Tag Archives: Wellcome Unit Seminars

Seminar 8: Peer support, mental health activism and changing doctor-patient relationships in Uganda

‘Peer support, mental health activism and changing doctor-patient relationships in Uganda’

The eighth and final HSMT seminar of Hilary Term will take place at 16.00 on Monday 6th March (Week 8) in the Lecture Theatre of the History Faculty on George Street, and will be delivered by Yolana Pringle.

Yolana Pringle is a Mellon/Newton Postdoctoral Fellow at CRASSH (Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities) 2014-present, and co-opted member of the Centre of African Studies. She has research interests in global health (particularly mental health) and the history of humanitarian intervention in Africa. She has conducted fieldwork in Uganda, Kenya, and Zanzibar. She holds a DPhil from the University of Oxford, which was awarded in 2013. While at CRASSH Yolana is conducting research on the work of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Africa since the 1950s. She is focusing on the ICRC’s education programmes and the diffusion of the Geneva Conventions in Eastern and Central Africa. Pringle’s doctoral research, funded by the Wellcome Trust, investigated the emergence of an internationally renowned psychiatric community in early postcolonial Uganda. During this time, Uganda established itself as a leader of mental health care in Africa, setting up a range of innovative research and education programmes. This aspect of Uganda’s history is all the more marked for its contrast with the almost complete collapse of mental health care in the 1970s and 1980s.

In the last ten years, the mental health landscape in Uganda has started to shift. New peer support groups, run by people living with mental illness, are engaged in outreach activities in the community. One of these groups is now based at Uganda’s psychiatric hospital, Butabika, supporting patients through recovery and working with British psychiatrists to provide recovery-oriented training to patients, staff, and carers. With support from human rights lawyers, former patients of Butabika have also successfully mounted legal challenges against outdated legislation and instances of degrading treatment. This seminar explores these recent developments, paying particular attention to the ways that ‘history’—both the history of psychiatry and in individual personal testimonies—is evoked and deployed as a tool in arguments for change. Drawing on oral histories, peer support media, court documents, and newspaper articles, Pringle discusses understandings of Uganda’s psychiatric past, explanations for stigma and discrimination, and reflect on how traditional spaces of psychiatry are being negotiated in new ways. She touches on hopes for the future, and consider the implications of recent developments for doctor-patient relationships in Uganda.

The abstract to Pringle’s thesis, ‘Psychiatry’s ‘golden age’: making sense of mental health care in Uganda, 1894-1972′, is available on SOLO, and the thesis itself can be consulted in the RSL.

Our seminar post last term about midwifery in Uganda has some more general reading about Ugandan healthcare, which readers may also be relevant to this seminar. Another title specific to Uganda and the topic of psychiatric care is John Orley’s Culture and mental illness : a study from Uganda (RC451.U4 ORL 1970), which pulls together anthropological and psychiatric studies of Uganda, analysing the difficult problems involved.

More widely, two other titles held in the Unit library focus on mental health in African countries. Colonial psychiatry and ‘the African mind’ by Jock McCulloch (RC451.A4 MCC 1995) describes clinical approaches of well-known European psychiatrists who worked with indigenous Africans, and explores problematic colonial notions of African inferiority. John Colin Carothers’ short pamphlet The African mind in health and disease : a study in ethnopsychiatry is a World Health Organisation monograph which further unpicks this concept of an ‘African mind’ and whether it has psychological relevance.

The library holds much material on mental illness and its surrounding attitudes, largely to be found in the section RC435-571, but we have picked out just two of them as an example. Madness and morals : ideas on insanity in the nineteenth century by Vieda Skultans (RC450.G7 MAD 1975) traces developments and changes in ideas about the insane and their treatment during the nineteenth century, looking at how psychiatric thinking reflects the contemporary moral outlook. Greg Eghigian’s From madness to mental health : psychiatric disorder and its treatment in Western civilization (RC438 FRO 2010) considers how mental disorders have historically challenged the ways in which human beings have understood and valued their bodies, minds and souls.

Please come and ask library staff if you would like any help with locating resources, or conducting further research. We also welcome further suggestions for reading not included in this post!

Seminar 7: Biology as technology

‘Biology as technology: an unexpected history of innovation in living things’

We haven’t forgotten about the Unit’s Seminar Series! As the series encompasses the History of Science and Technology as well as medicine, the last few seminars have focused on non-medical areas of HSMT. But this week we’re back – albeit with a very brief list of suggested reading, as plant breeding isn’t really our forté (falling more in the territory of the Radcliffe Science Library). Nevertheless, the genetic modification of plants is an interesting topic from a public health point of view .

The seminar, which is the seventh of Hilary Term, will take place at 16.00 on Monday 27th February (Week 7) in the Lecture Theatre of the History Faculty on George Street, and will be delivered by Helen Anne Curry.

Curry is a Senior Lecturer in the History of Science, at the University of Cambridge’s Department of History and Philosophy of Science. Her book Evolution Made to Order: Plant Breeding and Technological Innovation in Twentieth Century America traces the history of several early technologies used to modify genes and chromosomes. Currently, her research is in the history of global conservation, in particular efforts made to preserve the genetic diversity of agricultural crop species through the practice of seed banking, which has been the focus of a Wellcome Trust Seed Award in 2016–17. More widely, she has research interests in biology and biotechnology, the history of agriculture, horticulture and gardening, and the history of conservation and environmentalism.

