Far from passive recipients of questionable treatments, nineteenth-century asylum patients formed their own opinions on what constituted effective care. Patients’ critical views occasionally appeared in asylum periodicals that were published throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with various degrees of patient involvement. Though institutionally supervised, these publications platformed views that challenged contemporary medical ideas and…
Category: History of Medicine
Detestable Contagions: Richard Tennant Cooper’s Representations of Syphilis, ca. 1912
Girolamo Fracastoro’s sixteenth-century epic poem Syphilis, sive Morbus Gallicus tells the story of a shepherd who was stricken with a particularly unpleasant condition after insulting the sun god Apollo. A self-proclaimed “medical essay,” Syphilis offers an origin story for the New World disease, a celebration of its contemporary cure (mercury), and a number of behaviors…
Plant Ignorance for “Enlightened Races”: Shirai Mitsutarō (1863–1932) on Famine-Relief Flora
How one evaluates ignorance is inseparable from what they regard as the condition for knowledge. At least, this was the case with Shirai Mitsutarō (1863–1932), whose contribution to the development of botanical sciences in Japan went beyond his research of plant pathology and extended also to an endeavor to chronicle the country’s scholarly tradition in…
Book Review: Drugs: The Story of Pharmacology by Rod Flower
In his new book Drugs: The Story of Pharmacology (Yale University Press, 2026), Rod Flower, Emeritus Professor of Biochemical Pharmacology at Queen Mary University of London, offers a grand-sweeping account of how humans have come to know and use medicines as we do in the present day. Throughout the book’s twenty-two chapters, Flower guides the…
Childbearing pains in seventeenth-century midwifery manuals by men and women writers
How did an author’s gender influence seventeenth-century descriptions of women’s childbearing pains in medical and literary texts? Most English midwifery manuals were written by men with theoretical knowledge of the subject, but with little practical experience. Before the Middle Ages, there were no clear names for physicians or healers, but with the foundation of medieval…
Book Review: A Monument of Charity: St. Vincent’s Hospital and Catholic Health Care in New York City by Thomas F. Rzeznik
In A Monument of Charity: St. Vincent’s Hospital and Catholic Health Care in New York City (New York University Press, 2026), Professor Thomas F. Rzeznik offers a comprehensive look into the daily operations of the long-standing, titular hospital. Through this process, Rzeznik celebrates some of the more influential women among the ranks of the Sisters…
The Art that Hurts the Healer: Hippocratic Medicine and the Cost of Care
What does it cost to care? Contemporary debates about medicine and the health system often return to this question through the language of burnout, emotional labor, and clinical detachment. Yet the problem is far from modern. At the beginning of the Hippocratic treatise De flatibus, a speech intended to be delivered before an audience and…
When Medicine Met Diplomacy (Part IV): The “Tokyo Project” Abandoned?
What happened to the Institute of Public Health project in Tokyo in the 1920s?
The Emotional Labour of Medical History
Recently, a professor questioned my use of the word “madness” when describing the mental states of patients in asylums in nineteenth-century Britain. The comment surprised me, as many renowned historians and recent publications use madness to describe mental health in nineteenth-century contexts.[1] Despite my confidence in my word choice, I panicked, worried that I had…
Plant Knowledge in the Shadow of War: Rooting for a Multi-life History of Gender and Medicine
Interested in collaborations on a multidisciplinary project on multispecies and multi-life humanities? Please reach out to the Center for Integrated Japanese Studies (CIJS) at Tohoku University by email, where we have only recently launched such an initiative! Plant Knowledge in the Shadow of War Whereas others saw death in the carnage of World War I,…