In 1968, the barrier of marital status was removed from oral contraception. This meant that for the first time, unmarried women could legally access contraception for both social and medical reasons. As a biomedical drug, the pill required women to engage more frequently with the medical profession, purportedly redefining the patient-practitioner dynamic. However, despite the removal of legislative barriers to family planning services, societal attitudes towards the use of the pill by unmarried women continued to regulate individual behaviours and restrict their contraceptive choices. This was heightened in Scotland, which lagged behind the rest of mainland Britain in implementing family planning services. Using oral testimony, coupled with archival evidence, this article traces the implementation of family planning services by the Scottish state. It then examines unmarried women's early experiences of accessing the pill, and the impact of societal attitudes, gender inequalities and medical hostilities on their reproductive autonomy.

This is an autobiographical history of working as a sexual health adviser in the mid-1980s, a time of significant change in UK sexual health services. There are very few first-hand accounts of health advising in the literature. Autobiography is an increasingly accepted method that uses the historian's personal experience to understand the past. My work as a health adviser comprised two distinct elements. First, I saw patients with gonorrhoea, syphilis or non-specific urethritis in the clinic, and encouraged them to inform their sexual contacts, sought information on their contacts in case they did not attend, and provided a health education intervention. If the patient defaulted, or if the contacts did not attend, I sought them in the community. The second role involved providing counselling for those undertaking testing for HIV. My account provides unique testimony of lived experience in, and reflections on key issues concerning, 1980s UK sexual health services.

This article traces the rise in popularity of condom usage during the 1980s HIV/AIDS epidemic in Australia's most conservative state, Queensland. This research demonstrates the efficacy of grassroots activism and organisation in promoting condom use as a life-saving measure, despite government inaction. Centring the role of the condom, this article is the first history of policy surrounding condoms in 1980s Queensland, illustrating the moral and social anxieties that coalesced at state level around the condom, which came into conflict with federal, medical, community and (particularly notably) religious perspectives. With AIDS, the condom itself became a site of acute anxiety in that it simultaneously represented a medical act of prevention and a socially fraught sexual risk. Acceptance of the condom was fostered through educational campaigns by and for targeted communities and in direct opposition to abstinence advocacy espoused by the state government.

This article presents two case studies of Scottish midwives, Mrs Laidlaw from Edinburgh and Mrs Alexander from Aberdeen who used newspaper advertising to promote their establishments. Primarily providing for women wishing to conceal their pregnancies and find alternative provisions for their children, the two providers marketed the discreet nature of their practice. Together their stories contradict the dominant strands of historiography on early nineteenth-century midwifery focussed either on its increasingly professionalised and masculinised nature or its rootedness in community practice, largely resistant to commodification. Instead, this article centres on female care and bodyworkers who found opportunities for entrepreneurship in the commercialised care sector. Through focussing on the services offered and their clandestine nature, it elucidates the experiences of lying-in of unmarried mothers of means. Highlighting the midwives' ability to adapt to the socio-cultural fabric of motherhood, it contributes to the histories of female entrepreneurship and its many forms within the care sector.

Most commentators have argued that the 'curious' tale of Epizelus is the first historical example of anxiety-related combat trauma. While the capacity to experience combat-related trauma is universal across human societies, focussing on whether Epizelus can be diagnosed with a specific contemporary traumatic condition is presentist and misguided. Instead of engaging in disputes about diagnosis, historians are better placed providing a close reading and dissection of the source material informed by historical and cultural historiography, raising new questions and offering a synthesis and analysis that can then be used responsibly by medical scholars. By doing so, the Epizelus episode can be recontextualised as an epiphany of a god: a story with deep meaning for the Athenians by the time that Herodotus was writing in the late fifth-century BC.

