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Most read

This page lists the top ten most read articles for this journal based on the number of full text views and downloads recorded on Cambridge Core over the last 30 days. This list is updated on a daily basis.

Contents

  • The Agricultural Revolution

  • Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 November 2012, pp. 44-60
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  • The History of Mental Health Services in Modern England: Practitioner Memories and the Direction of Future Research

  • John Turner, Rhodri Hayward, Katherine Angel, Bill Fulford, John Hall, Chris Millard, Mathew Thomson
  • Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 September 2015, pp. 599-624
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  • Writing the recent history of mental health services requires a conscious departure from the historiographical tropes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries which have emphasised the experience of those identified (and legally defined) as lunatics and the social, cultural, political, medical and institutional context of their treatment. A historical narrative structured around rights (to health and liberty) is now complicated by the rise of new organising categories such as ‘costs’, ‘risks’, ‘needs’ and ‘values’. This paper, drawing on insights from a series of witness seminars attended by historians, clinicians and policymakers, proposes a programme of research to place modern mental health services in England and Wales in a richer historical context. Historians should recognise the fragmentation of the concepts of mental illness and mental health need, acknowledge the relationship between critiques of psychiatry and developments in other intellectual spheres, place the experience of the service user in the context of wider socio-economic and political change, understand the impacts of the social perception of ‘risk’ and of moral panic on mental health policy, relate the politics of mental health policy and resources to the general determinants of institutional change in British central and local government, and explore the sociological and institutional complexity of the evolving mental health professions and their relationships with each other and with their clients. While this is no small challenge, it is perhaps the only way to avoid the perpetuation of ‘single-issue mythologies’ in describing and accounting for change.

  • Index

  • Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 August 2012, pp. 483-507
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  • A history of thalidomide in India

  • Ludger Wimmelbücker, Anita Kar
  • Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2023, pp. 228-246
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  • In contrast to the well-known stories of the embryotoxic drug, thalidomide, in countries where it was responsible for large numbers of birth defects, there is limited information on its history in India. Its presence before 2002, when the country issued the first marketing licence for a thalidomide-containing preparation, is assumed to be negligible. This article challenges this view by showing that the drug entered the Indian subcontinent through the former Portuguese territory of Goa around 1960. We examine the subsequent development of its distribution, use and regulation in India from the mid-1960s up to the present situation. Colonial legacies are a crucial explanation for the early appearance of thalidomide on the Indian subcontinent. They also influenced its re-emergence as drug for treating leprosy reactions in India after 1965. We identify key actors in this process: the original German producer that delivered thalidomide free of charge, European doctors who worked for international non-governmental organizations, the World Health Organization (WHO), which supported clinical trials and later discouraged the use of the drug, and finally the Indian state institutions that limited its distribution and later quickly opened the way for the private sector to produce and market thalidomide and its analogues. Finally, we discuss the risk of thalidomide-induced birth defects by casting a critical look on the present state of regulatory provisions and the monitoring of birth defects in India.

  • Plague and the Fall of Baghdad (1258)

  • Nahyan Fancy, Monica H. Green
  • Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 March 2021, pp. 157-177
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  • The recent suggestion that the late medieval Eurasian plague pandemic, the Black Death, had its origins in the thirteenth century rather than the fourteenth century has brought new scrutiny to texts reporting ‘epidemics’ in the earlier period. Evidence both from Song China and Iran suggests that plague was involved in major sieges laid by the Mongols between the 1210s and the 1250s, including the siege of Baghdad in 1258 which resulted in the fall of the Abbasid caliphate. In fact, re-examination of multiple historical accounts in the two centuries after the siege of Baghdad shows that the role of epidemic disease in the Mongol attacks was commonly known among chroniclers in Syria and Egypt, raising the question why these outbreaks have been overlooked in modern historiography of plague. The present study looks in detail at the evidence in Arabic sources for disease outbreaks after the siege of Baghdad in Iraq and its surrounding regions. We find subtle factors in the documentary record to explain why, even though plague received new scrutiny from physicians in the period, it remained a minor feature in stories about the Mongol invasion of western Asia. In contemporary understandings of the genesis of epidemics, the Mongols were not seen to have brought plague to Baghdad; they caused plague to arise by their rampant destruction. When an even bigger wave of plague struck the Islamic world in the fourteenth century, no association was made with the thirteenth-century episode. Rather, plague was now associated with the Mongol world as a whole.

  • Ankylosing spondylitis: Yesterday and Today

  • David G. Spencer, Roger D. Sturrock, W Watson Buchanan
  • Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 August 2012, pp. 60-69
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  • AZTEC MEDICINE

  • Francisco Guerra
  • Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 August 2012, pp. 315-338
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  • Typhus and its control in Russia, 1870–1940

  • K David Patterson
  • Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 August 2012, pp. 361-381
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  • A HISTORY OF THE MEDICINAL USE OF TOBACCO 1492–1860*

  • Grace G. Stewart
  • Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 August 2012, pp. 228-268
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  • ON AN ANCIENT EGYPTIAN METHOD OF DIAGNOSING PREGNANCY AND DETERMINING FOETAL SEX

  • P. Ghalioungui, SH. Khalil, A. R. Ammar
  • Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 August 2012, pp. 241-246
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