Preprint Articles

As AIDS activists voiced their demands for “drugs into bodies” in the late 1980s, American scientists injected drugs into the body of a highly controversial research animal—the chimpanzee. This paper examines the controversy over the use of chimpanzees in U.S. HIV/AIDS research that led to the decline of chimpanzees as laboratory animals. The author suggests that the AIDS epidemic raised the public profile of laboratory chimpanzee research, heightening its preexisting financial and ethical problems. The scientific and lay debate sparked by chimpanzee AIDS research demonstrates the intersection of ethics and economics in shaping laboratory research practices and disease politics in the late twentieth century. As animal advocates constructed laboratory chimpanzees as close human relatives, innocent of the imagined sins of people with AIDS, researchers working with chimpanzees confronted their ambiguity as an HIV animal model and the long-term costs of maintaining HIV-infected animals. By the late 1990s, an animal that had been a promising AIDS model became a public relations headache and a major expense for biomedical research. The pushback to the use of chimpanzees in AIDS research helps scholars understand how American scientists, activists, and animal advocates have made sense of the enmeshed concerns of human and animal welfare in a time of epidemiological crisis.

This article examines the usage of alternative therapies such as AL-721 and metaphysical healing by gay men and AIDS patients during the HIV/AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s. The usage of alternative therapies during the epidemic has usually been framed by scholars as a foil to more well-studied areas of palliative care. Instead, this article argues that these alternative therapies and lifestyle regimens are worthy of greater discussion as this alternative medical marketplace offered patients a meaningful choice in managing their illness. Furthermore, this alternative medical marketplace was a patient-regulated one, where the patients themselves decided who was and who was not a legitimate medical practitioner. Gay publications in Texas became a major hub for information and discussion about alternative treatments, which indicates that medical pluralism flourished even outside of AIDS organizations in New York and Los Angeles.

This article opens a window on anti-cancer drug research using “traditional Chinese medicine” (TCM) in Mao-period China. Drawing on a database of over 120 scientific journal articles from that period, it discusses how physician-researchers mined Chinese materia medica for cancer cures in the context of political and practical imperatives. Some results were productive, though the interpretive possibilities of assigning credit to traditional/Chinese or Western/modern medicine in any particular instance remained broad. The article examines how extending or withholding traditionality to substances that made a seeming transition from that realm to modern clinical use was negotiated in different instances. It also locates Chinese pharmaceutical research, for the first time, in the larger context of global bioprospecting for anti-cancer drugs, which was characteristic of the 1960s and 1970s.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Iraq was visited by two influenza pandemics—one in 1889–1893 (the so-called Russian flu), the other in 1918–1920 (the so-called Spanish flu). These pandemics occurred during two completely different political contexts in the history of Iraq—that of the Ottoman Empire, which ruled Iraq since the sixteenth century, and that of the British wartime occupation, which brought an end to Ottoman rule in the region during World War I. The different political contexts in which influenza appeared in Iraq produced significant differences in how Ottoman and British authorities responded to the disease. Specifically, while influenza was widespread across Iraq during both pandemics, the Ottomans largely ignored the disease, whereas the British tracked and studied it. Despite these differences, however, there were certain similarities across both pandemics. For one, there were subsequent outbreaks of influenza following the worst of each pandemic, but these did not meaningfully shape Ottoman or British public health priorities. Second, in both cases, there was uncertainty about the nature of influenza, much as there was elsewhere in the world. As this article demonstrates, the history of influenza in late Ottoman and British occupied Iraq was one marked by continuity and change.

This article investigates the history of Sir Richard Carew’s warming stone. Through examination of handwritten notebooks, letters, and printed medical pamphlets, it recovers the theoretical framework shaping the stone’s design as a cure, the creation and launch of medical business in early modern London, the use of cheap print in promoting medical services, and the place of cure testimonials in the marketing of early modern health technologies. It also showcases the dynamism inherent in the design, production, and marketing of the early modern health devices. The article extends histories of early modern therapeutics beyond pharmacy to include medical devices and shines light on new historical actors, knowledge practices, and commercial ventures in early modern health care. It also demonstrates the utility of adopting history of technology frameworks to study early modern health objects and posits that further study of everyday health technologies can enrich histories of medicine.

