In 1965 Jamaica was declared free of malaria by the World Health Organisation (WHO), thus ending centuries of death and suffering from the disease. This declaration followed the successful completion of the WHO’s Malaria Eradication Programme (MEP) on the island, initiated in 1958. This account first explores the antecedent control measures adopted by the government up to the MEP. These, as advocated by the previous malaria ‘experts’ who had reported on the disease on the island concentrated on controlling the vector and the administration of quinine for individual protection. Although Jamaica suffered no catastrophic epidemics of island-wide scope, malaria was a constant cause of mortality and morbidity. Major change came in the wake of the Second World War within the changing political context of national independence and international development. In 1957 the Jamaican government joined the global WHO programme to eradicate malaria. The Jamaican campaign exposes many of the problems noted in other studies of such top–down initiatives in their lack of attention to the particular circumstances of each case. Despite being described as ‘a textbook pattern’ of malaria eradication, the MEP in Jamaica suffered from a lack of sufficient preparation and field knowledge. This is most obviously illustrated by the fact that all literature on the programme sent to Jamaica in the first two years was in Spanish. That the MEP exploited the technological opportunity provided by dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) with advantage in Jamaica is not disputed but as this analysis illustrates this success was by no means guaranteed.

Few medical authors can unambiguously claim to have written one of the most important works in their field: most important not simply in one language but in half a dozen, and not simply for a few years but for over a century and a half. Yet that distinction has long been given to the work of a largely obscure early sixteenth-century apothecary-turned-physician from Freiburg, Worms, and Frankfurt, one Eucharius Rösslin (c. 1470–c. 1526). His Der Swangern Frauwen und Hebammen Rosegarten (Rosegarden for Pregnant Women and Midwives), first published in Strasbourg and Hagenau in 1513, went through at least sixteen editions in its original form, was revised into three different German versions (each of which went through multiple printings), and was translated into Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, French, Italian, Latin, and Spanish, with almost all of these translations then going through their own multiple editions. The Rosegarten is the only work known to have been produced by Rösslin. His son, Eucharius Rösslin Jr, further capitalized on the work by producing in 1526 a German compilation of “marriage texts” which he called Ehestandts Artzney; this included his father's Rosegarten as well as extracts from the Enneas muliebris (Nine-Part Treatise on Women) by Ludovico Bonacciuoli (d. c. 1540), a herbal by Johannes Cuba (Johann Wonnecke von Caub, d. 1503/4), and Bartholomeus Metlinger's (born after 1440) tract on paediatrics. Eucharius Jr. also produced a Latin translation of the Rosegarten in 1532. That Rösslin's work was only the third obstetrical text addressed directly to an audience of midwives in a thousand years also places it in an important position in the history of the professionalization of midwifery. While it remains to be determined how frequently midwives themselves read the text, it is clear that both physicians and laypersons used the Rosegarten and later adaptations as the basis for medical training and as a reference for information on generation.

The revolutionary period in France was a time of great turmoil. It affected all aspects of society including medicine. One feature which has received some attention is the concomitant change in language. The adoption of the general term officier de santé (literally “health officer”) to denote all those practising medicine at the time provides a particularly interesting example, which has never been properly studied. The distinguished French historian of medicine, Jean-Charles Sournia, has said that the term deserves special attention, but he devotes no more than half a page to it.

Historians tend to view public health as a quintessentially modern phenomenon, enabled by the emergence of representative democracies, centralised bureaucracies and advanced biomedicine. While social, urban and religious historians have begun chipping away at the entrenched dichotomy between pre/modernity that this view implies, evidence for community prophylactics in earlier eras also emerges from a group of somewhat unexpected sources, namely military manuals. Texts composed for (and often by) army leaders in medieval Latin Europe, East Rome (Byzantium) and other premodern civilisations reflect the topicality of population-level preventative healthcare well before the nineteenth century, thereby broadening the path for historicising public health from a transregional and even global perspective. Moreover, at least throughout the Mediterranean world, military manuals also attest the enduring appeal of Hippocratic and Galenic prophylactics and how that medical tradition continued for centuries to shape the routines and material culture of vulnerable communities such as armies.

