['A case of decapitation'; calamity investigation in 1822]. / 'Het geval van onthoofting'.

A case of childbirth with a fatal outcome described in the book 'The King's Court Physician: the Adventurous Life of Franz Joseph Harbaur, 1776-1822' (De lijfarts van de koning. Het avontuurlijkeleven van Franz Joseph Harbaur, 1776-1822) puts the work of the Dutch Health and Youth Care Inspectorate into an historical context by pointing out the similarities between a calamity investigation held in 1822 and the situation today. Conflicts between medical disciplinary law and criminal law, boundary disputes between various professions (in this particular case midwives and gynaecologists) and questions of openness and transparency turn out to be nothing new. By doing case studies on how to deal with calamities, it is possible to gain insight into medical failures of the past and how they were managed. It is also possible to get a better picture of the expectations that medicine had to meet in the past, and how, and under what circumstances, these have changed. This information is of value in making choices in today's healthcare system.

Unexpected healers: Chinese medicine in the age of global migration (Lima and California, 1850-1930). / Sanadores inesperados: medicina china en la era de migración global (Lima y California, 1850-1930).

The massive waves of Chinese migrants arriving in California and Lima in the second half of the nineteenth century played a crucial role in expanding Chinese medicine in both settings. From the late 1860s on, herbalists expanded their healing system beyond their ethnic community, transforming Chinese medicine into one of the healing practices most widely adopted by the local population. This article uses a comparative approach to examine the diverging trajectories of Chinese healers in Peru and the USA, as well as the social and political factors that determined how this foreign medical knowledge adapted to its new environments.

Sanadores inesperados: medicina china en la era de migración global (Lima y California, 1850-1930) / Unexpected healers: Chinese medicine in the age of global migration (Lima and California, 1850-1930)

Resumen Las masivas olas de migrantes chinos que llegaron a California y Lima en la segunda mitad del siglo XIX jugaron un rol clave en la expansión de la medicina china en ambos contextos. Desde fines de la década de 1860, los herbolarios expandieron su sistema de sanación más allá de su comunidad étnica, transformando la medicina china en una de las prácticas de sanación más adoptada por la población local. Desde una perspectiva comparada, este artículo examina las divergentes trayectorias de los sanadores chinos en Perú y EEUU, así como los factores sociales y políticos que determinaron la adaptación de este conocimiento médico, foráneo, en su nuevo entorno.

Abstract The massive waves of Chinese migrants arriving in California and Lima in the second half of the nineteenth century played a crucial role in expanding Chinese medicine in both settings. From the late 1860s on, herbalists expanded their healing system beyond their ethnic community, transforming Chinese medicine into one of the healing practices most widely adopted by the local population. This article uses a comparative approach to examine the diverging trajectories of Chinese healers in Peru and the USA, as well as the social and political factors that determined how this foreign medical knowledge adapted to its new environments.

Techniques for nothingness: Debate over the comparability of hypnosis and Zen in early-twentieth-century Japan.

This paper explores a debate that took place in Japan in the early twentieth century over the comparability of hypnosis and Zen. The debate was among the first exchanges between psychology and Buddhism in Japan, and it cast doubt on previous assumptions that a clear boundary existed between the two fields. In the debate, we find that contemporaries readily incorporated ideas from psychology and Buddhism to reconstruct the experiences and concepts of hypnosis and Buddhist nothingness. The resulting new theories and techniques of nothingness were fruits of a fairly fluid boundary between the two fields. The debate, moreover, reveals that psychology tried to address the challenges and possibilities posed by religious introspective meditation and intuitive experiences in a positive way. In the end, however, psychology no longer regarded them as viable experimental or psychotherapeutic tools but merely as particular subjective experiences to be investigated and explained.

From transnational to regional magnetic fevers: The making of a law on hypnotism in late nineteenth-century Belgium.

