Preprint Articles

This article explores the extent to which the emergence of networked conceptions of etiology and network-oriented approaches to the organization of medical practice were historically congruent. Focusing on interwar malariology, it contextualizes the development of ecological approaches to infection management and control in terms of mosquito-borne malariotherapeutic practice. In Britain, mosquito breeding programs directed toward the therapeutic infection of mental hospital patients prompted malariologists to modify and refine existing environmental approaches to malaria. Breeding mosquitoes, attending to patients, and maintaining sources of malarial blood modified malariologists’ etiological presumptions, contributing to a wider breakdown of associations between race, place, and disease. Simultaneously, the emergence of an international network of malariotherapy-devoted institutions helped transform malariological practice. Examination of a collaboration between British and Romanian malariologists shows one way in which this network contributed to the transformation of malariology from a formal League of Nations–focused endeavor to one distributed along common lines of research and prevention.

This article situates the emergence of sensationalized news reports of “infant addicts” and the concurrently evolving study of neonatal drug withdrawal within the context of the expansion of methadone maintenance treatment (MMT) in the United States. It details how, in the early 1970s, concerns about pregnant narcotic addicts and their infants became part of the politically charged debate over methadone maintenance. The popular press amplified the apprehensions of a vocal group of pediatricians who saw in infants’ withdrawal an indication of methadone’s inherent harmfulness and potential toxicity. Increased access to MMT and its presumed normalizing effects on reproductive functions augmented these concerns. The ensuing controversy led clinical researchers to define, measure, and systematically study “neonatal abstinence syndrome,” whereas the emerging media trope of the infant drug addict effectively undermined the claims made by MMT’s proponents about the drug’s therapeutic utility.

This essay analyzes the beginnings of the Camphill movement, an international network of intentional communities for children and adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities. At its founding in Scotland in 1939, Camphill was a community of refugees; both the staff and first disabled residents fled Nazi Austria and Germany. This circumstance precipitated an innovation: disabled and nondisabled people lived together in a family-style household. But the innovation was not so much in Camphill’s structure: it was common for nineteenth and early twentieth-century asylums to resemble homes and to strive for a familial atmosphere. Furthermore, Camphill’s focus on cures, vocational training, and productivity aligned with the prevailing mid-twentieth-century medical approach to disability. The innovation concerned content: Camphill did not invoke a sense of home; it was a home because its displaced founders needed it to be one. The essay concludes with a critical reflection on how the model Camphill created should be situated in disability history.

In 1920, maternal mortality rates in the United States exceeded those of other industrialized nations. To redress this statistic, the federal Children’s Bureau set its sights on improving access to prenatal care at a time when 80 percent of American women received none. In 1921, following lobbying by urban, middle-class progressive women working at or in support of the Bureau, the government legislated for prenatal care programs through the Sheppard-Towner Act. To date, historians have focused on how successfully women implemented the act’s provisions, paying less attention to whether support for rural mothers reduced maternal mortality rates. Using Children’s Bureau pamphlets, documents pertaining to the Sheppard-Towner Act, and letters written to the Bureau from poor, rural women, this article brings government workers, medical professionals, and the women they served into dialogue to analyze the first push to establish prenatal care for underserved American women and the obstacles that stood in the way.

Phlegm figures as a major cause and consequence of disease in late imperial Chinese medicine. Curiously, however, when we go back to the classics, the very notion of phlegm is entirely absent. The rise of phlegm is one of the fundamental transformations in the history of Chinese medicine. This article suggests that the little-known Yuan dynasty treatise On the Art of Nourishing Life (1338), which is notable for extending Chinese phlegm theory in unprecedented ways, was pivotal for this transformation. Noting a strong resemblance of the innovations of this treatise with Galenic medical theories, this article argues that they were inspired by an encounter with the Galenic medical tradition. It submits that these innovations radically altered pre-existing Chinese understandings of the body’s materiality and the nature of disease. And it calls for closer attention to the transcultural movements of theories and concepts in the historiography of Chinese and global medicine.