In the mid-twentieth century, a series of strange tools were celebrated as revolutionary for the work of plant breeding: x-rays, chemical solutions, man-made radioisotopes. Many breeders envisioned that that these could be used to reshape plants to specification. According to scientific and popular reports, scientists would use radiation and chemicals to generate heritable variation “at will,” which would in turn allow breeders to develop agricultural organisms “to order.” There would be no more exhaustive searches for natural variations, and no more complex integration of desired variation into established breeds through hybridization and selection. Breeders would instead alter genes and chromosomes directly, transforming fruits, grains, vegetables, and flowers with unprecedented efficiency. In this talk, Curry charts the history Americans’ encounters with these early technologies for transforming plant genes and chromosomes. Drawing on this account, she will argue that it is impossible to understand early genetic technologies apart from the broader history of American technology and innovation. These were completely entangled with other areas of innovation and industrial production – electro-mechanical, chemical, nuclear – both in their material production and in the outcomes anticipated from them. In capturing this entanglement, Curry will show that many Americans envisioned and enacted the process of innovating living creatures, in this case new breeds of agricultural crops and garden flowers, little differently from that of innovating any other modern industrial product.

If you’re interested in reading more about issues surrounding human use of plants, the Unit Library holds two titles that are of particular relevance. The first is Anna Lewington’s Plants for People (SB107 LEW 1990), exploring the fundamental roles plants have in our lived in feeding, clothing, cleaning, protecting, curing, transporting and entertaining us. History of Medicine students may find the chapter on medicinal uses of plants useful: ‘Plants that cure us’. The impact of genetically modified crops is also discussed in a wider context of the heavy costs of plant use to people and the environment.

Philip Conford’s The Origins of the Organic Movement (S605.5 CON 2001) looks at organic agriculture against a backdrop of public concern about BSE and GM crops. It examines the attitudes of disparate groups which were the foundation of the organic movement, and chronicles its origins.

Please come and ask library staff if you would like any help with locating resources, or conducting further research.

Header image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/basf/4837267013
Available under CC licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/

Seminar 3: Fears, phobias and obsessions in the late-nineteenth century

Fears, phobias and obsessions in the late-nineteenth century

The third HSMT seminar of Hilary Term will take place at 16.00 on Monday 30th January (Week 3) in the Lecture Theatre of the History Faculty on George Street, and will be delivered by Sally Shuttleworth.

Sally Shuttleworthn moved to Oxford in 2006 to take up the post of the Head of the Humanities Division, with responsibility for the 11 faculties and units which make up the Division of Humanities within the University. She stepped down from this role in 2011 to return to research and is currently running two large research projects to extend her work on the interface of literature, science and culture: ‘Diseases of Modern Life: Nineteenth-Century Perspectives’ and ‘Constructing Scientific Communities: Citizen Science in the 19th and 21st Centuries’. She also teaches Victorian literature and culture.

Carl Friedrich Otto Westphal’s now-classic paper on ‘Agoraphobia’ of 1871 laid the foundations for the rapid development of work on phobias, fears and obsessions which sprang up in the last decades of the nineteenth century. This preoccupation with excessive states of fear, out of all proportion to any evident causes, climaxed in G. Stanley Hall’s ‘Synthetic Genetic Study of Fear’ in the American Journal of Psychology (1914), which registered no less than 138 different types of pathological fear, all with their own Greek or Latinate names, from more generalised categories such as agoraphobia, to the very specific pteronophobia (fear of feathers). In this talk, Shuttleworth will explore the intersection of medical and literary discourses of fear as they emerged in the latter half of the century, looking particularly at the ways in which psychiatry turned to literature for case studies of phobia and obsession.

G. Stanley Hall’s ‘Synthetic Genetic Study of Fear’, mentioned above, is available though SOLO in the American Journal of Psychology, Volume 25, No.3 (July 1914). The article can be accessed via this link if you’re already logged in to SOLO.

Several of Shuttleworth’s published works are also available online through SOLO. The mind of the child: child development in literature, science, and medicine 1840-1900 explores issues such as childhood fears, imaginary lands, sexuality, and the relation of the child to animal life, moving between literature and science. Chapter 2 of part 1 is entitled ‘Fears, Phantasms, and Night Terrors’, which is of particular relevance to the seminar. Shuttleworth is also a co-author of Crossing boundaries: thinking through literature, along with Julie Scanlon, Amy Waste, and Terry Eagleton. Shuttleworth’s chapter is ”So Childish and So Dreadfully Un-Childlike’: Cultural Constructions of Idiocy in the Mid-Nineteenth Century’, but its following chapter may also be relevant to the topic of fears: ”Aberrant Passions and Unaccountable Antipathies’: Nervous Women, Nineteenth-Century Neurology and Literary Text’, by Jane Wood.