Using a historical case study of the World Bank and World Health Organization (WHO)'s Onchocerciasis Control Programme (OCP, 1972-2002), I explore how success is conceptualised in global health and why it matters for policy and priority-setting. First, I summarise the 'dominant' OCP success narrative that has emerged since the 1980s, which is based on public health, socio-economic and humanitarian justifications for the programme's effectiveness. Next, I analyse how socio-economic metrics linking the programme's disease control to increased labour productivity and agricultural land availability evolved in the 1980-90s. This alternative analysis of the OCP demonstrates how metrics, particularly when divorced from their assumptions and political context, are pliable and constructible. I argue that the OCP's success was by the World Bank and that moving beyond triumphalist, programme-level 'lessons-learned' approaches within global health requires disruption of the epistemic, institutional and discursive power that 'lies beneath' success narratives.

This article presents how acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) vaccine research was coordinated internationally between 1990 and 1995 by creating a special unit within the World Health Organization (WHO), the AIDS Vaccine Development (VAD) unit. This WHO's international coordination constituted a paradoxical repoliticisation of international human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) research, as it centralised scattered, privatised and sometimes hidden research within a single international organisation, while also reinscribing research in southern countries into ambivalent, postcolonial power relations by means of humanist arguments and research cohorts of military subjects. This history is important because the WHO coordination appears to have unwillingly elided the sociopolitical conditions of possibility for experimentation that were also, in part, driving the explosion of HIV infection on the continent at that time. Finally, it helps reflect on how the current global health paradigm of accelerated research for innovations and vaccine development can institute uneven research infrastructures.

This article focuses on the advancement of Finnish occupational medicine in the immediate post-war period, situating its development within a transnational context. Its objective is to offer insight into Finnish post-war industrial medicine and particularly developments in mental health care. The empirical methodology addresses a previously unexplored case study: the connections between the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health (FIOH) and Roffey Park Rehabilitation Centre, established in 1943 to address various cases of industrial neurosis. The case study sheds light on the ways in which FIOH adopted reformist ideas from transnational medical communities by aligning them with the needs of Finland's war reparations industry. The article argues that FIOH's experts advanced new theories of mental disorder for Finland's newly modern industrial society, and that these initiatives should be situated within broader transnational endeavours in the mental hygiene movement.

This article contains an analysis of the use and abandonment of bloodletting in Sweden 1820-1900. Close readings of over 8,000 yearly reports by Swedish provincial doctors and popular medical handbooks, journals and notes from medical societies have been used, as well as key word searches meant to illustrate overarching tendencies. One result is that quantitative balance between humours was not an aim of therapeutic bleeding in this context. Rather, bloodletting was mainly used to reinstate regular flows in a hydraulic model of the body. It is argued that a shift from focusing on smooth flows to seeing bleeding as blood loss marked a transformation of the medical imagination from working with an 'open', malleable body to a 'closed', fixed body. This helps explain why therapeutic bleeding, for millennia the most important practice in medical practitioners' arsenal, was silently abandoned decades before the breakthrough of bacteriology and scientific medicine.

Through the 1920s and 1930s, the Berkeley Police Department, renowned as a centre of scientific training and investigation, developed new programmes of predictive policing targeting 'predelinquent' youth. Led by Chief August Vollmer, schools, charities, social services and families throughout Berkeley were coordinated in the ongoing detection of early signs of developing psychoses and personality disorders believed to lead to future criminality. Implying a malleable trajectory of habit formation which might be perverted or corrected, predelinquency warranted psychiatric surveillance across the community to assist Berkeley's police in identifying, mapping and correcting at-risk children. This paper examines how, through the psychiatric category of predelinquency, law enforcement enrolled the community in networks of pre-emptive surveillance with new responsibilities for reporting and correction. In turn, I examine how predelinquency shifted to accommodate various local priorities and anxieties, whereby predictive policing's conceptions of potential threat or improvability reproduced the boundaries of the normative American community.

