Who was to blame when a labouring woman or her unborn child died during the early modern period? How was responsibility assessed, and who was charged with assessing it? To answer such questions, this article draws on French obstetrical treatises produced by male surgeons and female midwives between 1550 and 1730, focusing on descriptions of difficult deliveries. Sometimes the poor outcome of a labour was blamed on the pregnant woman herself, but more often a particular medical practitioner was implicated. Authors of obstetrical treatises were careful to assign fault when injuries or deaths occurred in cases concerning them. Chirurgiens accoucheurs (surgeon men-midwives) regularly accused female midwives of incompetence, yet also attacked fellow surgeons as well as those male physicians officially superior to them in the medical hierarchy. Female midwives similarly condemned the actions of male practitioners, without hesitating to censure other women when their mismanagement of deliveries had tragic consequences. Part of authors' eagerness to blame others stemmed from the fear of being held accountable for mistakes preceding practitioners had made. Ascribing responsibility usually went hand-in-hand with defensive claims of innocence, or boastful declarations of having saved a suffering woman from the bungling attempts of less skilled birth attendants.

This paper was originally written for a conference entitled ‘The Future of Medical History. Now it ought to be clear – certainly to historians – that the future of anything is hard to predict; but at least in the short term, any future for medical history seems likely to include the history of disease, and the history of coronary heart disease (CHD) provides an excellent example of what the history of disease has to offer to a wide range of audiences.

During 1923, the South African government began to issue free vaccine for the immunization of cattle against anthrax. Five years later, it introduced compulsory annual vaccination in parts of the Transkeian Territories, an area reserved for occupation by Africans. Thereafter, the state sought to extend both compulsory and discretionary vaccination. In 1942, scientists at the government's Onderstepoort Veterinary Institute announced that they had issued 6 million doses of vaccine during the previous year. Approximately half the cattle in the country were being immunized annually with a special product which scientists at the Institute had recently devised. The scale of vaccination was unprecedented within the country and the annual issue of anthrax vaccine far surpassed the amount supplied for any other animal disease. It was a major state intervention in rural society. Nevertheless, vaccination against anthrax in South Africa is absent from the historiography, while published contemporary accounts are few.

Historical contingency complicates a reading of skill as a self-explanatory and always positive attribute. By focusing on the attempts of the first generation of neurosurgeons to build a community and fashion a collective neurosurgical self, this article highlights the extent to which the relationship between surgical skill and professional judgement is reflected in broader concerns that shape the landscape of medicine at a given time. Some early twentieth-century surgeons expressed concern about the spectacularisation of surgery and the skilful but problematic work of ‘brilliant operators’. The neurosurgeons’ policies of inclusion and exclusion show that in the process of fashioning a neurosurgical persona, this first generation sanctioned specific norms of conduct underwritten by similar moral imperatives, such as self-control. These norms governed the doctors’ work both in the operating room and on the public stage (in their engagement with the press). The meetings of the first neurosurgical society staged a critical encounter between the host neurosurgeon and the members who watched him perform surgery. These technical performances in the operating theatre, followed by discussions, were designed to encourage particular norms, to negotiate surgical knowledge, and to demonstrate the skills and character of the neurosurgeon. The performances acted as a technology of the self that aligned the operator to a community and helped that community refine its norms of surgical conduct. The awkward surgeon with inferior technical ability was preferable to the brilliant but vain operator who lacked the capacity to judge when he should not deploy his spectacular skills.

The living conditions and the health of Manx mothers continued to improve from 1881 to 1961. Against this background they were at first delivered conservatively and mostly by midwives. During this conservative phase the proportion of mothers surviving childbirth increased as their health improved: by the quinquennium 1907–1911 the maternal mortality rate on the Island was half what it had been twenty years earlier. Between 1912 and 1927 maternal mortality rose and during the quinquennium 1922–1926 the MD/BR was again at the level it had been thirty years before. Some of the maternal deaths during the quinquennium were among women who were subjected to intervention during childbirth by doctors in the unfavourable surroundings of their homes; conditions more suited to delivery by the conservative methods of kindly and patient handywomen. Following the opening of a small maternity home on 6 May 1927 the family doctors began to send their difficult deliveries into the Home where they were looked after by skilled staff and delivered in a well–equipped labour room. Throughout the subsequent decade the MD/BR remained at a level below that in 1907–1911.

‘Medicalisation’ of same sex relations is a phenomenon that reached its peak in the 1950s and 1960s. The rise of gay liberation produced a divisive political contest with the psychiatric profession and adherents of the orthodox ‘medical model’ in the United States and – to a lesser extent – in the United Kingdom. This socio-historical process occurred throughout the English-speaking world, but much less is known about its dynamics in smaller countries such as New Zealand where the historiography on this issue is very sparse. The methodology situates New Zealand within a transnational framework to explore the circulation of medical theories and the critical responses they were met with. The article is anchored around three key local moments in the 1970s to consider the changing terrain on which ideas about homosexuality and psychiatry were constantly rearranged during this decade. This power struggle took a number of twists and turns, and the drive toward medicalisation alternated with a new impetus to de-medicalise same-sex sexuality.

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.