This paper explores evolving conceptions and depictions of the human genome among human and medical geneticists during the postwar period. Historians of science and medicine have shown significant interest in the use of informational approaches in postwar genetics, which treat the genome as an expansive digital data set composed of three billion DNA nucleotides. Since the 1950s, however, geneticists have largely interacted with the human genome at the microscopically visible level of chromosomes. Mindful of this, I examine the observational and representational approaches of postwar human and medical genetics. During the 1970s and 1980s, the genome increasingly came to be understood as, at once, a discrete part of the human anatomy and a standardised scientific object. This paper explores the role of influential medical geneticists in recasting the human genome as being a visible, tangible, and legible entity, which was highly relevant to traditional medical thinking and practice. I demonstrate how the human genome was established as an object amenable to laboratory and clinical research, and argue that the observational and representational approaches of postwar medical genetics reflect, more broadly, the interdisciplinary efforts underlying the development of contemporary biomedicine.

Alexander of Tralles, writing in the late sixth century, combined his wide-ranging practical knowledge with earlier medical theories. This article shows how clinical experience is used in Alexander’s works by concentrating on his therapeutic advice on epilepsy and, in particular, on pharmacology and the group of so-called natural remedies. I argue that clinical testing is used not only for the introduction of new medicines but also as an instrument for checking the therapeutic effect of popular healing practices. On another level, this article discusses Alexander’s role as the author of a medical compendium; it suggests that by marking the cases of clinical testing with a set of recurrent expressions, Alexander leads his audience to reflect on his medical authority and personal contribution.

Charles Singer’s retrospective diagnosis of Hildegard of Bingen as a migraine sufferer, first made in 1913, has become commonly accepted. This article uses Hildegard as a case study to shift our focus from a polarised debate about the merits or otherwise of retrospective diagnosis, to examine instead what happens when diagnoses take on lives of their own. It argues that simply championing or rejecting retrospective diagnosis is not enough; that we need instead to appreciate how, at the moment of creation, a diagnosis reflects the significance of particular medical signs and theories in historical context and how, when and why such diagnoses can come to do meaningful work when subsequently mobilised as scientific ‘fact’. This article first traces the emergence of a new formulation of migraine in the nineteenth century, then shows how this context enabled Singer to retrospectively diagnose Hildegard’s migraine and finally examines some of the ways in which this idea has gained popular and academic currency in the second half of the twentieth century. The case of Hildegard’s migraine reminds us of the need to historicise scientific evidence just as rigorously as we historicise our other material and it exposes the cumulative methodological problems that can occur when historians use science, and scientists use history on a casual basis.

This article discusses a Latin manuscript that can be found in the Jan Baptist Van Helmont (1579–1644) archives in Mechelen (Malines), Belgium. The manuscript bears no author and no title, and begins with the words ‘Exterior homo’, hence being referred by this provisional title in the analysis. Ecclesiastical prosecutors investigating Van Helmont for heresy in 1634 considered that it was written by him, but this was vehemently denied by the Flemish physician. The present article takes a first detailed look at the content of the treatise and ideas contained therein. It hence identifies the manuscript as belonging to a seventeenth-century physician influenced by the ideas of Theophrastus Paracelsus (1493–1541) and his interpreter Petrus Severinus (1542–1602), and containing a complex medical philosophy drawn on alchemical thought. Thus, the anonymous author presents a comprehensive view on the nature and structure of man, as well as an idiosyncratic theory of human generation. Following the analysis of the treatise, the article further compares it with the known works of J.B. Van Helmont, and finds that it is very similar to his ideas. Hence, the article concludes that it is ‘likely’ that the manuscript is indeed written by Van Helmont, although lack of direct evidence prevents certain attribution.

The concept of a healthy skin penetrated the lives of many people in late-nineteenth-century Britain. Popular writings on skin and soap advertisements are significant for pointing to the notions of the skin as a symbolic surface: a visual moral ideal. Popular health publications reveal how much contemporary understanding of skin defined and connected ideas of cleanliness and the visual ideals of the healthy body in Victorian Britain. Characterised as a ‘sanitary commissioner’ of the body, skin represented the organ of drainage for body and society. The importance of keeping the skin clean and purging it of waste materials such as sweat and dirt resonated in a Britain that embraced city sanitation developments, female beauty practices, racial identities and moral reform. By focusing on the popular work by British surgeon and dermatologist Erasmus Wilson (1809–84), this article offers a history of skin through the lens of the sanitary movement and developments in the struggle for control over healthy skin still in place today.

In the year 1966, the first government hospital, Oshakati hospital, was inaugurated in northern South-West Africa. It was constructed by the apartheid regime of South Africa which was occupying the territory. Prior to this inauguration, Finnish missionaries had, for 65 years, provided healthcare to the indigenous people in a number of healthcare facilities of which Onandjokwe hospital was the most important. This article discusses these two agents’ ideological standpoints. The same year, the war between the South-West African guerrillas and the South African state started, and continued up to 1988. The two hospitals became involved in the war; Oshakati hospital as a part of the South African war machinery, and Onandjokwe hospital as a ‘terrorist hospital’ in the eyes of the South Africans. The missionary Onandjokwe hospital was linked to the Lutheran church in South-West Africa, which became one of the main critics of the apartheid system early in the liberation war. Warfare and healthcare became intertwined with apartheid policies and aggression, materialised by healthcare provision based on strategic rationales rather than the people’s healthcare needs. When the Namibian state took over a ruined healthcare system in 1990, the two hospitals were hubs in a healthcare landscape shaped by missionary ambitions, war and apartheid logic.