The child welfare exhibitions in Delhi, held for the first time in 1920, and then from 1924 to 1932, aimed at educating mothers to look properly after their children hoping to reduce illness and mortality. These exhibitions are to be understood against two broad trends. One is a worldwide interest regarding maternal and infant mortality and a greater awareness regarding the relevance of hygiene and sanitation. The other is the set of particular concerns in India and Delhi. There was a shift in policy and language between the end of the decade of 1910 and the beginning of the decade of 1920, when sanitation acquired a new meaning which included not only drainage works or cleaning of streets, but also hygiene lessons and inspection at schools; when there was talk about public health, and greater emphasis on the role of the 'Indian public' and 'social service' in the colonial discourse.

This article explores a colonial sanitation programme in Nigeria during the interwar period: the training and employment of Africans as sanitary inspectors to improve public health. From the early 1930-45, local health inspectors trained to educate the African public on modern hygiene principles emerged in a society where poverty made people pursue their changing personal interests in ways that challenged colonial laws and deviated from ethical standards governing behaviour in African society. In this landscape, some African sanitary inspectors and local chiefs articulated other meanings to the colonial hygiene project. Beyond the conventional racial analysis of colonial health, the article critiques the agentive role of local rulers and sanitary inspectors who shaped the health intervention. It concludes that by 1945, the well-intentioned programme had developed complications expected in an environment of budget restraint and economic hardship, transforming Yoruba towns into sites of power struggle between sanitary inspectors and the people.

The relationship between mortality and socioeconomic status is among the most debated topics within historical demography. This article scrutinises social disparities in infant mortality and its underlying mechanisms in mid-nineteenth-century Amsterdam. We apply two methods of survival analysis (Cox proportional hazard models and Fine-Grey competing risk models) on newly digitised individual-level cause-of-death data for infants born in 1856 combined with civil certificates and population register data. Through a comparison of all-cause and cause-specific mortality, we bring to light important social differences in infants' mortality risks; hazard ratios for congenital and birth disorders during early post-neonatal infancy were over 50 per cent lower for Amsterdam's middle class than for unskilled workers. We argue that the social differentiation in infant mortality reflects stark intra-urban disparities in maternal health across social groups as well as a degree of medical ineffectiveness or even indifference structured along the same socioeconomic lines.

Inspired by the current transdisciplinary debate about decolonisation, this article raises the fundamental question of how medicine can manage its own history in a way that safeguards the drive for decolonisation, but without eradicating the traces of previous misconceptions. We will do so by reconsidering a case from the complex records of physical anthropology, more specifically, a selected corpus of texts written by the two Norwegian physicians Kristian Emil Schreiner and Alette Schreiner in the early twentieth century, and their relation to race and racism. By teasing out the conceptual nuances and specificities in these texts, we do not attempt to exonerate the Schreiner couple of accusations of racism. Rather, we argue that it is essential to approach the past with caution, avoiding oversimplification when striving to distance ourselves from past thinking.

With the launching of the National Health Service (NHS) in 1948, this taxpayer-funded, centralised, universal service seemingly negated the need for new voluntary hospitals to be established in Britain. Within 3 years, however, the former doctors of the Kingston and Malden Victoria Hospital (KMVH) announced a new voluntary hospital (the New Victoria) after the KMVH was closed for repurposing in the NHS. Examining this case reveals stakeholder perceptions of the early NHS, including debates over general practitioner (GP) independence, local democracy and state control which predated and permeated the founding of the Service. I argue the New Victoria was founded as a response to and revolt against centralised bureaucracy and an attempt to restore a sense of GP independence and patient control in the local hospital service. Voluntarism, in the form of a voluntary hospital, was the medium through which these debates took place.

The discipline of human anatomy has often been overlooked in histories of race science in favour of comparative anatomy, anthropology, ethnography and statistics. However, understanding the historical relationship between human anatomy and race science is particularly important because of the discipline's central role, unlike its sister disciplines, in medical education. This article begins to redress this oversight, demonstrating that human anatomy played a key role in the development of nineteenth-century race science in Britain. This article considers three main elements of ideas about racial anatomical difference: the language of racial hierarchy, anatomists' location of racial difference within the body and the perpetuation of these ideas over time. In so doing, I argue that research into racial difference was demonstrably anatomical during the late nineteenth century, playing a key role in British anatomists' discipline-building processes, and that these ideas were present within the classroom, influencing generations of medical students.