The book from which Shuttleworth’s research project takes its name, Diseases of modern life by Benjamin Ward Richardson (QZ 40/Rich), is an interesting primary source text that we hold in the Unit Library, with some illuminating discussion of ‘Disease from Worry and Mental Strain’ (Part the Second, Chapter II). It covers such afflictions from mental strain as Hysteria and Broken Heart. This work approaches the effects of worry on health with the focus of the interview; a completely different angle on the topic of fear can be found in Philip Alcabes’s book Dread : how fear and fantasy have fueled epidemics from the Black Death to avian flu by (RA649 ALC 2009). This work looks at how anxieties about outbreaks of disease often stray from the facts to incorporate inflated fears about what is unknown, undesirable or misunderstood.

Allan Horwitz’s Anxiety : a short history (RC531 HOR 2013 and online) is a more general work on the topic, covering melancholia, nerves, neuroses and phobias, but has a pertinent chapter entitled ‘The Nineteenth Century’s New Uncertainties’. This explores how the newly industrialized world created a wide range of uncertainties, including a discussion of phobias. Finally, The age of anxiety : a history of America’s turbulent affair with tranquilizers by Andrea Tone (RM333 TON 2009) looks at medication and anxieties, and takes a brief look at the roots of modern anxiety in Victorian neurasthenia (‘tired nerves’) in its first chapter.

You can read more about Shuttleworth’s research into The Stresses and Strains of Modern Life here: http://www.britac.ac.uk/blog/stresses-and-strains-modern-life.

Please come and ask library staff if you would like any help with locating resources, or conducting further research. We also welcome further suggestions for reading not included in this post!

Header image: ‘A woman diagnosed as suffering from melancholia with fear, or fear of everything, and with a propensity to attempt suicide’
L0026691 Credit: Wellcome Library, London
A woman diagnosed as suffering from melancholia with fear, or fear of everything, and with a propensity to attempt suicide. Lithograph, 1892, after a drawing made for Sir Alexander Morison.
1892 after: Alexander Morison and Byrom Bramwell
Published: [s.n.],[Edinburgh] : [1892]; Printed: McLagan & Cumming Lith.)(Edin[bu]r[gh] :
Size: image 20.5 x 20 cm. ; Collection: Iconographic Collections
Library reference no.: ICV No 51428 and Iconographic Collection 38637i
Full Bibliographic Record: Link to Wellcome Library Catalogue

Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons Attribution only licence CC BY 4.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Seminar 2: Richard Titmuss and the origins of social medicine

Richard Titmuss and the origins of social medicine

The second HSMT seminar of Hilary Term will take place at 16.00 on Monday 23rd January (Week 2) in the Lecture Theatre of the History Faculty on George Street, and will be delivered by John Stewart.

John Stewart is a Research Associate here in the Wellcome Unit, whose research interests range broadly across modern British history. In particular, his work has focused on the history of health care provision and social policy, with an associated emphasis on the history of child welfare. Specific research topics have included: municipal medicine in inter-war England and Wales; child evacuation policies in wartime Scotland; and welfare provision in ‘peripheral’ areas of the United Kingdom and Europe. He is currently writing a biography of Richard Titmuss for the London School of Economics, as the LSE Library holds an extensive collection of Titmuss’s papers and of a number of his close colleagues and associates.

Richard Titmuss is perhaps best known as the first Professor of Social Administration at the London School of Economics (LSE). He was appointed to this post in 1950 and held it until his death in 1973 during which time he developed, initially single-handedly, the academic field of social administration/policy. He also held many official positions and advised the Labour Party on welfare issues. However prior to his LSE appointment Titmuss was seen, and regarded himself, as an expert on population and population health. This seminar examines his (erroneous) belief that the British population was about to decline and, more importantly, his analysis of the health of that population through which he showed that rates of morbidity and mortality were crucially shaped by environment and socio-economic circumstance. So, for instance, in the 1930s the infant mortality rate was significantly higher in the industrial North of England than in the affluent South East and, relatively speaking, this situation was worsening rather than improving. It is thus argued that Titmuss was instrumental, in the period from around 1935 to around 1945, in shaping the emerging field of social medicine, a field concerned with social rather than individual pathology. Titmuss published extensively in this area and the seminar draws on works such as his book Birth, Poverty and Wealth (1943) and on the numerous articles he wrote for journals such as The Lancet and The Spectator.

We have two of Stewart’s own published works here in the Unit library, which are of relevance to his seminar. Child guidance in Britain, 1918-1955 : the dangerous age of childhood (HV751.A6 STE 2013) is a history of the child guidance literature from its origins post-World War I until the consolidation of the welfare state. The concepts widely used in this guidance played a part in broader social and cultural perceptions of the healthy emotional development of a child. His earlier work, ‘The battle for health’ : a political history of the Socialist Medical Association, 1930-51 (RA413.5.G7 STE 1999) is a scholarly study of the Labour Party-affiliated Socialist Medical Society, founded in 1930, whose aim was a free, comprehensive and universal state medical service.