In May 1892, Belgium adopted a law on the exercise of hypnotism. The signing of the law constituted a temporary endpoint to six years of debate on the dangers and promises of hypnotism, a process of negotiation between medical doctors, members of parliament, legal professionals and lay practitioners. The terms of the debate were not very different from what happened elsewhere in Europe, where, since the mid 1880s, hypnotism had become an object of public concern. The Belgian law was nevertheless unique in its combined effort to regulate the use of hypnosis in public and private, for purposes of entertainment, research and therapy. My analysis shows how the making of the law was a process of negotiation in which local, national and transnational networks and allegiances each played a part. While the transnational atmosphere of moral panic had created a seedbed for the law, its eventual outlook owed much to the powerful lobby work of an essentially local network of lay magnetizers, and to the renown of Joseph Delbœuf, professor at the University of Liège, whose work in the field of hypnotism stimulated several liberal doctors and members of Parliament from the Liège region to defend a more lenient law.

A dangerous method? The German discourse on hypnotic suggestion therapy around 1900.

In the late nineteenth century, German-speaking physicians and psychiatrists intensely debated the benefits and risks of treatment by hypnotic suggestion. While practitioners of the method sought to provide convincing evidence for its therapeutic efficacy in many medical conditions, especially nervous disorders, critics pointed to dangerous side effects, including the triggering of hysterical attacks or deterioration of nervous symptoms. Other critics claimed that patients merely simulated hypnotic phenomena in order to appease their therapist. A widespread concern was the potential for abuses of hypnosis, either by giving criminal suggestions or in the form of sexual assaults on hypnotized patients. Official inquiries by the Prussian Minister for Religious, Educational and Medical Affairs in 1902 and 1906 indicated that relatively few doctors practised hypnotherapy, whereas the method was increasingly used by lay healers. Although the Ministry found no evidence for serious harm caused by hypnotic treatments, whether performed by doctors or by lay healers, many German doctors seem to have regarded hypnotic suggestion therapy as a problematic method and abstained from using it.

Between Charcot and Bernheim: The debate on hypnotism in fin-de-siècle Italy.

In the late 1870s, a small group of Italian psychiatrists became interested in hypnotism in the wake of the studies conducted by the French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot. Eager to engage in hypnotic research, these physicians referred to the scientific authority of French and German scientists in order to overcome the scepticism of the Italian medical community and establish hypnotism as a research subject based on Charcot's neuropathological model. In the following years, French studies on hypnotism continued to exert a strong influence in Italy. In the mid 1880s, studies on hypnotic suggestion by the Salpêtrière and Nancy Schools of hypnotism gave further impetus to research and therapeutic experimentation and inspired the emergence of an interpretative framework that combined theories by both hypnotic schools. By the end of the decade, however, uncertainties had arisen around both hypnotic theory and the therapeutic use of hypnotism. These uncertainties, which were linked to the crisis of the neuropathological paradigm that had to a large extent framed the understanding of hypnotism in Italy and the theoretical disagreements among the psychiatrists engaged in hypnotic research, ultimately led to a decline in interest in hypnotism in Italy.

"Endeavoring to Carry On Their Work": The National Debate Over Midwives and Its Impact in Rhode Island, 1890-1940.

This article analyzes the national discourse over "the problem" of midwifery in medical literature and examines the impact of this dialogue on Rhode Island from 1890 to 1940. Doctors did not speak as a monolithic bloc on this "problem": some blamed midwives while others impugned poorly trained physicians. This debate led to curricula reform and to state laws to regulate midwifery. The attempt to eliminate midwives in the 1910s failed because of a shortage of trained obstetricians, and because of cultural barriers between immigrant and mainstream communities. A decrease in immigration, an increase in trained obstetricians, the growing notion of midwives as relics of an outdated past, and the emergence of insurance plans to cover "modern" hospital births led to a decline in midwifery.

Back to the future: The AMA and religion, 1961-1974.

U.S. medical scholarship and education regarding religion and spirituality has been growing rapidly in recent years. This rising interest, however, is not new; it is a renewal of significant interweavings that date back to the mid-20th century. In this Perspective, the authors draw attention to the little-known history of organized medicine's engagement with religion from 1961 to 1974. Relying on primary source documents, they recount the dramatic rise and fall of the Committee on Medicine and Religion (CMR) at the American Medical Association (AMA). At its height, there were state-level committees on medicine and religion in 49 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico, and there were county-level committees in over 800 county medical societies. Thousands of physicians attended annual conferences for clinicians and clergy, and direct outreach to patients included a film viewed by millions. The CMR arose in the context of rapid medical advances, the growth of professional chaplaincy, and concern for declining "humanism" in medicine-conditions with parallels in medicine today. The CMR was brought to a puzzling end in 1972 by the AMA's Board of Trustees. The authors argue that this termination was linked to the AMA's long and contentious debate on abortion. They conclude with the story's significance for today's explorations of the intersection of spirituality, religion, and medicine, focusing on the need for mutual respect, transparency, and dialogue around the needs of patients and physicians.