Since women's entrance to the historically male-dominated medical profession in small numbers in the nineteenth century, they faced numerous exclusions and obstacles. In the 1960s and 1970s, as the number of women attending co-educational medical schools increased significantly, male students and faculty members responded with renewed opposition by deploying hypersexualised innuendo including references to magazine. This article brings together a range of material, including , student yearbooks, teaching materials, contemporary studies and oral histories, to document the masculine heterosexual peer culture that pervaded US medical schools, where sexual innuendo and centrefold-style images were commonplace. This learning environment influenced male students, perpetuating harmful views about women and fostering camaraderie at the expense of their female colleagues. These experiences also impacted female students, who confronted and negotiated encounters with sexual harassment, while balancing study, career ambitions and personal wellbeing.

In the months after March 2020, people across Britain began to seek medical attention for protracted illness following an infection with coronavirus disease 2019. Through the efforts of patients, these illnesses were eventually gathered into the diagnostic category of 'Long Covid' and therefore viewed as viral sequelae, in turn opening up the possibility for medical care and treatment in the British health system. This article adds to such patient-made knowledge of Long Covid through a comparative historical analysis with the problem of 'Post-Encephalitis' Lethargica (EL). In the early twentieth century, the viral sequelae of EL were parsed in line with and thus shaped by the binary divisions that were becoming used to structure healthcare in Britain. By telling this story of the past, this article provides a framework to understand if and how such administrative divisions within the National Health Service (NHS) might continue to inform perceptions of and responses to Long Covid in the present.

Small local hospitals have been neglected by historians, and frequently assumed to have been marginal to their communities and largely obsolete by the eighteenth century. This paper questions such assumptions via a case study of Catalonia. It provides the first comprehensive estimates for the number of hospitals over the course of the eighteenth century, and then examines a sample of surviving accounts and other documentation to analyse the extent and nature of care provided. While the quality of care varied and most hospitals were restricted by their income, particularly against a background of war and rising prices, many nevertheless provided considerable care both to transient populations of foundlings and migrants and to their local communities. The paper calls for a re-evaluation of these forms of care in line with the re-evaluation of women's caring work.

From 1890, as advertising in Irish newspapers grew in quantity and sophistication, a discourse of immunity began to circulate. Advertisers drew on advancements in bacteriology and immunology to present their goods as defensive strategies against a range of threats, from major infectious diseases to everyday coughs and colds. Consumers were urged to supplement their bodies' vulnerabilities by purchasing pills and tonics, with medical products joined by immunity-assuring underwear, coats, cosmetics and cars. From a dataset of every immunity-focused advertisement in the Irish Newspaper Archives and archives between 1890 and 1940, I unpack the ways immunity was presented to the Irish public outside of medical institutions. I show how discourses of immunity intersected with influenza outbreaks, consider the implication of the non-national origins of many advertisements, and trace their rhetoric of protection and resistance across a range of product types.

The healthcare provided to expectant mothers impacts the health outcomes of the mother and infant, or infants, and reflects current social and political priorities which mirror middle-class values and leave poorer women feeling socially isolated. Utilising focus group interviews with nineteen women who were living on low-incomes in Glasgow, Scotland, when they delivered their first child between the 1970s and early 2000s, this article analyses the women's recollections of their maternity care experiences within the changing middle-class health context. It reveals how expectant mothers remembered feeling healthcare practitioners prioritised the needs of the embryo/foetus/infant before their own. The women recalled feeling stigmatised for being pregnant and poor. While interviewees identified individual caring practitioners, overall a disconnect remained between the middle-class healthcare providers and the needs of low-income mothers. Finally, this article suggests that co-creating history with a third-sector organisation could offer a potential methodology for addressing the middle-class bias of official sources.