This article is the first scholarly research focusing exclusively on the history of Jews with disabilities in the Kingdom of Poland from the 1860s to 1914. It analyses sources drawn from the Jewish press in Yiddish, Polish, and Hebrew. Areas of investigation include the hierarchy of attitudes towards different categories of individuals with disabilities, spiritual perspectives on disability, and the portrayal of disabilities within Jewish literature. The study places particular emphasis on the Jewish deaf community, given the proliferation of available source material. Drawing on the broad conceptual framework of disability studies, the authors examine the phenomenon of medicalisation, tracing its influence on Jewish public discourse over the latter half of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth.

Reproductive health in state socialism is usually viewed as an area in which the broader contexts of women’s lives were disregarded. Focusing on expert efforts to reduce premature births, we show that the social aspects of women’s lives received the most attention. In contrast to typical descriptions emphasising technological medicalisation and pharmaceuticalisation, we show that expertise in early socialism was concerned with socio-medical causes of prematurity, particularly work and marriage. The interest in physical work in the 1950s evolved towards a focus on psychological factors in the 1960s and on broader socio-economic conditions in the 1970s. Experts highlighted marital happiness as conducive to healthy birth and considered unwed women more prone to prematurity. By the 1980s, social factors had faded from interest in favour of a bio-medicalised view. Our findings are based on a rigorous comparative analysis of medical journals from Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia and East Germany.

Medical acculturation forms a crucial part of the process of migration, and equally, the influx of migrants can shape how medical structures develop in receiving societies – nowhere is that more evident than in the American metropolis. In the late nineteenth century, few ethnic groups caused such sustained bio-hazard concerns as the Irish in America. Poverty and the sheer numbers migrating in the post-Famine (1852-) era, caused the immigrant Irish body to be pathologised, or described in medical terms, to a much greater degree and for longer than their Anglo-Saxon or German counterparts. With a particular focus on Irishwomen’s use of maternity services in New York and Boston, this article aims to elucidate the potential of medical records to flesh out the understandings of how immigrants navigated healthcare. By adopting a case study approach to hospital records in tandem with other data sources, it shows what is being lost through restrictive data protection legislation. It discusses how Irishness was politicised in the contexts of immigration, the social history of medicine and medicalisation.

‘Medicalisation’ of same sex relations is a phenomenon that reached its peak in the 1950s and 1960s. The rise of gay liberation produced a divisive political contest with the psychiatric profession and adherents of the orthodox ‘medical model’ in the United States and – to a lesser extent – in the United Kingdom. This socio-historical process occurred throughout the English-speaking world, but much less is known about its dynamics in smaller countries such as New Zealand where the historiography on this issue is very sparse. The methodology situates New Zealand within a transnational framework to explore the circulation of medical theories and the critical responses they were met with. The article is anchored around three key local moments in the 1970s to consider the changing terrain on which ideas about homosexuality and psychiatry were constantly rearranged during this decade. This power struggle took a number of twists and turns, and the drive toward medicalisation alternated with a new impetus to de-medicalise same-sex sexuality.

Recent years have witnessed new processes of visibilisation of adult heterosexual men's sexuality in the public arena in Italy, culminating in discussions on sexual scandals. The authors explore here one of these processes: the current mediatisation of a medicalised male sexuality, which appears as a more socially legitimate and scientifically grounded new discourse on masculinity. By analysing recent social campaigns on male sexual health, it will be shown how, far from opening spaces for a de-naturalisation of male sexuality and masculinity, this form of visibility through medicalisation actually works by re-naturalising male sexuality, and thereby restoring virility, through reference to highly gendered respectability and predatory sexual scripts and the disempowering of intimacy as a new sexual script promoting a situational and more symmetric understanding of gender.

Male ageing is in focus nowadays. The aim of this study was to investigate conceptions of the male menopause (also known as andropause) in the educational and professional literature of Finnish physicians from 1982 to 2002, and the main point of interest was how the presentation of the male menopause and its treatments have changed. Published items for analysis were retrieved from the two main Finnish medical journals and from introductory gynaecology and urology textbooks using keywords for male ageing and hormones. It was found that disagreements about the male menopause have been marked. Some authors described it as a consequence of the decline in gonad functioning that comes with increased age, and some argued that we are making a disease out of normal ageing, but its association with sexual problems has risen in prominence: libido and potency disorders have recently been identified as symptoms. The treatment provided for male menopause was androgens, about which opinions diverged, especially the effect of androgen therapy on cardiovascular diseases and osteoporosis. New forms of testosterone treatment have been eagerly adopted, but opinions varied on the appropriate duration of the therapies. By the 2000s, the male menopause was increasingly likened to the female menopause, with emphasis upon the similar symptoms. While gerontological thinking largely sees the male menopause as an aspect of ageing and a normal condition, the andrological approach regards it as a treatable disease and its rapid adoption can be seen as a reflection of both private and public concerns about increased longevity.

The notion of ‘addiction’ appears to present profound and intractable difficulties for contemporary medicine. Using the problem of alcohol addiction as a mediating example, this paper examines some of the sources of these difficulties, and relates these to critiques of the medicalisation of the addictions. It is argued that the difficulty that medicine faces in the case of the ‘addict’ is not that addiction to alcohol has been medicalised, but rather that over a period of two centuries the medicalising project has been only partially successful. Thus medical knowledge and practice have taken as their focus the problem of susceptibility, but made little headway in the domain of conceptualising recovery. In this context, the clinician is forced to divide the susceptible from the culpable in the diagnosis of addiction, and to explain this in terms of the potential for moral self-actualisation on the part of the addict.