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The editors of the Rochester Studies in Medical History series seek to bring to our readers publications that will advance an understanding of health, illness, and healing in a broad historical context. The series seeks to support projects especially that promise to elucidate the history of public health and health policy, the history of clinical and investigative medicine, and the history of the biomedical sciences and their application to practice, as well as works that deepen our historical appreciation of the cultural and social significance of medicine and disease.

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37 results in Rochester Studies in Medical History

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The Hidden Affliction
  • Sexually Transmitted Infections and Infertility in History
  • Edited by Simon Szreter
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    25 March 2020
    Print publication:
    01 October 2019
  • Multidisciplinary collection of essays on the relationship of infertility and the historic" STIS--gonorrhea chlamydia and syphilis--producing surprising new insights in studies from across the globe and spanning millennia."

Sickness in the Workhouse
  • Poor Law Medical Care in Provincial England, 1834–1914
  • Volume 48
  • Alistair Ritch
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    21 March 2020
    Print publication:
    01 November 2019
  • Sickness in the Workhouse illuminates the role of workhouse medicine in caring for England's poor, bringing sick paupers from the margins of society and placing them centre stage.

Psychiatry and Racial Liberalism in Harlem, 1936–1968
  • Volume 36
  • Dennis A. Doyle
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    13 July 2019
    Print publication:
    20 October 2016
  • Reveals the history of the individuals who worked to make psychiatry more available to Harlem's black community in the early Civil Rights Era.

Setting Nutritional Standards
  • Theory, Policies, Practices
  • Edited by Elizabeth Neswald, David F. Smith, Ulrike Thoms, Elizabth Neswald, Ulrike Thomas
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    18 April 2018
    Print publication:
    28 February 2017
  • Suzanne Junod's essay "Proscribing Deception": The Gould Net Weight Amendment and the Origins of Mandatory Nutrition Labeling" is the winner of the 2017 Charles Thomson Prize of the Society for the History of the Federal Government. In the second half of the nineteenth century, ways of thinking about food changed as chemists and physiologists identified nutrients and bodily needs and as urbanization, industrialization, and colonial encounters challenged traditional dietary customs and assumptions. Emerging as a reaction to concerns about industrial and military power, social welfare, and public health, the science of nutrition sought to define the norms and needs of variable human bodies, setting standards for bodies and foods that would enable physicians and politicians to develop nutritional recommendations and food policies for individuals and populations. Setting Nutritional Standards brings together authors from a variety of disciplines to explore perspectives on the theory, practices, and policies of modern nutrition science from the 1860s to the 1960s. The essays place the new science of nutrition within the changing social landscapes of Western Europe and the United States at the intersection of medicine, policy, social reform agendas, and public health initiatives. CONTRIBUTORS: Nick Cullather, Suzanne Junod, Deborah Neill, Elizabeth Neswald, David F. Smith, Ulrike Thoms, Corinna Treitel, Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska Elizabeth Neswald is associate professor for the history of science and technology at Brock University, Canada. David F. Smith is Honorary Senior Lecturer in the history of medicine at the University of Aberdeen. Ulrike Thoms is a historian of science and researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science.

Infections, Chronic Disease, and the Epidemiological Transition
  • A New Perspective
  • Alexander Mercer
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    14 March 2018
    Print publication:
    30 December 2014
  • This volume examines the ongoing, worldwide epidemiological transition in which acute infectious diseases are being superseded by chronic diseases as the predominant causes of morbidity and mortality; age at death has shifted from childhood to older adult ages; and life expectancy, population, and the proportion of older people are increasing. This transition constitutes a fundamental change in the human condition, and an understanding of the historical process behind it is thus of major importance. This study is the first to document the transition in a single country, drawing on records of cause-specific mortality since the eighteenth century in England, with comparative data from other Western countries. Alexander Mercer discusses possible causes of specific disease trends, reassessing the relative importance of "health interventions" and "standard of living" as determinants of increased life expectancy, and presents a new theory of how chronic diseases have developed. As specific microorganisms have been established as causal agents in chronic diseases that account for a significant proportion of "premature" deaths, the study suggests that a new conceptualization of the epidemiological transition is required, one that takes into account interrelationships between infectious diseases, between infections and chronic diseases, and between disorders underlying different chronic diseases. Alexander Mercer is an independent researcher and the author of Disease, Mortality and Population in Transition: Epidemiological-Demographic Change in England Since the EighteenthCentury as Part of a Global Phenomenon.

