Preprint Articles

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.

This article examines international cooperation in family planning between Japan and the People’s Republic of China in the early 1980s. By taking up a broader understanding of infrastructure, the author considers diplomacy itself as an extension of health infrastructure. The author argues that diplomacy as a form of health infrastructure acted as a site of transnational networking and of material production, by showing how different forms of diplomacy generated sometimes overlapping, yet other times distinctive human networks, and how memorandums as an artifact generated through diplomatic negotiations helped (and did not help) to construct material and social conditions for birth control and related health activities in the PRC. Through the case of China-Japan international cooperation, this article confirms the importance of Cold War diplomacy for the politics of international health in the mid-twentieth century but also suggests that scholars should explore additional intersectional dynamisms, in particular regional and bilateral politics, which pivoted negotiations for international health.

During the 1920s and early 1930s, American psychiatrists and other experts in the field of child guidance engaged in debate about which discipline had professional competency over children’s mental health. Psychiatrists contested psychologists’ claims to expertise, arguing that children’s behavioral disturbances were medical problems of an emotional nature. As the child guidance movement gained steam through the proliferation of child guidance clinics, pediatricians protested their exclusion from it. Some hospital-based psychiatrists echoed their claim that the adoption of psychoanalysis at child guidance clinics without a hospital connection isolated psychiatry from scientific medicine. The authors examine the early work of some of these psychiatrists, who sought to collaborate with pediatricians in a hospital framework. They developed a medical model for the nascent discipline of child psychiatry, alternative to the model practiced at child guidance clinics. Eschewing psychoanalytic interpretations, they emphasized the interaction between physical and mental health problems from early childhood.

By the twentieth century, hospitals in Latin America were cornerstones and contact zones of nation building and healing. In Guatemala and Ecuador, indígenas (Indigenous people) struggled to carve out their place in the nation. Latin American hospitals hosted a wide range of therapies. Early twentieth-century Ecuadorian hospitals endorsed curanderos (healers), while Guatemalan hospitals regularly employed midwives. Sometimes overseen by Catholic nuns, hybrid hospital care was both a product and reflection of the imperfect, capricious, and partial processes that marked modernization’s and scientific medicine’s evolution in postcolonial nations with large Indigenous populations such as Guatemala and Ecuador. Highlighting the contributions and experiences of Indigenous people, healers, and midwives and the Sisters of Charity reveals how hospitals and the care provided in them held multiple meanings and functioned in different ways for a variety of parties.

When William Pickering’s mind became “troubled” in 1803, his parents and seven siblings launched into action. As hundreds of letters between family members reveal, after initially ensuring William’s safety, the family embarked on an extended initiative to heal his disordered thinking, first through lifestyle modifications and medical treatments, then boarding in the home of a physician who specialized in mental disorders. By 1807, the family decided that it was necessary to institutionalize William in the Pennsylvania Hospital where he died in 1814. The Pickering letters documenting William’s treatments—as well as those of his brother George who was also institutionalized for purported insanity—suggest a blurring of the bounds between home and asylum care in the early United States. Before asylum admission, the family pursued a range of therapies that were part familial, part medical, and part institutional. After institutionalization, family members continued to care for their confined relations.

This article analyzes how Brazilian physicians in the nineteenth century framed therapeutic abortion as a lifesaving intervention, arguing for professional authority amid religious and legal constraints. Drawing on medical theses from the Faculdades de Medicina of Rio de Janeiro and Bahia, it explores how doctors defended abortion in cases of obstructed labor, when maternal death was imminent. Physicians appealed to humanitarian urgency, theological reinterpretation, and legal ambiguity to justify their opinions on therapeutic abortion. The article identifies three key sites of contention: opposition from the Catholic Church, medical debates between abortion and cesarean section, and shifting legal frameworks. Much of the debate examined here unfolded under the 1830 Criminal Code, which criminalized abortion without providing explicit protection for therapeutic interventions. Later, the 1890 Penal Code formally recognized therapeutic abortion, but only conditionally, imposing legal liability on physicians in cases of maternal death. This study argues that medical authority over therapeutic abortion emerged through a fragile and contested form of recognition, negotiated within overlapping regimes of law, religion, and medical ethics, and constrained in practice by legal uncertainty and the threat of professional liability.