Richard Titmuss himself published a number of titles, many of which we hold. One that the seminar will focus on is Birth, poverty and wealth : a study of infant mortality (HB1323.I4 TIT 1943), a study of the inequalities between the economic classes of England and Wales. Titmuss concludes that such inequalities increased steadily in the first half of the twentieth century, and that maternal and infant welfare services had proved inadequate to the problems they were designed to solve. A broader work of Titmuss’ is Social policy : an introduction (HV31 TIT 1974), based on the introductory letters Titmuss delivered to students at the London School of Economics. The work explores the wide range of social, medical and economic changes in society which generate social problems, and analyses the implications of different solutions.

As an influential and sometimes controversial figure in public heath, we also hold titles written about Titmuss, after he died. David Reisman’s Richard Titmuss : welfare and society (HN16 REI 1977) seeks to explain and evaluate Titmuss’ work, concluding that his model of social welfare was the best of its time. Richard Morris Titmuss, 1907-1973 (HN16 GOW 1975) is a short pamphlet by Margaret Gowing published soon after his death that serves as a very brief memoir of his life. It gives an idea not only of his work, but also his personality:

“He had an inexhaustible fund of kindness and friendship and treated everyone alike, with real interest and consideration; he was available to all and was the most patient of listeners.”

Works on Social Sciences are generally classified under the shelfmark H. Social history and conditions, social problems and social reform come under HN, while Social and Public Welfare are HV. More relevant works will be found in these areas of the library.

Please come and ask library staff if you would like any help with locating resources, or conducting further research. We also welcome further suggestions for reading not included in this post!

Header image: Richard Titmuss (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Richard_Titmuss.jpg)

Seminar 1: Prophets of Progress?

‘Prophets of progress? Predicting the future of science and technology from H G Wells to Isaac Asimov’

The first HSMT seminar of Hilary Term will take place at 16.00 on Monday 16th January (Week 1) in the Lecture Theatre of the History Faculty on George Street, and will be delivered by Peter Bowler.

Peter Bowler is based at Queen’s University, Belfast, and is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a corresponding member of the Académie Internationale d’Histoire des Sciences. He was President of the British Society for the History of Science 2004-6. He has published extensively on the development and impact of the theory of evolution, focusing especially on the role played by theories other than Darwinian natural selection. More recently he has worked on the relationship between science and religion and on twentieth-century British popular science. His latest work is on twentieth-century speculations about the future development of science and technology, combining a long-standing interest in science fiction with his knowledge of the popular science literature.

The first half of the twentieth century saw the emergence of science fiction as a recognized genre, but popular science writers also sought to imagine what the next developments would be, especially in areas with immediate practical applications. This talk will explore a number of issues relating to how we can understand the role played by science in popular culture through these predictions. What were the interactions between popular science writing and works of fiction ranging from science fiction to the many pessimistic novels of the period? How were public expectations aroused and used to create hopes of major improvements in everyday life, or fears of war and other calamities? How were rival technologies promoted by those who hoped to benefit from their introduction? The talk concludes by taking debates about the future of aviation during the inter-war years as a case study.

We have three of Bowler’s published works in the Wellcome Unit Library, the earliest of which is The eclipse of Darwinism : anti-Darwinian evolution theories in the decades around 1900 (QH361 BOW 1983). In this work, Bowler reevaluates the influence of social forces on the scientific community and explores the broad philosophical, ideological, and social implications of scientific theories. The Mendelian revolution : the emergence of hereditarian concepts in modern science and society (QH428 BOW 1989) examines the interpretations and theories of Mendelian genetics and their role in the emergence of modern ideas and values. His 1990 work Charles Darwin : the man and his influence (QH31.D2 BOW 1990) further evaluates the biograhy and cultural history around Darwin’s work, and the motivations of its various evaluations.

As described in the seminar title, one of the writers Bowler will focus on in his talk is H.G. Wells. We hold two copies of his scientific writings in the library, both of which contain a number of interesting illustrations. The science of life (QH309 WEL 1931), written jointly with Julian Huxley and G.P. Wells, has been called the ‘first modern textbook of biology’, and Book 1: The Living Body is an interesting read for HSMT. This section of the book is reproduced on its own in a smaller (and less unwieldy) version, The living body, H. G. Wells (QH 325/Well). Wells and his contemporaries look at the concept that ‘The Body is a Machine’, which ties with some of the themes of several of Wells’ novels, such as ‘The War of the Worlds’, ‘The Island of Doctor Moreau’ and ‘The Invisible Man’.

Isaac Asimov is another writer mentioned and we also have a copy of Inside the atom (QC778 ASI 1961). The book describes the internal structure of the atom, and the sequence of concepts described follows the sequence that these facts were discovered in. It is intended to be accessible for the less scholarly reader, and ends on the somewhat foreboding note, ‘If only we can learn to use wisely the knowledge we already have…’, echoing fears of technology that can be seen in twentieth-century literature, in particular science fiction.

The intersection of medicine and literature is an interesting subsection of the history of medicine, and works on this topic can be found most commonly in the Wellcome Unit Library at shelfmark ‘P’. Our collections in the area have particular strengths in the influence of psychology and its theories on literature. The mind of modernism : medicine, psychology, and the cultural arts in Europe and America, 1880-1940 by Mark Micale (PN56.P93 MIN 2004) explores the interplay of the aesthetic and psychological domains during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in relation to Modernism, which took shape when modern psychological disciplines were establishing their scientific foundations. William Greenslade’s Degeneration, culture and the novel, 1880-1940 (PR888.D373 G74 GRE 1994) looks at how developments in medical, biological and psychiatric sciences led many to believe that ignorance, insanity, criminality and even homosexuality were evidence of degeneration of the human race, causing disturbing social changes. Greenslade examines the impact of these degeneration theories on culture and fiction.