The Spanish Influenza Pandemic of 1918–1919
  • Perspectives from the Iberian Peninsula and the Americas
  • With contributions by María-Isabel Porras-Gallo , Ryan A. Davi , Mercedes Pascual Artiaga , Catherine Belling , Josep Bernabeu-Mestre , Esteban Domingo , Magda Fahrni , Hernán Feldman , Pilar León-Sanz , Maria Luísa Lima , Maria deFátima Nunes , Anny Jackeline Torres Silveira , José Manuel Sobral , Paulo Silveira e Sousa and Christiane Maria Cruz de Souza
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    14 March 2018
    Print publication:
    15 November 2014
  • The Spanish Influenza Pandemic of 1918-1919 sheds new light on what the World Health Organization described as "the single most devastating infectious disease outbreak ever recorded" by situating the Iberian Peninsula as the key point of connection, both epidemiologically and discursively, between Europe and the Americas. The essays in this volume elucidate specific aspects of the pandemic that have received minimal attention until now, including social control, gender, class, religion, national identity, and military medicine's reactions to the pandemic and its relationship with civilian medicine, all in the context of World War I. As the authors point out, however, the experiences of 1918-19 remain persistently relevant to contemporary life, particularly in view of events such as the 2009 H1N1 swine flu pandemic. Contributors: Mercedes Pascual Artiaga, Catherine Belling, Josep Bernabeu-Mestre, Ryan A, Davis, Esteban Domingo, Magda Fahrni, Hernán Feldman, Pilar León-Sanz, Maria Luísa Lima, Maria deFátima Nunes, María-Isabel Porras-Gallo, Anny Jackeline Torres Silveira, José Manuel Sobral, Paulo Silveira e Sousa, Christiane Maria Cruz de Souza. María-Isabel Porras-Gallo is Professor of History of Science in the Medical Faculty of Ciudad Real at the University of Castile-La Mancha (Spain). She is the author of Un reto para la sociedad madrileña: la epidemia de gripe de 1918-1919 and co-editor of El drama de la polio. Un problema social y familiar en la España franquista. Ryan A. Davis is Assistant Professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at Illinois State University. He is the author of The Spanish Flu: Narrative and Cultural Identity in Spain, 1918.

Intrusive Interventions
  • Public Health, Domestic Space, and Infectious Disease Surveillance in England, 1840-1914
  • Graham Mooney
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    14 March 2018
    Print publication:
    15 October 2015
  • The politics of public health in modern democracies concerns the balance between rights and responsibilities. This equilibrium of citizenship is under perpetual negotiation, but it was particularly intense in mid-nineteenth-century Britain when public health became deeply embedded as a state practice. Using extensive archival research, Intrusive Interventions examines the contested realm ofVictorian liberal subjectivity through an interconnected group of policies: infectious disease reporting, domestic quarantine, mandatory removal to isolation hospital, contact tracing, and the disinfection of homes and belongings. These techniques of infectious disease surveillance eventually became one of the most powerful and controversial set of tools in modern public health.

    One of the crucial questions for liberal democracies has been how the state relates to the private family in shaping duties, responsibilities, rights, and needs. Intrusive Interventions argues that thegaze of public health was retrained onto everyday behaviors and demonstrates that infectious disease surveillance attempted to govern through the agency of family and through the concept of domesticity. This fresh interpretation of public health practice during the Victorian and Edwardian periods complements studies that have examined domestic visiting, the infant welfare movement, child protection, and school welfare.

    Graham Mooney is an assistant professor at the Institute of the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University.

