In the years 1947–57, following a turbulent retirement, Ugo Cerletti, the father of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) (1938), invested his energies in a new audacious project conceived as an extension of his ECT research. Forced to leave the direction of the Sapienza University Clinic, he got funds from the National Research Council of Italy to carry out his experimental activities, and founded a ‘Center for the study of the physiopathology of Electro-shock’ in Rome. The Center was aimed at studying liquid substances extracted from electro-shocked animals’ brains that Cerletti named acroagonine and injected into human patients. Inspired by coeval literature, Cerletti believed that electroshock efficacy was due to stimulating some homeostatic processes in the brain, specifically in the meso-diencephalic area (i.e. involving neuroendocrine response in the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis). Cerletti’s team wished not only to find these effects, but also to reproduce them. With this hypothesis, that proved ineffective, Cerletti anticipated intuitions on the neuroendocrine effects of ECT and the necessity for the development of psychopharmacology. In this article, I cross-combined previously unexplored archival materials stored at Sapienza University of Rome (‘ES Section’) with established bibliographic and archival sources.

In the late Soviet period, a great deal of research was conducted on older people’s health, with the Institute of Gerontology Academy of Medical Sciences (AMN) USSR in Kyiv spearheading a great deal of this. Of particular interest was older people’s ability to work beyond retirement age, the issue of premature ageing, as well as physical activity, diet and living conditions. Many of these interests came under the concept of ‘gerohygiene’, which also reflected the Soviet Union’s prophylactic approach to eldercare (and healthcare more generally). Discussions about older people and Soviet research on gerohygiene are important for furthering our understanding of ideas around healthy ageing and the Soviet project more generally. The Soviet, and indeed socialist, research on gerohygiene sheds light on ideas around active ageing, premature ageing and work practices for older people. It also shows that the role of old people belonged to the wider Soviet effort of contributing to the communist project and shaping society. In this article, I define and examine the broad concept of ‘gerohygiene’ and then assess how gerohygiene applied to older people’s health in relation to both physical activity and labour.

This article examines the emergence of modern psychiatric discourse under the culturally Islamic yet radically secular context of the early Turkish republic (1923-1950). To do so, it focuses on the psychiatric publications of Mazhar Osman [Uzman] (1884-1951), the widely acknowledged “father” of modern Turkish psychiatry; and aims to genealogically trace his scientific project of reconceptualizing ruh, an Arabo-Turkish concept that predominantly refers to transcendental soul, rendering it physiologically within the framework of biological-descriptive psychiatry. The article consequently addresses the elusive and multilayered psychiatric language emerged in Turkey as a result of modern psychiatry’s interventions into a field that was previously defined by religion and indigenous traditions. Attempting to contextualize republican psychiatric discourse within the cultural and socio-political circumstances that has produced it, the article sheds light on how the new psychiatric knowledge propagated by Mazhar Osman was formulated in constitutive contradistinction to religious or traditional discourses, explicitly associating them with the Ottoman past and its alleged backwardness, hence reverberating with the Kemalist project of modern Turkish state building. Furthermore, by focusing on the complexities of the Turkish psychiatric language and the contestations it has generated, the article aims to reflect on the ways in which the Turkish psychiatric language was (and presumably still is) haunted by earlier forms of Islamic knowledge and traditions, despite modern psychiatry’s as well as modern secular state’s systematic and authoritative attempts to erase them for good.

Paul-Louis Simond’s 1898 experiment demonstrating fleas as the vector of plague is today recognised as one of the breakthrough moments in modern epidemiology, as it established the insect-borne transmission of plague. Providing the first exhaustive examination of primary sources from the Institut Pasteur’s 1897–98 ‘India Mission’, including Simond’s notebooks, experiment carnets and correspondence, and cross-examining this material with colonial medical sources from the first years of the third plague pandemic in British India, the article demonstrates that Simond’s engagement with the question of the propagation of plague was much more complex and ambiguous than the teleological story reproduced in established historical works suggests. On the one hand, the article reveals that the famous 1898 experiment was botched, and that Simond’s misreported its ambiguous findings for the Annales de l’Institut Pasteur. On the other hand, the article shows that, in the course of his ‘India Mission’, Simond framed rats as involved in the propagation of plague irreducibly in their relation to other potential sources of infection and not simply in terms of a parasitological mechanism. The article illuminates Simond’s complex epidemiological reasoning about plague transmission, situating it within its proper colonial and epistemological context, and argues for a new historical gaze on the rat as an ‘epidemiological dividual’, which highlights the relational and contingent nature of epidemiological framings of the animal during the third plague pandemic.

Miranda de Ebro was created in 1937 to imprison Republicans and foreigners who fought with the International Brigades in Spanish Civil War. From 1940, the camp was used only to concentrate detained foreign refugees with no proper documents. More than 15 000 people, most of them from France and Poland, were kept there until the camp was closed in January 1947. Playing both sides of the international divide, fascist Spain at various points in time allowed passage and was a country of refuge both for those escaping Nazism and for Nazis and collaborators who, at the end of World War II (WWII), sought to escape justice. Treatment of each of these groups passing through Miranda was very different: real repression was meted out to the members of the International Brigades (IB), tolerance shown towards those escaping Nazism, and protection and active cooperation given to former Nazis and their collaborators. For the first time, data about foreign physicians imprisoned in Miranda de Ebro were consulted in the Guadalajara Military Archive (Spain). From 1937 to 1947, 151 doctors were imprisoned, most of them in 1942 and 1943, which represents around 1% of the prisoners. Fifty-two of the doctors were released thanks to diplomatic efforts, thirty-two by the Red Cross, and ten were sent to other prisons, directly released or managed to escape. All of them survived. After consulting private and public archives, it was possible to reconstruct some biographies and fill the previous existing gap in the history of migration and exile of doctors during the Second World War.