Please come and ask library staff if you would like any help with locating resources, or conducting further research. We also welcome further suggestions for reading not included in this post!

1. David C. Smith, H.G. Wells: Desperately Mortal (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 262.

Hilary Term 2017 Seminar Series

The following seminars will be held on Mondays at 4pm in the History Faculty Lecture Theatre, George Street.

Coffee will be available from 15:30

All are welcome

*Please note: there will be no weekly blog post with suggested reading for seminars 4-6, as these are not on the History of Medicine*

‘Research Seminars in the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology’

Week 1: 16 January
Peter Bowler, Queen’s University, Belfast
‘Prophets of progress? Predicting the future of science and technology from H G Wells to Isaac Asimov’

Week 2: 23 January
John Stewart, LSE/Oxford
‘Richard Titmuss and the origins of social medicine’

Week 3: 30 January
Sally Shuttleworth, University of Oxford
‘Fears, phobias and obsessions in the late-nineteenth century’

Week 4: 6 February
Gordon Barrett, University of Oxford
‘Stuck in the middle with you: scientist, state, and network in Chinese engagement with the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, 1957-1985’

Week 5: 13 February
Philipp Nothaft, University of Oxford
‘Precession or trepidation? The motion of the sphere of fixed stars as a problem in medieval Latin astronomy’

Week 6: 20 February
James Sumner, University of Manchester
‘Garbage in, garbage out? A history of representations of computers in popular media’

Week 7: 27 February
Helen Anne Curry, University of Cambridge
‘Biology as technology: an unexpected history of innovation in living things’

Week 8: 6 March
Yolana Pringle, University of Cambridge
‘Peer support, mental health activism, and changing doctor-patient relationships in Uganda’

Conveners: Professor Mark Harrison, Professor Rob Iliffe, Dr Sloan Mahone, Dr Erica Charters

Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, University of Oxford
45-47 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6PE
wuhmo@wuhmo.ox.ac.uk
Tel: (01865) 274600
wuhmo@wuhmo.ox.ac.uk

Details of all Wellcome Unit events can be found at: www.wuhmo.ox.ac.uk

Seminar 8: ‘William James and “the laws of health” in nineteenth-century America’

‘William James and “the laws of health” in nineteenth-century America’

The eighth and final HSMT seminar of Michaelmas Term will take place at 16.00 on Monday 28th November (Week 8) in the Lecture Theatre of the History Faculty on George Street, and will be delivered by Emma Sutton.

Sutton’s central research interest is the history and philosophy of concepts of health. Her PhD thesis examined this topic from a biographical perspective, looking at the American philosopher and psychologist William James’s explorations of different understandings of health and their social, philosophical and religious contexts: ‘Re-writing the laws of health: William James on the politics and philosophy of disease in nineteenth-century America.’ Sutton’s post-doctoral research extends her focus further into the twentieth century and explores the links between child-rearing ideas and practices and concepts of psychological health.

The nineteenth-century American philosopher and psychologist William James is known for his writings on the physiological study of psychology, the psychology of religion, and as one of the founders of the philosophical school of pragmatism. His work, whilst well-respected by his professional colleagues, also received an extremely wide popular dissemination, and contemporary scholars have probed his writings in an attempt to discern his political message to the masses. In this seminar, Sutton argues that James’s politics do not fit easily within conventional academic concerns with the categories of class, gender and race. Instead she proposes that James was occupied with what may be characterised as a politics of invalidism and health; a response to the growing and, as he saw it, increasingly disturbing cultural authority of medical concerns, values and normative expectations. She will explore how James’s ethico-political manifesto may be read as a reaction against both the hygienic guidelines for healthy living, “the laws of health”, and also the state legislation that aimed at restricting therapeutic practices to the orthodox medical profession.

We hold two primary texts by William James at the Wellcome Unit Library: the first, a (well-loved) copy of William James : a selection from his writings on psychology (WMA/Jame/K), edited with commentary by Margaret Knight. It contains extracts from several of James’ works, including Principles of Psychology – proclaimed by the blurb as ‘one of the greatest books on the subject in any language’. James, the book says, ‘begins at the beginning, and he deals with fundamentals (…) in a way which keeps the reader in a continual state of intellectual excitement, amusement and surprise’. We also hold Psychology (BF131.J2 JAM 1920), an abridgment made by James of the Principles in order to make it more accessible to the student of psychology.

William James’ work lies within a wider narrative of psychology and psychiatry, and Edward Shorter’s A history of psychiatry : from the era of the asylum to the age of Prozac (RC438 SHO 1997) helps to give James’ work a backdrop, as well as briefly discussing him in a study of the American origins of psychoanalytics. James was a contemporary of Freud, corresponding with the Austrian neurologist and sharing some of his influences. As such, Freud’s converts by Vicki Clifford (BF51.C55 CLI 2007 and online) is another relevant title to consider, and considers the relationship psychotherapy has with religion.