Female Circumcision and Clitoridectomy in the United States
  • A History of a Medical Treatment
  • Sarah B. Rodriguez
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    14 March 2018
    Print publication:
    15 October 2014
  • In the nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries, American physicians treated women and girls for masturbation by removing the clitoris (clitoridectomy) or clitoral hood (female circumcision). During this same time, and continuing to today, physicians also performed female circumcision to enable women to reach orgasm. While the opposite purposes of these clitoral surgeries (to either contain a perceived excessive sexuality or to remedy a perceived lack of sexual responsiveness) may seem paradoxical, their use reflects a consistent medical conception of the clitoris as a sexual organ. In recent years both the popular media and academics have commented on the rising popularity in the United States of female genital cosmetic surgeries, including female circumcision, yet these discussions often assume such surgeries are new. In Female Circumcision and Clitoridectomy in the United States: A History of a Medical Treatment, Sarah Rodriguez presents an engaging and surprising history of surgeries on the clitoris, revealing what the therapeutic use of clitoridectomy and female circumcision tells us about changing (and not so changing) medical ideas concerning the female body and female sexuality. Sarah B. Rodriguez teaches at Northwestern University in the Medical Humanities and Bioethics Program and in the Global Health Studies Program.

Communities and Health Care
  • The Rochester, New York, Experiment
  • Sarah F. Liebschutz
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    09 March 2018
    Print publication:
    30 June 2011
  • During the 1992 presidential campaign, candidate William J. Clinton praised Rochester's hospital experimental payment (HEP) program for containing costs and providing access to high quality health care. "If Rochester, New York, can do it with two-thirds of the cost of the rest of us," Clinton asserted, "America can do it too." This book is a detailed case study of a community that devised and implemented a unique, successful, and celebrated hospital cost containment experiment in the 1980s. Author Sarah Liebschutz describes the economic and social culture of Rochester dating to the early part of the twentieth century that provided the fertile soil for regional health planning and the HEP program. This study also examines how the changing economy ultimately stimulated robust competition among health care insurers and providers.
    What does Rochester's experience tell us about the role communities play in organizing and financing health care? The national government has long played --and will continue to play -- a central role in determining health policy, funding health insurance, and reimbursing health care providers. The responsibility for dealing with the interlocking issues of access, quality, and costs, however, is not exclusively national. State governments shape the health system as they legislate, regulate, and finance such key components of health care as insurance coverage, quality of care, hospitals, and other providers.
    Communities matter because they organize and deliver health care at the ground level through private and employed health care professionals and public, private, and nonprofit hospitals. They matter because they ultimately determine whether health care in America is available, efficient, and effective.
    The book draws heavily on files of the Rochester Area Hospitals Corporation, made available specifically to the author, and on extensive interviews with business leaders, hospital trustees, and administrators whose decisions fostered collaboration and then competition.

    Sarah F. Liebschutz is Distinguished Service Professor Emerita at the State University of New York, College at Brockport.

Beriberi in Modern Japan
  • The Making of a National Disease
  • Alexander R. Bay
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    08 April 2017
    Print publication:
    15 December 2012
  • In modern Japan, beriberi (or thiamin deficiency) became a public health problem that cut across all social boundaries, afflicting even the Meiji Emperor. During an age of empire building for the Japanese nation, incidence rates in the military ranged from 30 percent in peacetime to 90 percent during war. Doctors and public health officials called beriberi a "national disease" because it festered within the bodies of the people and threatened the health of the empire. Nevertheless, they could not agree over what caused the disease, attributing it to a diet deficiency or a microbe.

    InBeriberi in Modern Japan, Alexander R. Bay examines the debates over the etiology of this "national disease" during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Etiological consensus came after World War I, but the struggle at the national level to direct beriberi prevention continued, peaking during wartime mobilization. War served as the context within which scientific knowledge of beriberi and its prevention was made. The story of beriberi research is not simply about the march toward the inevitable discovery of "the beriberi vitamin," but rather the history of the role of medicine in state-making and empire-building in modern Japan.

    Alexander Bay is assistant professor of history at Chapman University.

