Medical acculturation forms a crucial part of the process of migration, and equally, the influx of migrants can shape how medical structures develop in receiving societies – nowhere is that more evident than in the American metropolis. In the late nineteenth century, few ethnic groups caused such sustained bio-hazard concerns as the Irish in America. Poverty and the sheer numbers migrating in the post-Famine (1852-) era, caused the immigrant Irish body to be pathologised, or described in medical terms, to a much greater degree and for longer than their Anglo-Saxon or German counterparts. With a particular focus on Irishwomen’s use of maternity services in New York and Boston, this article aims to elucidate the potential of medical records to flesh out the understandings of how immigrants navigated healthcare. By adopting a case study approach to hospital records in tandem with other data sources, it shows what is being lost through restrictive data protection legislation. It discusses how Irishness was politicised in the contexts of immigration, the social history of medicine and medicalisation.

The Ospedale Maggiore, known as Ca’ Granda, was founded in 1456 by will of Francesco Sforza, Duke of Milan, and was considered for almost five centuries a model for Milanese, Italian and even European healthcare. Attracting patients from all over Europe, the Ca’ Granda distinguished itself for the introduction of new treatments and innovative health reforms. In the burial ground of the hospital still lie the bodies of the deceased patients, who came from the poorest strata of the population. The study of their remains aims to give back a general identity and a story to each of these persons as well as reconstruct a fraction of the sixteenth century population of Milano as concerns lifestyle and disease and examine practises and therapy of this exceptional hospital. It is estimated that about two million commingled bones and articulated skeletons rest in the crypt, together with other types of findings (e.g., ceramic, coins, clothing). These remains are the object of a large project involving various disciplines ranging from humanities to hard sciences. The aim of this paper is to bring this historical gem to the attention of scholars and provide a glimpse of what its contents have already revealed.

This paper examines some neglected aspects of Hippocratic medicine, drawing special attention to certain methodological questions concerning the role of sense perception in the acquisition of medical knowledge. I argue that there is greater epistemological uniformity among the texts of the Hippocratic Corpus than is sometimes assumed. I provide a careful reading of seemingly inconsistent Hippocratic treatises in the light of a plausible and coherent epistemological model. The impression that we are dealing with different, indeed inconsistent, epistemological views can be explained away by the specific dialectical contexts of each work and their historical background. Most importantly, a proper justification of this model will require us to delve into the epistemological foundations of Hippocratic medicine.

The treatment of injured Indian soldiers in Britain during WWI deployed particular ways of recording injuries and using them to make judgments about loyalty to the Imperial Army by assessing the soldier’s ability to malinger. This was possible by using personal correspondences between soldiers and their families for ethnographic ends ie. to determine susceptibility to develop mental illness through a soldier’s ethnic background and whether he was from the so-called ‘martial races’ or not. This classificatory knowledge as well as the suspicion towards exaggerated symptoms was also inherited by Indian psychiatry after partition. However, while these psychiatrists reproduced some colonial biases about susceptibility of illness, they were much more receptive to considering the social experience of patients including their kinship relations at home and in the military. By the end of WWII, symptoms came to be regarded as signs of recovery and readjustment to social relations to make a case for the lasting impacts of war on the soldier’s mental and physical health.

This article aims to demonstrate how researchers from different South American countries took part in the process of globalisation of the tropical medicine paradigm, through research on leishmaniasis found in this region. The main objective of the present article is to highlight the role of these researchers, as well as of their scientific institutions, in a global history of tropical medicine which surpassed European borders and its imperialistic practices. At the same time, it will be identified the renewal of the tropical medicine paradigm in the South American context. During the beginning of the twentieth century, leishmaniasis became an important health issue in tropical areas, whereas the mere usage of the repertoire of the medical knowledge, produced in Europe up until that time, revealed itself as an insufficient instrument to help solve the problem. Hereupon, this matter was, above all, an open discussion, which required great skills and refined techniques of tropical medicine for its study. For this reason, it enabled the members of the regional medical communities to establish vigorous communication channels with medical centres, located in other continents, that had already been giving much deserved importance to leishmaniasis as an exciting scientific theme.