This article examines the care provided for the welfare of soldiers by the three combatant countries – China, Korea and Japan – during the East Asian War of 1592–8. Also known as the Imjin War, this large-scale military conflict can also be understood as an encounter between different state cultures and strategies of military medicine. This study focuses on cold-induced injuries, epidemic outbreaks and external wounds suffered during the war. I illuminate provision of prophylactic measures against cold by the Ming state, as well as attempts by the Sino-Chosŏn medical alliance to manage epidemics and treat wounded soldiers. I contrast these measures with the lack of similar centralised support for the Japanese forces, and examine the effect these differences had upon on military outcomes during the war. The difference in the amount of time, efforts and resources that the three combatant states devoted to sick and injured soldiers has implications not only for our understanding of the war but also for illuminating the early modern history of military medicine in East Asia. By exploring East Asian military medicine during and after the Imjin War, this article responds to recent calls for more detailed examination of histories of military medicine in premodern periods and non-European regions.

This article discusses early modern North Indian ways of expressing how barrenness could be mapped onto a woman’s maternal identity. Scholars have engaged with the historical evolution of women’s identities, focusing overwhelmingly on their economic and political potential. This article is the first to use medical and erotological sources from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to study women as procreative agents, and the socio-sexual anxieties prompted by infertile female bodies. Through a critical study of a wide range of medical material, I demonstrate that by the eighteenth century, several transformations in medical discourses can be mapped onto textual transmissions from Sanskrit (and Braj Bhasha) to Persian, as well as between competing but conterminously flourishing medical paradigms, Ayurveda and Yunani. While cures for childlessness have a much longer history, a new genre of ‘anonymous’ sources, particularly focused on the sexual diseases of men and women emerged in early modern North India. Lastly, my comparative methodological approach to different textual genres will complicate our understanding of early modern medical episteme and its intended audience.

The persistent use of neurasthenia in Asia, an out-dated diagnostic category in modern psychiatry, has confounded many psychiatrists from the 1960s. This paper attempts to understand the prevalence of neurasthenia among the lay public in post-World War II Hong Kong. It examines the social history of psychiatry and focuses on the roles of traditional Chinese medicine in shaping public perceptions and responses towards neurasthenia. This research reveals that, when psychiatrists discarded the term as an ineffective label in the 1950s, practitioners and pharmaceutical companies of Chinese medicine seized on the chance to reinvent themselves as experts in neurasthenia. By commericialising everyday distress, they provided affordable, accessible and culturally familiar healing options to the Chinese public. A case study of neurasthenia, therefore, is not simply about changing disease categories but an important example to illustrate the tensions between traditional medicine and Western psychiatry in Asia.

This paper reexamines the sources used by N. Fancy and M.H. Green in “Plague and the Fall of Baghdad (1258)” (Medical History, 65/2 (2021), 157–177). Fancy and Green argued that the Arabic and Persian descriptions of the Mongol sieges in Iran and Iraq, and in particular, in the conquest of Baghdad in 1258, indicate that the besieged fortresses and cities were struck by Plague after the Mongol sieges were lifted. This, they suggested, is part of a recurrent pattern of the outbreak of Plague transmitted by the Mongol expansion across Eurasia. Fancy and Green concluded that the primary sources substantiate the theory driven by recent paleogenetic studies indicating that the Mongol conquests of the thirteenth century set the stage for the massive pandemic of the mid-fourteenth century. The link between the Plague outbreak and the Mongol siege of Baghdad relies on three near-contemporaneous historical accounts. However, our re-examination of the sources shows that the main text (in Persian) has been significantly misunderstood, and that the two other texts (in Syriac and Arabic) have been mis-contextualized, and thus not understood properly. They do not support the authors’ claim regarding Plague epidemic in Baghdad in 1258, nor do other contemporary and later Arabic texts from Syria and Egypt adduced by them, which we re-examine in detail here. We conclude that there is no evidence for the appearance of Plague during or immediately after the Mongol conquests in the Middle East, certainly not for its transmission by the Mongols.

This essay responds to Brack et al., ‘Plague and the Mongol Conquest of Baghdad (1258)? A reevaluation of the sources’, which is a critique of our 2021 essay in this journal, ‘Plague and the Fall of Baghdad (1258)’. We argue that Brack and colleagues have misunderstood our investigation as an attempt to pinpoint the exact timing of the outbreak of plague connected with the Mongol siege of Baghdad, and so believe that an altered timeframe invalidates our suggestion that plague was involved. Taking this opportunity to revisit the state of plague historiography in western Asia, we address four issues: (1) why Mongol historiography has, until recently, avoided the question of plague’s late mediaeval resurgence within the Mongol Empire and why the ‘new genetics’ of plague now makes the question unavoidable; (2) why reconstruction of the biological processes of ‘focalisation’ is now the most urgent question in plague historiography since it constitutes what we call the prodromal stage of the Black Death pandemic; (3) how a newly informed biological perspective on disease history can allow a more sensitive reading of past observers’ reports of epidemics; and finally, (4) what a plausible scenario might look like for plague’s presence in western Asia and the eastern Mediterranean region in the late-thirteenth and early-fourteenth centuries as an emerging zoonotic disease with occasional epizootic and human outbreaks, before the more catastrophic outbreaks of the 1340s commonly referred to as ‘the Black Death’.

This article reconstructs the first outbreak of epidemic dropsy recorded in documentary evidence, which occurred in Calcutta, Mauritius, and northeastern India and Bengal in 1877–80. It uses current medical knowledge and investigations into the wider historical contexts in which the epidemic occurred to re-read the colonial medical literature of the period. It shows that colonial policies and structures in the context of variable enviro-climatic conditions increased the likelihood that an epidemic would break out, while also increasing the vulnerability of certain populations to infection and mortality. Additionally, it shows how the trans-regional nature of the epidemic contributed to varying understandings of the disease between two colonial medical establishments, which influenced each other in contradictory ways. The article’s core contributions are to recent trans-regional perspectives on disease transmission and colonial medical knowledge production in the Indian Ocean World.

Medical practitioners, inevitably scattered across the country, need frequent periodicals to communicate the latest medical information. Journals are an essential component of the infrastructure of modern medicine, yet they were slow to achieve firm roots in Britain during the eighteenth century, with few sustained quarterly periodicals and the only attempt at a monthly lasting a year. Then in 1799, Richard Phillips, owner of the Monthly Magazine, published the Medical and Physical Journal, the first sustained monthly medical journal, which lasted for thirty-four years. Ever since, Britain has never been without a monthly or weekly general medical journal. Responding to the need for a strong commercial focus, the Journal used a magazine format which blended reviews and abstracts of already published material with original contributions and medical news, and it quickly achieved a national circulation by close engagement with all types of practitioners across the country.

Contrary to the historiography, the Journal was distinctly different from the contemporaneous monthly science journals. The key to success was two-way communication with all practitioners, especially the numerous surgeons and surgeon-apothecaries who were increasingly better trained and confident of their status. Much of the content of the Journal was written by these readers, and with rapid, reliable distribution and quick publication of correspondence, controversial topics could be bounced back and forth between all practitioners, including the distinguished. Initially, the editors tried to maximise circulation by avoiding any controversy, but this started to change in the first few years of the next century.