Stress, Shock, and Adaptation in the Twentieth Century
  • Edited by David Cantor, Edmund Ramsden
  • With contributions by Theodore M. Brown , Otniel E. Dror , Rhodri Hayward , Mark Jackson , Robert G. W. Kirk , Junko Kitanaka , Tulley Long , Joseph Melling , Elizabeth Siegel Watkins and Allan Young
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 April 2014
    Print publication:
    20 February 2014
  • The modern concept of stress is commonly traced to the physiologist, Hans Selye. Selye viewed stress as a physiological response to a significant or unexpected change, describing a series of stages: alarm, resistance, and exhaustion, when an organism's adaptive mechanisms finally failed. While Selye originally focused on nonspecific physiological responses to harmful agents, the stress concept has since been used to examine the relationship between a variety of environmental stressors and mental disorders and chronic organic diseases such as hypertension, gastric ulcers, arthritis, allergies, and cancer. This edited volume brings together leading scholars to explore the emergence and development of the stress concept and its ever-changing definitions. It examines how the concept has been used to connect disciplines such as ecology, physiology, psychology, psychiatry, public health, urban planning, architecture, and a range of social sciences; its application in a variety of sites such as the battlefield, workplace, clinic, hospital, and home; and the emergence of techniques of stress management in a variety of different socio-cultural and scientific locations. Contributors: Theodore M. Brown, David Cantor, Otniel E. Dror, Rhodri Hayward, Mark Jackson, Robert G. W. Kirk, Junko Kitanaka, Tulley Long, Joseph Melling, Edmund Ramsden, Elizabeth Siegel Watkins, Allan Young. David Cantor is Acting Director, Office of History, National Institutes of Health. Edmund Ramsden is Research Fellow at the Centre for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester.

Medicine and the Workhouse
  • Edited by Jonathan Reinarz, Leonard Schwarz
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 December 2013
    Print publication:
    01 October 2013
  • While the welfare functions of the workhouse have been well researched, its medical services have been comparatively neglected. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and despite much administrative reform, workhouse medicine remained central to the medical experiences of the poor. Workhouse beds in Britain, for example, far outnumbered beds provided by charitable hospitals, which have often been the subject of historical study, and, by the 1830s, most parishes possessed their own workhouses. A high percentage of entries to workhouses consisted of the sick of all ages. In those communities where the elderly comprised the majority of workhouse inmates, most required medical relief. Perhaps inevitably, the position of workhouse doctor, or medical officer, became progressively more central to the management of these institutions, though we know very little about these overworked and undervalued practitioners. Historians of welfare, the English poor laws, and medicine have been aware of the importance of workhouse-based medical relief in the past, but the topic has not bee studied in depth. This is the first book to examine the history of the medical services provided by these welfare institutions, both in Britain and its former colonies, over the period covered by the Old and New Poor Laws. Jonathan Reinarz is Director of the History of Medicine Unit at the University of Birmingham, UK. He has published extensively on the history of English medical institutions, 1750-1950. Leonard Schwarz has recently retired as a Reader in Urban History at the University of Birmingham, where he founded the Birmingham Eighteenth Century Centre.

Plague and Public Health in Early Modern Seville
  • Kristy Wilson Bowers
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 October 2013
    Print publication:
    15 September 2013
  • Plague and Public Health in Early Modern Seville offers a reassessment of the impact of plague in the early modern era, presenting sixteenth-century Seville as a case study of how municipal officials and residents worked together to create a public health response to epidemics that protected both individual and communal interests. It argues in particular for a redefinition of what "public health" meant in the early modern era, noting the efforts of city officials to protect both individual health and communal welfare as they negotiated a series of balances: between individual and communal needs, between public health and economic needs, between municipal and royal interests. Based on extensive primary sources held in the municipal archive of Seville, the work argues that a careful reading of the records shows a critical difference between how plague regulations were written and how they were enforced, a difference that reflects an unacknowledged process of negotiation aimed at preserving balance within the community. The book makes an important contribution to the scholarly history of epidemics, and in particular to the study of the impact of plague in Spain, which until now has received scant attention from historians. Kristy Wilson Bowers received her PhD from Indiana University and teaches in the History Department at Northern Illinois University.

The Lobotomy Letters
  • The Making of American Psychosurgery
  • Mical Raz
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 July 2013
    Print publication:
    01 June 2013
  • The rise and widespread acceptance of psychosurgery constitutes one of the most troubling chapters in the history of modern medicine. By the late 1950s tens of thousands of Americans had been lobotomized as treatment for a host of psychiatric disorders. Though the procedure would later be decried as devastating and grossly unscientific, many patients, families, and physicians reported veritable improvement from the surgery; some patients were even considered cured. The Lobotomy Letters gives an account of why this controversial procedure was sanctioned by psychiatrists and doctors of modern medicine. Drawing from original correspondence penned by lobotomy patients and their families as well as from the professional papers of lobotomy pioneer and neurologist Walter Freeman, the volume reconstructs how physicians, patients, and their families viewed lobotomy and analyzes the reasons for its overwhelming use. Mical Raz, MD/PhD, is a physician and historian of medicine.

