This article deals with the presence of physicians, surgeons and apothecaries in the early modern Portuguese empire and the dissemination of medical knowledge there. In Portugal itself, the health care sector had been the target of considerable royal interference since the final years of the fifteenth century, during the construction of the early modern state. Regulatory frameworks were established to harmonise health care practice throughout the country and to control the organisation and distribution of the available health care practitioners among local communities. As this was also the time when Portugal was investing heavily in its colonies, how were these policies reflected in the empire? Did health care feature in the Portuguese government’s colonial strategies? How did the official policy to send medical personnel overseas work on the ground? Did it operate at a large enough scale to transform local practices?

We provide a brief account of the life and work of Jules Parrot, a significant figure in French paediatrics, about whom almost nothing has been written. We focus on his work relating to congenital syphilis, specifically reporting on the examination of a collection of bones taken at autopsy from children with congenital syphilis. The collection of bones was brought to London in 1879 by Parrot to illustrate a talk that he gave before the Pathological Society of London. Subsequently, it travelled a circuitous route to the Royal Free Hospital pathology collection, where it remained until we (GC and TW) ‘discovered’ it. The bones represent the largest assemblage of material from cases of congenital syphilis in the UK and they are important as they clearly demonstrate the skeletal lesions associated with congenital syphilis and are now irreplaceable. The bones have been identified to anatomical element and have come from a minimum of eight children, both foetuses and neonates covering the period 30–50 weeks post-conception. Radiological and micro computerised tomography examinations were carried out and three-dimensional models printed at twice life size. The models are durable and can be handled with impunity by students and others wishing to familiarise themselves with the skeletal changes shown.

On Tuesday, 12 April 1726, Robert Worger fell from his horse at Barnham Down, Kent, hitting his head on the ground ‘with strong Force’. Unconscious, he was taken to Bridge, a nearby village, and laid out at the home of Sarah Knot, ‘Nurse and Landlady to the Patient’, bled several times, given ‘volatile mixture’ (ammonia, salt, opium) and treated with purgatives and clysters. He vomited as many as five times over the course of his illness and delivered ‘half a score [of] very foul, stinking, loose Stools’. Worger died, ‘without … Agony’, at 5 am, Thursday, 21 April 1726, after living for 8 days in the care of Knot, his wife, two surgeons, an assistant, an apothecary and two physicians, Christopher Packe and John Gray. An autopsy was performed – the next night, by the light of a single candle – and, although there was little extravasation and no severe fractures or depressions in the skull, slight abnormalities were found: the cerebellum ‘Turgid with Blood’, two small fissures appeared on the os frontis. Worger’s illness and death spurred months of rebarbative public controversy: in order to exonerate themselves, both physicians published pamphlets and letters, secured affidavits, importuned surgeons and Worger’s relatives for support, vied for authority and mastery over the circumstances of the case and argued about propriety, professionalism and conduct. This paper explores Worger’s case – controversy about diagnosis and prognosis, concern with ‘knowledge and deportment’, with the status of medical offices and medical jurisprudence and with relationships between physicians, patients, surgeons – as an instance of learned medical controversy in early eighteenth-century England.

During the War in China (1937–1945), the Japanese military combined warfare with the maintenance of a military occupation. To sustain its tentative grasp over the occupied territories, the Japanese military vied to cultivate trust among the local population. This was a challenging task in the midst of a violent war which as many historical works described was accompanied by brutal war crimes. A less explored aspect of the occupation was medical care. This article unfolds this history by analysing medical encounters between Japanese military medics and military affiliated agents, and members of the local population in the rural Chinese countryside. Testimonies reveal that these encounters – some spontaneous and others deliberate – were small moments of humanity and benevolence within a violent environment. Concomitantly, they demonstrate the overarching tension in this unequal encounter and the use of medicine as a pacifying tool that also served as means to build and maintain the occupation through the transference of medical trust towards the military at large. Thus, this article presents a different aspect of the role of trust and distrust in medical care, as well as expanding the analysis of medicine as a ‘tool of empire’ to the context of military occupation.

The paper uses the correspondence of three Finns – Elias Erkko, Henrik Erkko and Hilda Asp – to analyse the conceptual and practical means with which late nineteenth-century-educated Europeans coped with ill health in general and tuberculosis in particular. While the need to gain control over (the threat of) disease may well be universal, the specific coping methods are historical and context-specific. They are both conceptual and practical, both individual and collective. The paper focuses on the 1880s and 1890s, a period when tuberculosis provided an especially lucrative subsector of the booming European medical marketplace. Sanatorium treatment was still only one among many treatment options, and the theory of the bacterial causation of tuberculosis was far from being universally accepted. The paper charts the options available for people suffering from pulmonary tuberculosis and analyses the eclectic, sometimes idiosyncractic, ways that they combined elements from different conceptual scripts and therapeutic traditions.