This article is a microhistorical examination of a settler medical technology in an Indigenous community: Umoⁿhoⁿ leader Joseph La Flesche’s artificial leg, which he wore from the early 1860s until his death in 1888. This case study illustrates how La Flesche’s disability and prosthesis were deeply entangled with Euro-American challenges to Umoⁿhoⁿ ways of life, including relational care, land use, and spiritual practices. Although the artificial limb, from a Euro-American perspective, was a medical technology to resolve disability, from the perspective of some Umoⁿhoⁿ the limb represented unwanted changes to their land and culture, changes that also compromised crucial community rituals and engendered new forms of “spiritual disablement.” The medical technology’s significance cannot be removed from a larger context of settler colonialism and its ableist assessment of Indigenous bodyminds, lands, beliefs, and ways of life.

The 1950s were a decade of remarkable advances in tuberculosis research globally, with Kenya emerging as a key site for developing new control and treatment regimens. Yet historical source material and consequently medical histories are largely silent on the context of anticolonial war in which this work took place. This article argues that disease control efforts in postwar Kenya must be examined in the context of the Mau Mau uprising and uses photographs to probe the intersection of politics and health. Examining photographs of late colonial TB control initiatives, it highlights the stark contrast between these images and the concurrent realities and imageries of Mau Mau. Produced in contexts of omnipresent violence and deep uncertainty about Kenya’s future, these medical photographs were instruments of colonial power and Western hegemony. Even as they reproduced a generic developmentalist vision of medical knowledge production, the specificities of Kenya’s late colonial struggle reverberate throughout these images.

This article uses a close reading of clinical photographs to demonstrate how ambiguities surrounding the ostensibly scopic nature of race—that is, race as both conspicuous and measurable based on surface appearance—functioned in the medical terrain in segregationist South Africa, and beyond. By analyzing both archival and published materials produced and used during the mid-twentieth century at Cape Town’s medical school, the author argues that race operated as an “elusive signifier” in that it was simultaneously conspicuous and elided in visual and written form. As such, the material was legible to local South African audiences, situated within a context of increasingly explicit racial segregation, but also able to circulate across the globe as universal medical knowledge. The author shows how the coterminous presence and absence of race aligned with sociopolitical tensions, scientific attitudes, “commonsense” assumptions, and the international aspirations of local medical professionals in the Cape region.

This special issue explores the opportunities and challenges of using photographs to write histories of health and healing in colonial and postcolonial Africa. Since the latenineteenth-century introduction of photographic technology to Africa, it has been employed in a myriad of manners and settings related to health. Yet while photographs abound in medical histories of Africa—typically as provocative yet unexplored cover photos or illustrations—historians of health and healing in Africa have not systematically utilized photographs as historical sources that augment or contest analyses based on written sources. This special issue introduction proposes a set of tools that establish the intersection of visual, medical and African history as a productive analytic: (1) confronting the fiction of photographic transparency through contextualization, (2) close viewing of and ethical engagement with images, and (3) centering the fictions of photographic truth as historical subjects in themselves. These tools are demonstrated with reference to the contributions in the special issue, dealing, variously with colonial-era Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, and South Africa.

In 1977, self-proclaimed cancer doctor Milan Brych set up a clinic in the Cook Islands offering to cure 80 percent of terminal patients. Patients from Australia and New Zealand flew to Rarotonga to have the $12,000 treatment. Most died within months and were buried in the Rarotonga cemetery, locally known as the “Brych Yard”: Brych had not discovered a cure for cancer but was a quack and con man. This article looks at this notable case of cancer quackery and examines the associations that facilitated Brych’s activities. It argues that, given the late twentieth-century context of an established, influential medical profession well-policed by government regulation, the web of interests that facilitated Brych’s activities was critical in enabling him to achieve the scope and influence that he did. Both modern quackery and its brethren misinformation can be considered as an activity of an interlinked network of diverse, but complementary, interests.