The Birth Control Clinic in a Marketplace World
  • Rose Holz
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    30 June 2012
  • ‘The Birth Control Clinic in a Marketplace World’ is the first book to chart the origins and evolution of the charity birth control clinic movement in the United States from the 1910s through the 1970s, a period that witnessed dramatic transformation in the goods and services such clinics provided. Rose Holz uncovers the virtually unexamined relationship between Planned Parenthood and the commercial marketplace sphere. Challenging more than thirty years of historiography on birth control, Holz sheds new light on battles over reproductive rights through her analysis of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America within the context of the commercial birth control world. Revealing that it would be Planned Parenthood's engagement to charity -- the argument the organization once used to discredit the presumed profit-driven exploitation of the marketplace -- that would put precisely those women it hoped to assist in dangerous situations, she asks such probing questions as: What were the meanings attached to the provision of birth control and its commercial distribution? How in turn were these meanings used as sources of power? The project draws on rich primary sources to answer these questions and to examine the historical role of the local birth control clinic in modern America. Rose Holz earned her PhD in history from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is associate director of and associate professor of practice in the Women's and Gender Studies Program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Bacteriology in British India
  • Laboratory Medicine and the Tropics
  • Pratik Chakrabarti
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    31 October 2012
  • Bacteriology transformed colonial medicine from a focus on public health and hygiene to unlimited possibilities for the eradication of diseases. It also fiercely engaged public discourse on the ethics of animal and human experimentation. 'Bacteriology in British India' is the first book to provide a social and cultural history of bacteriology in colonial India, situating it at the confluence of colonial medical practices, institutionalization, and social movements. Bacteriology was established in India through a complex process of conflict and alignment between Pasteurism and British imperial medicine. This led to divergences and tensions within bacteriology as practiced in Europe and the tropical colonies: in ideas of climate and potency of vaccines, in laboratory methods, in the ethical principles of experimentations, and in the discourses of racial immunity and endemicity of diseases. Scientists like Semple, Haffkine, Cunningham, Brunton, Simond, and Lustig worked in the several Indian Pasteur Institutes and the Central Research Institute, established from 1900, on vaccines for rabies, plague, typhoid, cholera, and snake venom. They conducted vaccinations in Indian cantonments, cities, hospitals, slums, jails, railway stations, villages, and pilgrim sites. The book describes how in the process India became a vast experimental field for bacteriology. By investigating a vast array of laboratory notes, medical literature, and literary sources, the book links colonial medical research with issues of poverty, race, nationalism, and attitudes toward tropical climate and wildlife. It contributes to a wide field of scholarship like imperial and South Asian history, history of science and medicine, sociology of science, and cultural history. Pratik Chakrabarti is senior lecturer in history at the University of Kent, UK.

The Neurological Patient in History
  • L. Stephen Jacyna, Stephen T. Casper
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    12 September 2012
    Print publication:
    15 February 2012
  • Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, Tourette's, multiple sclerosis, stroke: all are neurological illnesses that create dysfunction, distress, and disability. With their symptoms ranging from impaired movement and paralysis to hallucinations and dementia, neurological patients present myriad puzzling disorders and medical challenges. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries countless stories about neurological patients appeared in newspapers, books, medical papers, and films. Often the patients were romanticized; indeed, it was common for physicians to cast neurological patients in a grand performance, allegedly giving audiences access to deep philosophical insights about the meaning of life and being. Beyond these romanticized images, however, the neurological patient was difficult to diagnose. Experiments often approached unethical realms, and treatment created challenges for patients, courts, caregivers, and even for patient advocacy organizations. In this kaleidoscopic study, the contributors illustrate how the neurological patient was constructed in history and came to occupy its role in Western culture. Stephen T. Casper is assistant professor in Humanities and Social Sciences at Clarkson University. L. Stephen Jacyna is reader in the History of Medicine and Director of the Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London.

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