divine gift. In some cities, Reformed ordinances mandated medical support for the poor by institutionalizing care during epidemics. The convergence of religious and medical reform, aided by print culture, resulted in Christian thinkers recognizing medicine as a form of God’s providence in nature (thereby encouraging a positive view of medicine), and physicians promoting religious reform in their medical treatises. In the early modern era, Catholics and Protestants both strengthened the link between Christianity and medicine with theological and practical ways to show care and concern for the sick.

This article discusses early modern North Indian ways of expressing how barrenness could be mapped onto a woman’s maternal identity. Scholars have engaged with the historical evolution of women’s identities, focusing overwhelmingly on their economic and political potential. This article is the first to use medical and erotological sources from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to study women as procreative agents, and the socio-sexual anxieties prompted by infertile female bodies. Through a critical study of a wide range of medical material, I demonstrate that by the eighteenth century, several transformations in medical discourses can be mapped onto textual transmissions from Sanskrit (and Braj Bhasha) to Persian, as well as between competing but conterminously flourishing medical paradigms, Ayurveda and Yunani. While cures for childlessness have a much longer history, a new genre of ‘anonymous’ sources, particularly focused on the sexual diseases of men and women emerged in early modern North India. Lastly, my comparative methodological approach to different textual genres will complicate our understanding of early modern medical episteme and its intended audience.

Lightning-related accidents were relatively frequent among age-of-sail seafarers, due to tall ships’ exposure and prominence above the sea. Yet lightning remains largely neglected in the historiography on sailors’ experiences. Examining a range of contemporary medical and philosophical literature, shipboard surgeons’ journals, operational correspondence and seamen’s memoirs, this article argues that lightning strikes created unique moments of epistemological and social crisis aboard naval ships. With its awesome multi-sensorial manifestations, divine symbolism and catastrophic and erratic effects on human bodies, lightning loomed large in many seafarers’ consciousness, as a powerful source of panic and trauma. At the same time, despite contemporary developments in natural philosophical understandings of electricity, surgeons’ training on how to treat these injuries remained limited. As a result, lightning could substantially affect naval shipboard relations between officers and ‘common’ seamen, creating challenges to the former’s authority and mobilising a range of competing emotions and knowledges. Considering lightning illustrates the fruitfulness of looking at uncommon but devastating types of injury, for historians interested in medical authority and in the doctor–patient relationship. It also helps us to start sketching accounts of seafaring bodies, health and maritime medical and religious cultures that give the sky its due place alongside the water.