This dual-focussed examination will critically compare and contrast the British Royal Army Medical Corps and the French Medical Service’s involvement in the Western Front chemical campaign between 1915 and 1918. Because the Anglophone historiography has tended to marginalise the French contribution to the allied chemical war, this article will attempt to re-balance the historical narrative by emphasising the collective nature and importance of this joint Franco-British enterprise. By interrogating a raft of under-utilised primary evidence in the French and British archives, this investigation will contribute to the ‘alliance literature’ by arguing that when it comes to aspects of the Franco-British chemical war such as the co-operation of the medical services, the appellation ‘together but alone’ does not fully hold. The article will explore avenues of the two national armies evolving process of mutual medical assistance, material exchange and scientific collaboration. The striking similarity of French and British gas casualty statistics is highlighted with reference to the overall congruence of their anti-gas strategies – notwithstanding the problematic nature of these statistics. In addition to enhancing soldiers’ resistance to the poison gas threat on the battlefield, the Medical Services were also responsible for the protection of local civilians in the war zones. With reference mainly to France, this investigation will discuss the significance and implications of the poison gas threat to the home front. Finally, the impact of chemical weapon production upon civilian war workers in France and Britain will be commented upon.

This article examines the medical career of an enslaved physician in Virginia named Nassaw from the mid eighteenth-century until the period of the American Revolution. I develop a taxonomy of Nassaw’s labours as a nurse caring for the sick, a healer administering medicines at the behest of his enslaver and as a doctor in his own right making medical judgements as he treated his patients. Nassaw is in some ways comparable to other enslaved healers of African descent in the Atlantic world, including well-known Mohanes and ritual specialists in Brazil and Latin America. However, due to his role as a physician employed by his slaveholder to principally heal other enslaved people, Nassaw struggled to find satisfaction in his labours as a healer as other enslaved people rightly perceived him as an agent of their enslaver whose medical work healed their bodies while extending their oppression. I argue that Nassaw became frustrated and depressed, and turned to drinking because of his inability to pursue or experience what Sharla M. Fett terms a ‘relational vision of health’ in the Chesapeake. Moreover, I interpret his drinking as a rebuke to the racist pretensions of his enslaver – who instructed him in pharmacy and surgery – who aimed to transform Nassaw into an Enlightened ‘black exhibit’ by training him to be a doctor. I conclude by returning to how precisely different Nassaw was from other enslaved healers in the Chesapeake like Tom of Nomini Hall or Romeo, and make the case that Nassaw deserves a place in histories of slavery and medicine precisely because he was an enslaved plantation doctor rather than a popular healer or conjuror.

In the Finnish medical discussion during the middle decades of the twentieth century, the challenging differential diagnostics between hyperthyroidism and various neuroses was perceived to yield a risk of unnecessary surgical interventions of psychiatric patients. In 1963, the Finnish surgeon Erkki Saarenmaa claimed that ‘the most significant mark of a neurotic was a transverse scar on the neck’, a result of an unnecessary thyroid surgery. The utterance was connected to the complex nature of thyroid diseases, which seemed to be to ‘a great extent psychosomatic’. Setting forth from this statement, the article aims to decipher the connection between hyperthyroidism, unnecessary surgical treatment and the psychosomatic approach in Finnish medicine. Utilising a wide variety of published medical research and discussion in specialist journals, the article examines the theoretical debate around troublesome diagnostics of functional complaints. It focuses on the introduction of new medical ideas, namely the concepts of ‘psychosomatics’ and ‘stress’. In the process, the article aims to unveil a definition of psychosomatic illness that places it on a continuum between psychological and somatic illness. That psychosomatic approach creates a space with interpretative potential can be applied to the historiography of psychosomatic phenomena more generally. Further inquiry into the intersections of surgery and psychosomatics would enrich both historiographies. It is also argued that the historical study of psychosomatic syndromes may become skewed, if the term ‘psychosomatic’ is from the outset taken to signify something that is all in the mind.

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.

During the colonial period sexually transmitted infections (STIs) came to be recognised as a major public health problem in African cities. Thus, STI control and urban modernisation became deeply entangled as authorities redrew spatial and social boundaries to manage populations and their cross-cultural interaction. Public health measures, urban planning and policing were part of a coordinated effort to neutralise the potential impact of rapidly growing African urban migration on the Belgian Congo’s ‘model’ capital Leopoldville. While STI control was facilitated by new drugs (arsenicals, sulfonamides and antibiotics) to treat syphilis, chancroid, gonorrhoea and chlamydia (bacterial STIs), the effects of the 1929 economic crisis and urban social change illustrated the limits of colonial authority. Redesigning urban spaces and repressive measures to curb polygyny and prostitution operated in a parallel fashion with the expansion of health coverage, new treatments and awareness campaigns. To gain a better understanding of the evolution of STI incidence among African urban populations during the colonial period between 1910 and 1960, extensive archival records and secondary literature were consulted to assess the interplay between improved screening, diagnostic and therapeutic methods with demographic and social change. They show that STI rates, probably peaked during the pre-1929 period and apart from a short period in the early 1930s associated with mass screening, declined until becoming residual in the 1950s. Reflecting upon sanitary interventions and their broader dimensions, the article analyses the evolution of treatment regimes and their impact in the changing urban organisation and environment of the colony’s capital.

Though male doctors gained prominence at the bedsides of pregnant mothers in nineteenth-century Europe, the clinical training they received in medical academies remained cursory. In France, to supplement the medical faculties, the government set up schools for both health officers and midwives which were meant to teach practical obstetrics. This paper focusses on the city of Arras, where these two groups of students competed for the limited numbers of pregnant patients on which to practice their future professions. Like many in their field, two prominent instructors in Arras at each end of the century promoted male obstetrical education over female, arguing that practical education for health officers would lead to safer births for mothers and infants. By the 1870s, the obstetrics instructor adopted germ theory, tying improved hygiene and thus mortality rates to male students’ access to hospitalised patients. Despite their arguments, in Arras, the male students never gained priority in clinical obstetrical training, which midwifery students kept. To keep male students out of maternity wards, local administrators used fears that gender mixing would lead to immoral acts or thoughts. In doing so, they protected the traditional system of midwifery rather than invest in more costly male medical education. Championing midwifery students’ rights to the spaces and bodies needed for their education, however, delayed adoption of hygiene and antiseptic practices that led to lower maternal mortality. Unable to adapt to changing requirements by the state, the medical school closed in 1883, while the midwifery programme thrived until the 1960s.