This article shows how funding research on Alzheimer’s disease became a priority for the British Medical Research Council (MRC) in the late 1970s and 1980s, thanks to work that isolated new pathological and biochemical markers and showed that the disease affected a significant proportion of the elderly population. In contrast to histories that focus on the emergence of new and competing theories of disease causation in this period, I argue that concerns over the use of different assessment methods ensured the MRC’s immediate priority was standardising the ways in which researchers identified and recorded symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease in potential research subjects. I detail how the rationale behind the development of standard assessment guidelines was less about arriving at a firm diagnosis and more about facilitating research by generating data that could be easily compared across the disciplines and sites that constitute modern biomedicine. Drawing on criticism of specific tests in the MRC’s guidelines, which some psychiatrists argued were ‘middle class biased’, I also show that debates over standardisation did not simply reflect concerns specific to the fields or areas of research that the MRC sought to govern. Questions about the validity of standard assessment guidelines for Alzheimer’s disease embodied broader concerns about education and social class, which ensured that distinguishing normal from pathological in old age remained a contested and historically contingent process.

On 30 August 1998, the Mail on Sunday, under the headline “TB refugee ‘must be held in hospital’”, described the case of a Somalian man who had been “ordered by a court to remain in hospital for six months to prevent him spreading a highly infectious deadly disease”. That disease was tuberculosis and a court order had been issued “after the man had twice staggered into Northwick Park Hospital in Harrow, North-West London, for treatment but left without trace. He failed to take prescribed treatment and his condition rapidly deteriorated, forcing him to return to hospital a third time.”

This article examines the changing nature of public health services and their relationship with the public in post-war Britain by an analysis of the exhibitions mounted by Medical Officers of Health (MOsH) in London. Focusing on the period 1948–71, the article explores a time when public health practice, and the problems it faced, were in flux. A decline in infectious disease and an increase in chronic conditions linked to lifestyle required a new role for public health services. Exhibitions were one of several methods that MOsH used to inform the public about dangers to their health, but also to persuade them to change their behaviour. The exhibition, though, offers a unique insight into the relationship between public health authorities and the public, as exhibitions brought MOsH into direct contact with people. It is suggested that in the MOsH exhibitions we can find signs of a new relationship between public health practitioners and the public. Whilst elements of the pre-war, often moralistic ideology of public health services could still be detected, there is also evidence of a more nuanced, responsive dynamic between practitioners and the people. By the end of the 1960s, ‘the public’ was increasingly being thought of as a collection of ‘publics’, including individuals, target groups and vocal respondents.

In the early 1950s, when the National Health Service (NHS) was still in its infancy, the British public was gripped by news reports of two attempts at the surgical separation of conjoined twins. The first operation involved one-year-old twin girls from Kano, Nigeria. The twins were xiphopagus (joined at the lower sternum) and shared a liver, separation was attempted at London's Hammersmith Hospital in December 1953. One child survived. In February 1955 news broke of the birth of craniophagus twins (joined at the head) in Keighley, West Yorkshire. Separation of the month-old girls was attempted at London's University College Hospital, but neither child survived.

This paper readdresses the assertion found in much secondary literature that Greek medicine was adopted in Tibet in the seventh and eighth centuries. I discuss some of the traces of Galenic medical knowledge in early Tibetan medicine, and raise the question of why Tibetan medical histories who mention Galen give Galenic medicine a much more significant place than is evidenced in the Tibetan medical literature itself. I discuss some historiographical considerations and argue that the centrality given to Galenic medicine is more indicative of the period in which these sources are written than of the period which they presumably describe.