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…
Category: History of Medicine
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,…
Love Hurts, But Where? A Brief History, from Lovesickness to Limerence
Readers of medieval romance were all too familiar with a common trope of modern romance novels: love is pain. Andreas Capellanus opens his famous twelfth-century treatise on romantic love by calling love “a certain inborn suffering,” a malady most commonly afflicting young noble-born men for whom the sight of (and subsequent meditation upon) his beloved’s…
The Birth of the Wellness-Industrial Complex: Justus von Liebig’s Extractum carnis as Exemplar
Baron Justus von Liebig carved out his name among one of the most influential yet now-forgotten figures in the history of chemistry. A major contributor to the development of fertilizer and its techniques for use, Liebig made an equally indelible mark on the landscape of mass-marketed foodstuffs, with his development of dried milk, his investigations…
Don’t Judge a Doctor by Their Coat – or Do We? The Fabric of Medical Authority Between Hippocrates and Us
Before moving to the United Kingdom, my life looked very different. I lived in a small town and I worked as an EMT on an ambulance. Professionally, it lasted only a few months, but on a human level – as a student and as a volunteer – it shaped me for more than three years….
When Medicine Met Diplomacy (Part III): The “Tokyo Project”
What was the Rockefeller Foundation’s “Tokyo Project”?
To Have and To Hold: The Clinical Significance of Getting Married in Interwar Japan
To Have: Marriage as an Etiology of Disease Entering matrimony can be a dauntingly momentous life decision to make. In Japan between the late 1910s and the 1930s, the significance of getting married at times went beyond uniting two individuals and manifested also through a drastic change in one party’s state of health. For the…
“She was evidently insane”: Gender and Madness in Victorian Britain
How did Victorians understand and diagnose mental illness? If a person on trial in a nineteenth-century British courtroom was thought to be suffering from “madness,” the court did not necessarily ask a physician to provide an expert opinion or to diagnose the individual. As Joel Peter Eigen explains, doctors were not respected as expert witnesses…
When Medicine Met Diplomacy (Part II)
How did American medical professionals design and learn from the 1923 Japanese Medical Commission to the United States for the promotion of “American medicine”?
“Innocent” and “Guilty” AIDS Victims: A Review of The Life and Times of Ryan White by Paul M. Renfro
Flyer, “Bring Your Grief and Rage About AIDS to a Political Funeral in Washington, D.C.” October 11, 1992. Several years ago, I was asked to give a presentation for World AIDS Day while working as a sexual health educator at a youth center. Popular histories of AIDS activism were in vogue, such as David…