The purpose of the Medical Termination of Pregnancy Bill, published on 15 June 1966, was to amend and clarify the law relating to termination of pregnancy by a registered medical practitioner. When David Steel, a young Liberal MP from the Scottish Borders, put this bill forward, some suggested that a Scottish politician had no need to introduce abortion reform since Scots law was already satisfactory in this regard. Certainly, abortion law in Scotland was more flexible than its English counterpart, and the number of prosecutions few. The line between criminal and non-criminal abortion was, however, just as indistinct, with great medical uncertainty in this area. On becoming law, the 1967 Abortion Act was the first piece of abortion-related legislation to cover Scotland, England and Wales collectively. None the less, for a variety of legal and moral reasons, abortion policy and practice continued to differ on either side of the Border.

This article examines one of the long-term structural forces that contributed to the making of public health in Modern Japan. My overall argument is that the history of public health should be conceived as a total history, encompassing not just political, administrative, and scientific factors but also natural, social, and economic factors. Elsewhere I have discussed two of these factors in some detail, both of which were long-term structural forces resulting from the interactions of different realms: 1) the effect of the topography and the pattern of the use of land; and 2) the effect of the market as a medium for people's behaviour seeking the prevention of the disease. Here I will argue that the Japanese long-term experience of diseases provided another structural force that shaped public health in Japan. The long-term cumulative factor can be called the ‘epidemiological heritage’ of Japan.

Within the colonial setting of the Belgian Congo, the process of cutting the body, whether living or dead, lent itself to conflation with cannibalism and other fantastic consumption stories by both Congolese and Belgian observers. In part this was due to the instability of the meaning of the human body and the human corpse in the colonial setting. This essay maps out different views of the cadaver and personhood through medical technologies of opening the body in the Belgian Congo. The attempt to impose a specific reading of the human body on the Congolese populations through anatomy and related Western medical disciplines was unsuccessful. Ultimately, practices such as surgery and autopsy were reinterpreted and reshaped in the colonial context, as were the definitions of social and medical death. By examining the conflicts that arose around medical technologies of cutting human flesh, this essay traces multiple parallel narratives on acceptable use and representation of the human body (Congolese or Belgian) beyond its medical assignation.