More general works on public health in America include Sickness and health in America : readings in the history of medicine and public health by Judith Walzer Leavitt and Ronald L. Numbers (R151 SIC 1985), which offers a comprehensive overview of the social history of medicine in the US. Tying into some of the themes Sutton will be examining, Faith in the Great Physician : suffering and divine healing in American culture, 1860-1900 by Heather D. Curtis (BT732.5.C88 CUR 2007) offers an examination of the politics of sickness, health and healing during the nineteenth century.

Emma Sutton has published several journal articles, and access is available for university members to one such article, ‘Interpreting “Mind-Cure”: William James and the “Chief Task…of the Science of Human Nature”’, at this URL: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jhbs.21532/full

Please come and ask library staff if you would like any help with locating resources, or conducting further research. We also welcome further suggestions for reading not included in this post!

Header image: from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:William_James_b1842c.jpg (image in public domain)

Seminar 7: ‘Antibiotics as infrastructure: rehearsing a counterfactual of convalescence’

‘Antibiotics as infrastructure: rehearsing a counterfactual of convalescence’

The seventh HSMT seminar of Michaelmas Term will take place at 16.00 on Monday 21st November (Week 7) in the Lecture Theatre of the History Faculty on George Street, and will be delivered by Clare Chandler.

Chandler’s interests lie in the application of anthropological methods and critiques to health care and public health policies and programmes. She is interested in the implementation of technologies as ‘tools’ in global public health, for example by studying the social lives of RDTs as they meet, shift and expose patient, health care provider, health system and donor agendas. She is interested in the development of methods to design interventions which aim to improve health care and methods to understand and interpret how such interventions are enacted, absorbed, resisted and appropriated in the everyday lives of implementers and recipients. Her primary sites of research are among health care providers and care seekers (in public, private and community settings) in Tanzania and Uganda. Chandler currently holds a Seed Award from the Wellcome Trust to research how anthropological theory can be productive in conceptualising antimicrobial resistance and efforts to address this issue.

Concerns over antibiotic resistance reemphasise the centrality of antibiotics for maintaining the health of current and future populations. Since their mass production, antibiotics have been considered essential to human health care. Current apocalyptic discourses of the loss of antibiotic efficacy due to mounting resistance draw attention to the impact for future individuals who may face fatal consequences of infections now considered minor thanks to antibiotics. In this seminar, Chandler will argue that current responses to resistance allow us to see how the significance of antibiotics goes beyond health. She will explore how these substances can be considered as infrastructure socially, politically and economically, and will trace a hypothetical example of convalescence to illuminate the spaces, connections and frameworks that antibiotics currently hold together. From this perspective, more nuanced and mundane futures for living without antibiotics may become apparent.

One of the most pertinent and interesting titles the Wellcome Unit Library holds concerning this topic is The antibiotic era : reform, resistance, and the pursuit of rational therapeutics by Scott H. Podolsky (RM267 POD 2015). This recent work contains a history of antibiotics, focusing particularly on efforts to change how they are developed and prescribed, and examining the irrational usage and overprescription that has contributed to antibiotic resistance in infectious bacterial pathogens. The Wellcome Trust in London has a seminar transcript which the library also holds, discussing changes in attitudes towards antibiotics: Post penicillin antibiotics : from acceptance to resistance?, edited by E. M. Tansey and L. A. Reynolds (R131.A2 POS 2000). It reviews the problem of antibiotic resistance, and the mechanisms that transfer this resistance.

Robert Bud’s Penicillin : triumph and tragedy (RM666.P35 BUD 2007) also looks at this problem, moving from post-war optimism about infectious diseases and their eradication to the emergence of ‘superbugs’ following antibiotic abuse. Looking at one specific disease, Magic bullets to conquer malaria : from quinine to qinghaosu by Irwin W. Sherman (RC159.A5 SHE 2011) contains one chapter of particular relevance: ‘Reversal of Fortune’, which explains resistance in more detail (though its language is quite scientific in nature).

If you are unfamiliar with history of medicine from an anthropological point of view, we have titles that you may find a useful introduction. A reader in medical anthropology : theoretical trajectories, emergent realities, edited by Byron J. Good (et al.) (GN296 REA 2010) is a very broad work containing a collection of essays that represent key themes in the field of medical anthropology, examining how societies grapple with questions about the meaning of illness, suffering and death. Marcia C. Inhorn and Peter J. Brown’s The anthropology of infectious disease : international health perspectives (RA643 ANT 1997) offers a more focused anthropological perspective on the sources, consequences and treatment of infectious diseases.

Please come and ask library staff if you would like any help with locating resources, or conducting further research. We also welcome further suggestions for reading not included in this post!

