This article explores the introduction of smallpox vaccination into Nepal in 1816 at the request of the Nepalese government; the king, however, was not vaccinated, contracted the disease and died. British hopes that vaccination would be extended throughout the country did not eventuate. The article examines the significance of this early appearance of vaccination in Nepal for both Nepalese and British, and relates it to the longer history of smallpox control and eventual eradication. When the Nepalese requested World Health Organization (WHO) assistance with communicable disease control in the mid-twentieth century little had changed for most Nepalese. We know about the events in 1816 through the letters of the newly imposed British Resident after Nepal’s military defeat in the Anglo-Nepal War (1814–16). By also drawing on other sources and foregrounding Nepal, it becomes possible to build up a more extensive picture of smallpox in Nepal that shows not only boundaries and limits to colonial authority and influence but also how governments may adopt and use technologies on their own terms and for their own purposes. Linking 1816 to the ultimately successful global eradication programme 150 years later reminds us of the need to think longer term as to why policies and programmes may or may not work as planned.

Using court records involving the expert testimony of the Berlin sexologist Albert Moll, my article demonstrates that during the early 1920s a shift in the ‘epistemologies of justice’ concerning the adjudication of sex crimes took place within German courtrooms. Namely, presiding judges considered a greater number of sexual acts as punishable, despite no change in the laws themselves. Central to my argument is the role of expert testimony in practice and its critical reception. By focusing upon the rhetorical strategies presented by attorneys, judges and expert witnesses (as well as defendants themselves and their relatives), it illustrates the functions of expert and tacit knowledge in court, which were often not mutually exclusive. Moll’s stature also enabled him to translate his scientific–medical expertise into state support for his testimonies, as well as the rebuilding of an international community of sexological authorities. It was only under Moll’s leadership that the First International Sexology Congress could take place in 1926, an event that marked the apex of his prestige.

American child psychiatrists have long been interested in the problems of delinquent behaviour by juveniles. With the rise of specific psychiatric diagnoses in the 1960s and 1970s, delinquent behaviour was defined within the diagnosis of conduct disorder. Like all psychiatric diagnoses, this concept was shaped by particular historical actors in context and has been highly contingent on assumptions related to race, class and gender. The history of conduct disorder illustrates the tensions in child psychiatry between the expansive goals of the field and the often limited uses of its professional authority, as well as individual children as the target of intervention and their interactions in groups.

After its formation in 1910 as a self-governing dominion within the British empire, the Union of South Africa followed a combination of English and Roman-Dutch common laws on abortion that decreed the procedure permissible only when necessary to save a woman’s life. The government continued doing so after South Africa withdrew from the Commonwealth and became a republic in 1961. In 1972 a sensational trial took place in the South African Supreme Court that for weeks placed clandestine abortion on the front pages of the country’s newspapers. Two men, one an eminent doctor and the other a self-taught abortionist, were charged with conspiring to perform illegal abortions on twenty-six white teenagers and young unmarried women. The prosecution of Dr Derk Crichton and James Watts occurred while the National Party government was in the process of drafting abortion legislation and was perceived by legal experts as another test of the judiciary’s stance on the common law on abortion. The trial was mainly intended to regulate the medical profession and ensure doctors ceased helping young white women evade their ‘duty’ to procreate within marriage. Ultimately, the event encapsulated a great deal about elites’ attempt to buttress apartheid culture and is significant for, among other reasons, contributing to the production of South Africa’s extremely restrictive Abortion and Sterilisation Act (1975).