Some ideas return after the briefest of exiles: reductionism is back in vogue. Existential questions – about who we are, about our origins and future, about what is valuable – no longer require difficult soul searching, especially when straightforward answers are expected from the neurosciences. History is being rewritten with the brain as its centrepiece; the search for great men and big ideas of the past begins again. William Cullen (1710–90), whose work on neurosis was once part of the history of psychoanalysis, is now well placed to become part of such a neuro-history. This article attempts to subvert this process, by rebuilding the original meaning of neurosis through Cullen’s physiological and medical works, in comparison with his predecessor, Robert Whytt (1714–66), and illustrating this meaning using one particular neurosis: hypochondriasis. The result is a more complicated version of neurosis which, importantly, carries significant insights into the nature and practice of medicine. Moreover, this article examines how Cullen’s standing fell in the 1820s as British physicians and surgeons turned to an idea which promised to reform medicine: pathological anatomy. When these hopes faded, Cullen became a figure obsessed with the nerves. This image has survived to the present, a blank canvas onto which any theory can be projected. It also values precisely what Cullen warned against: simplistic explanations of the body and disease, and unthinking confidence in the next big idea or silver bullet. Neurosis was not simply a nervous ailment, but it is a warning against reductionism in history making.

Since 1974 the National Health Service (NHS) has been subject to successive reorganisations which have shaped and reshaped patterns of administration, clinical care and services. This paper uses two sources of oral evidence: a Witness Seminar with a group of administrators who attended the NHS National Administrators’ Training Scheme in the late 1950s and a collection of interviews with doctors and managers who have played key roles in the health services of Manchester and Salford between 1974 and 2007. It surveys the day-to-day interactions between doctors and administrators/managers in hospital settings and analyses what these reveal about relationships within the broader context of shifting organisational structures and management styles. It suggests that the evidence challenges the historical stereotyping of the two groups and that strong working relationships have been determined as much by the values of respect and association as by changes to structures or management styles.

Over the last three decades, Norway has experienced two fundamental reforms in hospital organization and direction. In 1970 the nineteen county authorities took over ownership and budget responsibilities for hospitals within their areas, replacing a highly varied and complex structure of ownership, typically generated locally. In 2002 hospitals were transferred to the state and amalgamated into five regional government enterprises. These, in turn, have organized all hospitals in their region under local health enterprises. Both regional and local enterprises are separate legal entities, with their own executive boards and managing directors. The Minister of Health appoints the boards of the regional enterprises, while their directors and the boards of the local enterprises are appointed by the regional boards. Both regional and local enterprises are supposed to have full autonomy for day-to-day operations, while being subject to strategic and political decisions by the Minister of Health as the ultimate authority of the enterprise assembly (foretaksmøte). The “enterprise” concept is, of course, borrowed from private business, modelled on companies of limited liability. The choice of this organizational model must be understood at least partly within the context of a general politico-administrative reform, inspired by the worldwide New Public Management movement. Each enterprise is a separate economic entity with a clear responsibility for balancing its budgets. Privatization (or part-privatization) and bankruptcy, however, are out of the question, as the state in the end retains full economic responsibility.

The first major reorganisation of the National Health Service took place in 1974, twenty-six years after the service had been established. It has long been perceived as a failure. This article draws on archival records and a witness seminar held in November 2016 to provide a more nuanced assessment of the 1974 reorganisation and understand more fully why it took the form that it did. In particular it identifies the reorganisation as an important moment in the ongoing story of management consultants engaging with health policymakers, and explores the role of McKinsey and Co. in detail for the first time. Key explanatory factors for their involvement are identified, including the perceived lack of expertise and manpower inside the civil service and the NHS, and perceptions of their impact and effectiveness are discussed. Many debates about the use of management consultants today were directly foreshadowed during the early 1970s. Alongside this, the role of other groups of policy actors, including civil servants, politicians and medical professionals, are established and the extent to which British health policymakers have had to work within existing cultural, political, legislative and practical constraints when trying to initiate change is demonstrated. The fact that many of the ‘mistakes’ that were made have been repeated in the course of subsequent reforms, speaks to the poor institutional memory of Whitehall, and the Department of Health and Social Care in particular. In the run up to 1974 management consultants could make only a limited contribution to an imperfect compromise.