Header image: L0059573 Credit: Science Museum, London, Wellcome Images
British Standard penicillin was defined as one milligram of penicillin containing 1,600 International Units. An International Unit is defined as the potency or activity of a drug. The standard was set by the National Institute for Medical Research. International Standards were set in 1944 and in 1952. Standardisation of drugs such as penicillin is important to ensure the quantity and quality produced and given to patients is consistent all over the world.
Maker: National Institute for Medical Research
Place made: London, Greater London, England, United Kingdom, 1946
Collection: Wellcome Images; Library reference no.: Science Museum 1984-1086
Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons Attribution only licence CC BY 4.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Seminar 6: “A midwife should be welcoming”

‘“A midwife should be welcoming”: personality, midwives, and shifting perceptions of healthcare in Uganda, 1918-1979’

The sixth HSMT seminar of Michaelmas Term will take place at 16.00 on Monday 14th November (Week 6) in the Lecture Theatre of the History Faculty on George Street, and will be delivered by Kathleen Vongsathorn.

Vongsathorn’s research project focuses on the role of gender in the perception, spread, and adaptation of biomedicine and biomedical knowledge in twentieth-century Uganda. While women rarely appear in formal medical reports generated within Uganda, biomedically trained women outnumbered men in mission medical institutions. Much of the provision of and teaching about biomedicine in Uganda was in the hands of women missionaries, or in the hands of the Ugandan women that they trained. The first formalised biomedical training programmes for women in Uganda were midwifery schools, and these midwives staffed a network of maternity and child welfare centres that stretched across the country. The main goal of these centres was to reduce maternal and infant mortality, but while infant mortality has been drastically reduced over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, maternal mortality rates in Uganda are still very high, in large part because even today, only 57 percent of women in Uganda have ‘skilled’ assistance in their deliveries. There are a variety of reasons that so many women give birth without a biomedical professional attendance, but significant among them is many women’s – or their relatives’ – reluctance to deliver in health centres.

Drawing on interviews with midwives, traditional birth attendants, and community members in Uganda, and on hospital, mission, and government records, the seminar will discuss the reasons why women have chosen to engage with biomedical services while pregnant and delivering babies, why they have chosen not to, how those choices have changed (or not) over time, and why. Specifically, it will focus on the role of the midwife’s ‘character’, or behaviour, in encouraging and discouraging women from coming to biomedical health centres for antenatal care and for deliveries. For many Ugandans, especially in rural areas, midwives were the first point of contact with biomedicine, and this paper explores changing ideas about health and health seeking behaviour through these women and their social presence in communities.

Vongsathorn is a former doctoral student of the Wellcome Unit, and as such we hold a copy of her D.Phil. thesis in the library, shelved under her surname on the theses shelf in Library Room 1. The work is titled, ‘Things that matter’: missionaries, government, and patients in the shaping of Uganda’s leprosy settlements, 1927-1951, and the abstract can be read here in the Oxford Research Archive.

The Unit Library also holds several monographs specifically concerning the subject of healthcare in Uganda. We have a copy of a survey prepared for the Medicine and Public Health in Africa section of the Oxford Development Records project, entitled The medical services of Uganda in 1954-1955 (RA552.U33 BUL 1984) and written by Mary Bull, and this has a small section on nurses and midwives (p.42-43). The report provides a factual snapshot of the state of medical services during one particular year. A more general account on a period of difficulty in Ugandan health services can be found in Crisis in Uganda : the breakdown of health services (RA552.U4 CRI 1985), edited by Cole P. Dodge and Paul D. Wiebe. The work examines how Uganda went from having one of the most highly-developed health services delivery systems in Africa at its independence in 1962 and into the early 1970s, to being one of the world’s least developed nations following a period of troubles.

Our header image for this week’s post comes from Uganda memories, 1897-1940 (R722.32.C66 A38 COO 1945), which is a memoir by Albert R. Cook, a British-born medical missionary in Uganda who established a maternity training school in the country. The image depicts maternity students in 1921. Chapter 27 of the book, ‘Mortality and Infant Welfare’, is of particular interest, discussing midwifery and infant mortality. The Lady Coryndon Maternity Training School is pictured below.

The professionalisation of African medicine (GN645 PRO 1986), edited by Murray Last and G. L. Chavunduka widens the study of the changes and developments in African biomedicine to a continental level. The work is a collection of articles exploring the relationship between African governments and traditional healers, never previously organised, and the associated problems of African medicine. Chapter 6 is pertinent for the themes of this week’s seminar: ‘Prospects for the Professionalisation of Indigenous Midwifery in Benin’.

For other titles specifically concerning midwifery, shelfmarks in the range RG940-991 cover the subject of maternal care and prenatal care services. One such title is Midwives, society, and childbirth : debates and controversies in the modern period (RG950 MID 1997 and online via SOLO), edited by Hilary Marland and Anne Marie Rafferty. The articles contained in the volume examine midwives’ lives and work in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For the study of biomedical care in another developing country – that of rural India – and of women’s experiences of birth and infant death there, Where there is no midwife : birth and loss in rural India (RG965.I4 PIN 2008) by Sarah Pinto is an interesting read. It touches upon themes of caste, emotion, domestic spaces, illicit and extra-institutional biomedicine, and household and neighbourly relations.

Please come and ask library staff if you would like any help with locating resources, or conducting further research. We also welcome further suggestions for reading not included in this post!

