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Table of Contents: Social History of Medicine 23, no. 3 (2010)

Posted: 06 Dec 2010 06:12 AM PST

Although the entire TOC for the journal Social History of Medicine should be consumed post-haste by anyone with a remote interest in the subject, I'd like to pick out two papers that appear in the current issue.

The first is authored by Hannah Newton (University of Exeter), and is entitled Children's Physic: Medical Perceptions and Treatment of Sick Children in Early Modern England, c. 1580–1720 (subscription required). Here is the Abstract:

Historians of medicine, childhood and paediatrics have often assumed that early modern doctors neither treated children, nor adapted their medicines to suit the peculiar temperaments of the young. Through an examination of medical textbooks and doctors' casebooks, this article refutes these assumptions. It argues that medical authors and practising doctors regularly treated children, and were careful to tailor their remedies to complement the distinctive constitutions of children. Thus, this article proposes that a concept of 'children's physic' existed in early modern England. This term refers to the notion that children were physiologically distinct, requiring special medical care. Children's physic was rooted in the ancient traditions of Hippocratic and Galenic medicine: it was the child's humoral make-up that underpinned all medical ideas about children's bodies, minds, diseases and treatments. Children abounded in the humour blood, which made them humid and weak, and in need of medicines of a particularly gentle nature.

I have had the privilege of exchanging some correspondence with Dr. Newton, in part because of my interest in treatments of pain and suffering in the early modern period. Patient narratives are relatively difficult to come by in the nineteenth century, let alone the eighteenth and seventeenth centuries, and finding material that provides some material for constructing some of the meanings of pain and suffering for illness sufferers during those periods are even more rare, I suspect. Hence Dr. Newton's analysis of these subjects is both significant in its own right and especially valuable to my own work on the history of pain.

Although my work on that subject centers on mid-to-late 19th c. America, periodicity is ever a danger and hence I have found it important and helpful to contextualize my work in reference to older attitudes, practices, beliefs, and traditions regarding the experience of pain.

The article is highly recommended.

The second article I wanted to highlight is Roger Cooter's (UCL, Wellcome Centre) essay review of the anthology entitled The Cambridge World History of Medical Ethics, edited by Robert B. Baker (Union College) and Laurence B. McCullough (Baylor College of Medicine). The review is entitled Inside the Whale: Bioethics and Discourse. There is no Abstract, but here is an excerpt:

Like medical ethics before it, bioethics has a history of opportunism. Long before revelations in the 1990s that some of its institutions in the USA were funded by the pharmaceutical industry, the enterprise was hailed for saving clapped-out philosophy departments and their professors. It got bums on seats, the philosopher Stephen Toulmin stated in 1981. Less cynical, if more sinister, was the observation by Alasdair MacIntyre in 1984, that this was a domain where the ideological function of dominant conceptions masked professional power and authority, shielding it from general moral scrutiny. Many other scholars soon came to an equally jaundiced view, so much so that by the 1990s charges of 'ethnocentrism, medicocentricism, [and] psychocentricism' had become cliché among those seeking to reinvigorate what had become a bureaucratized managerial set of practices driven by an empiricist methodology and mindset (notes omitted).

The review is highly recommended.

On Schizophrenia

Posted: 06 Dec 2010 05:59 AM PST

Rachel Aviv, an award-winning mental health journalist, has a fascinating piece following a woman diagnosed with schizophrenia in the latest issue of Harper's (subscription required).

Here are the opening sentences:

Anna did not simply decide one day that people are made of paper. She came to the conclusion slowly and reluctantly, several months after she first noticed that the consistency of everything around her had subtly changed.

Although I do not agree with all of the points Aviv makes, her writing is compelling and the article is well-worth reading and reflecting upon.