The article provides the first description and analysis of the recently rediscovered manuscript titled Methodus anatomica by Girolamo Fabrici da Acquapendente (1533–1619). Acquapendente was one of the most important anatomists in late sixteenth-century Europe and played an instrumental role as Harvey’s teacher in Padua towards the latter’s discovery of the circulation of the blood. The manuscript provides first-hand testimony as to how anatomy was administered in Padua in the post-Vesalian era and sheds light on a number of otherwise unknown aspects of the development of the anatomical method. Chiefly among these is the attention devoted by Acquapendente to historia, as a way to order sensory data in a consistent way, which draws widely from the geometrical method and from the contemporary debate on the discretisation of continuous quantities.

The historiography of western medicine in colonial India has predominantly been analysed from the perspectives of the elite services – the Indian Medical Service (IMS) and their recruits. Unfortunately, perceiving colonial medical practices through the lens of the IMS has remained inadequate to provide a nuanced understanding of the role played by Indians in the semi-urban and rural areas of colonial India. This article examines the contributions of local administration and the role played by the recruits of the Subordinate Medical Service. This article uses the Madras Presidency as its case study and focusses on the medical subordinates who were pivotal in establishing a western medical tradition in the region. This will shift the urban-centric focus and examine mostly the rural parts of the presidency, in particular, the district hospitals and dispensaries located in the districts, taluks and villages. The article analyses the transformation in the Madras medical administration from the late nineteenth century until 1935 to argue how subordinates were the ones controlling the local medical services, and thus pulling the strings of health administration in the presidency. This will also demonstrate the uniqueness of Madras and how it disseminated western medical care with an active participation and involvement of the local residents.

Until the beginning of the nineteenth century, registering and regulating the training of any medical practitioners in Britain had rarely been attempted, unlike in many other European countries. During the Revolutionary War with France, fevers swept through British armies, leading to numerous fatalities and crushing military defeats, especially in the disastrous expedition to St Domingo. The problem, as forcibly advocated by Robert Jackson, the leading expert on military fevers, seemed to be poor medical care due to both lack of compulsory medical training and the unsuitability of whatever training was available for army medical practitioners. With the simultaneous rapid advance of French military and civilian medical training and the threat of a French invasion, regulating British medical training and excluding the unqualified became a military necessity, and suddenly medical reform was receiving widespread attention. Emphasising the benefits to the Britain’s fighting ability, the reform effort, led by Edward Harrison, a very provincial Lincolnshire physician, under the patronage of Sir Joseph Banks, the President of the Royal Society, gained the support of leading politicians, including three Prime Ministers. For a short time, comprehensive medical reform seemed inevitable: but the opposition of the medical corporations, especially the London College of Physicians, could not be circumvented, and although Harrison persisted in his efforts for 6 years, no legislation was achieved. Nevertheless, within months, the Association of Apothecaries continued the process by pressing for a more limited reform, culminating in the 1815 Apothecaries Act. The long march towards the full regulation of doctors in Britain was started by the perceived military needs of the country during the war with France.

This manuscript investigates clinical decisions and the management of ‘intersex’ children at the University Children’s Hospital Zurich between 1945 and 1970. This was an era of rapid change in paediatric medicine, something that was mirrored in Zurich. Andrea Prader, the principal figure in this paper, started his career during the late 1940s and was instrumental in moving the hospital towards focusing more on expertise in chronic diseases. Starting in 1950, he helped the Zurich hospital to become the premier centre for the treatment of so-called ‘intersex’ children. It is this treatment, and, in particular, the clinical decision-making that is the centre of our article. This field of medicine was itself not stable. Rapid development of diagnostic tools led to the emergence of new diagnostic categories, the availability of new drugs changed the management of the children’s bodies and an increased number of medical experts became involved in decision-making, a particular focus lay with the role of the children themselves and of course with their families. How involved were children or their families in an era widely known as the golden age of medicine?