Seminar 5: ‘Traditional medicine and primary health care in Sri Lanka: policy, perceptions, and practice’

‘Traditional medicine and primary health care in Sri Lanka: policy,
perceptions, and practice’

The fifth HSMT seminar of Michaelmas Term will take place at 16.00 on Monday 7th November (Week 5) in the Lecture Theatre of the History Faculty on George Street, and will be delivered by Margaret Jones.

Margaret Jones is a historian of medicine and colonialism in Sri Lanka and Jamaica. She joined the History Department at York after six years here at the Wellcome Unit as a Research Officer and then as a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow. She has worked extensively on the development of public health policies and the medical services of colonial Sri Lanka and Jamaica. She is currently working on the development of primary health care services and the impact of international initiatives in Sri Lanka, 1950-2000.

Primary Health Care was launched onto the international stage by the World Health Organization’s Alma Ata Declaration of 1978 and with it came the acknowledgment that traditional medical systems could play a vital part in its delivery. The traditional medical systems of Sri Lanka (termed collectively as Ayurveda) have been part of the official medical landscape from the 1930s and at least at the level of stated government policy have been seen as participating in the government health care system: their values and holistic approach to health being particularly appropriate for the delivery of preventive medicine. Faced with a double disease burden of communicable and non-communicable disease in the twenty first century this vital role was again emphasised in the Government’s Health Master Plan of 2007-16, ‘Healthy and Shining Island in the 21st Century’. The traditional medical systems were, it stated, to ‘collectively constitute an integral part of the health sector’ and its practitioners to participate fully in delivering its services. Through the means of a purposive qualitative survey of a sample of traditional medical practitioners in and around the Colombo area this paper seeks to explore the reality as opposed to the rhetoric of government policy.

Jones has written several books on the history of medicine in Sri Lanka herself, two of which we hold at the Wellcome Unit Library. The first, Health policy in Britain’s model colony : Ceylon, 1900-1948 (RA530.2 JON 2004) discusses within the context of British Ceylon (now the nation of Sri Lanka) whether Western medicine was a positive benefit of colonialism, or one of its agents of oppression. The research for this title is underscored by a detailed analysis of public health measures in Ceylon. Her second monograph, The hospital system and health care : Sri Lanka, 1815-1960 (RA990.S72 JON 2009) specifically examines the role and development of hospitals in Sri Lanka to ascertain the nature of the contribution of Western medicine to the health of indigenous populations. Across both titles, Jones explores government, mission and philanthropic initiatives in the provision of medical services, and sets her critique against a background of human needs and rights.

Jones has argued that the roots of Sri Lanka’s healthcare policies and infrastructure, and its record of achieving good quality of life indicators, lie in part in its colonial period. To gain a better understanding of this backdrop, a number of titles provide a useful insight into the medical and health issues surrounding colonialism. For example, Western medicine as contested knowledge by Andrew Cunningham and Bridie Andrews (RA441.5 WES 1997) examines the range and extrent of non-Western responses to western medicine across the spectrum of Western imperalist influence, and includes a chapter on the influence of the World Health Organization: ‘Who and the developing world: the contest for ideology’. Soma Hewa’s work, Colonialism, tropical disease and imperial medicine : Rockefeller philanthropy in Sri Lanka (RA530.2 HEW 1995), looks more closely at the impact of European colonial policies on the health and disease of the population of Sri Lanka.

Moving closer to the present day, Decolonisation, development and disease : a social history of malaria in Sri Lanka by Kalinga Tudor Silva (RA644.M2 SIL 2014) examines the politics of the devastating malaria epidemic of 1934–35 that shaped Sri Lanka’s transition from a colony to a postcolonial state, and also looks at the shift away from indigenous knowledge.

One online article of particular relevance to this topic is ‘Public Policy and Basic Needs Provision: Intervention and Achievement in Sri Lanka’ in The political economy of hunger (Vol. 3: Endemic hunger), which is available through SOLO. Ravi Kanbur studies the country’s intrinsic and directed public policies, exploring the role of the expansion of health services in mortality decline as compared with the effect of food subsidies.

Please come and ask library staff if you would like any help with locating resources, or conducting further research. We also welcome further suggestions for reading not included in this post!

Header image: International Nurses Day: President Mahinda Rajapaksa presides over a ceremony to mark International Nurses Day held at the BMICH on May 12 2014. From https://www.flickr.com/photos/presidentrajapaksa/14145702576, Flikr user Mahinda Rajapaksa. Image use permitted under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC 2.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/

The History of Medicine Library

A Bodleian Libraries blog

Tag Archives: Wellcome Unit Seminars

Seminar 8: Peer support, mental health activism and changing doctor-patient relationships in Uganda

Seminar 7: Biology as technology

Seminar 3: Fears, phobias and obsessions in the late-nineteenth century

Seminar 2: Richard Titmuss and the origins of social medicine

Seminar 1: Prophets of Progress?

Hilary Term 2017 Seminar Series

Seminar 8: ‘William James and “the laws of health” in nineteenth-century America’

Seminar 7: ‘Antibiotics as infrastructure: rehearsing a counterfactual of convalescence’

Seminar 6: “A midwife should be welcoming”

Seminar 5: ‘Traditional medicine and primary health care in Sri Lanka: policy, perceptions, and practice’