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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

Page 2 of 2

Stress, Shock, and Adaptation in the Twentieth Century
  • Edited by David Cantor, Edmund Ramsden
  • 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.

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.

Barefoot Doctors and Western Medicine in China
  • Xiaoping Fang
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    14 February 2023
    Print publication:
    01 December 2012
  • The first study in English that examines barefoot doctors in China from the perspective of the social history of medicine.

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 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.

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.

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.

The Origins of Organ Transplantation
  • Surgery and Laboratory Science, 1880-1930
  • Thomas Schlich
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    17 February 2023
    Print publication:
    01 December 2010
  • A history of the little-known or forgotten academic origins of modern organ transplant surgery.

Marriage of Convenience
  • Rockefeller International Health and Revolutionary Mexico
  • Anne-Emanuelle Birn
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    17 March 2023
    Print publication:
    15 August 2006
  • Offers a nuanced analysis of the interaction between the Rockefeller Foundation's International Health Division and Mexico's Departamento de Salubridad Pública as they jointly promoted public health through campaigns against yellow fever and hookworm disease, organized cooperative rural health units, and educated public health professionals in North American universities and Mexican training stations.

Charles Nicolle, Pasteur's Imperial Missionary
  • Typhus and Tunisia
  • Kim Pelis
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    17 March 2023
    Print publication:
    20 April 2006
  • Kim Pelis uses a wide range of French and Tunisian archival materials and a close reading of Nobel Prize-winning bacteriologist Charles Nicolle's scientific papers and philosophical treatises to explore the relationship of science and medicine to society and culture in the first third of the twentieth century.

Rockefeller Money, the Laboratory and Medicine in Edinburgh 1919-1930
  • New Science in an Old Country
  • Christopher Lawrence
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    17 March 2023
    Print publication:
    24 August 2005
  • This book examines the Rockefeller Foundation's attempts to introduce the laboratory sciences, particularly biochemistry, into the Edinburgh medical world of the 1920s.

Venereal Disease, Hospitals and the Urban Poor
  • London's 'Foul Wards,' 1600-1800
  • Kevin P. Siena
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    17 March 2023
    Print publication:
    28 February 2004
  • A re-examination of the role of charity and treating venereal disease in public hospitals in early modern London.

Public Health and the Risk Factor
  • A History of an Uneven Medical Revolution
  • William G. Rothstein
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    22 March 2023
    Print publication:
    01 May 2003
  • A look at how the concept of 'risk factor' has influenced public health and preventive medicine, with an emphasis upon the study of heart disease.

The Mechanization of the Heart
  • Harvey and Descartes
  • Thomas Fuchs
  • Translated by Marjorie Grene
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    17 March 2023
    Print publication:
    01 November 2001
  • In Mechanization of the Heart: Harvey and Descartes Thomas Fuchs discusses the similarities and differences of the views of the two seventeenth-century scholars William Harvey and Rene Descartes on the beat and circulation of the blood; Fuchs traces the reception of the two views in the medical literature of the time and the influence both views had.

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