Chocolate in history: food, medicine, medi-food.

Throughout history, chocolate has been used to treat a wide variety of ailments, and in recent years, multiple studies have found that chocolate can have positive health effects, providing evidence to a centuries-long established use; this acknowledgement, however, did not have a straight course, having been involved in religious, medical and cultural controversies. Christian Europe, in fact, feared the exhilarating effects of new drinks, such as chocolate, coffee and tea. Therefore, these beverages would have been banished, had not doctors and scientists explained that they were good for the body. The scientific debate, which reached its peak in Florence in the 18th century, regarded the therapeutic effectiveness of the various chocolate components: it was necessary to know their properties first, in order to prepare the best cacao concoction for every patient. When Dietetics separated from Medicine, however, chocolate acquired the role of vehicle for easing the administration of bitter medicines, being associated to different health problems. The recent rediscovery of the beneficial use of cacao and chocolate focuses upon its value as supplemental nutrition. Building a bridge to the past may be helpful to detect the areas where the potential health benefits of chocolate are likely to be further explored.

Debating scientific medicine: homoeopathy and allopathy in late nineteenth-century medical print in Bengal.

The historiography of medicine in South Asia often assumes the presence of preordained, homogenous, coherent and clearly-bound medical systems. They also tend to take the existence of a medical 'mainstream' for granted. This article argues that the idea of an 'orthodox', 'mainstream' named allopathy and one of its 'alternatives' homoeopathy were co-produced in Bengal. It emphasises the role of the supposed 'fringe', ie. homoeopathy, in identifying and organising the 'orthodoxy' of the time. The shared market for medicine and print provided a crucial platform where such binary identities such as 'homoeopaths' and 'allopaths' were constituted and reinforced. This article focuses on a range of polemical writings by physicians in the Bengali print market since the 1860s. Published mostly in late nineteenth-century popular medical journals, these concerned the nature, definition and scope of 'scientific' medicine. The article highlights these published disputes and critical correspondence among physicians as instrumental in simultaneously shaping the categories 'allopathy' and 'homoeopathy' in Bengali print. It unravels how contemporary understandings of race, culture and nationalism informed these medical discussions. It further explores the status of these medical contestations, often self-consciously termed 'debates', as an essential contemporary trope in discussing 'science' in the vernacular.

Electrotherapeutic disputes: the 'Frankfurt Council' of 1891.

Since the 1980s and 1990s, vagus nerve and deep brain stimulation, transcranial magnetic stimulation and cranial electrotherapy stimulation have found their way into neurology as therapeutic approaches to epilepsy, Morbus Parkinson and other central nervous symptoms. Moreover, these methods have proven useful and provided hope in the therapy of other diseases, most of all in psychiatry. From a historic perspective, this new emphasis on somatic therapies in the case of transcranial magnetic stimulation and cranial electrotherapy stimulation represents the return of therapeutic methods widely used in the 19th century and based on very similar techniques. Against the background of a general rise in the importance of neurobiological concepts in the neurosciences, we are now in a new situation of change. Yet, as in the 1880s and 1990s, many epistemic questions remain unresolved, the methods not yet having been standardized. In particular, the inability to explain which way and precisely how electricity induces healing processes in the body continues to put the neurosciences, which have always regarded themselves as exact and scientific in nature, in a rather uncomfortable position. There was a similar situation in the 1880s and 1990s, when positivist scientific dogmas prevailed. For ideological and professional reasons, neurologists strongly rejected the notion pioneered by Leipzig neuropsychiatrist Paul Julius Möbius that curative effects of electrotherapy were based on suggestion. One should see, however, that Möbius's actual concern was not to raise opposition towards or question electrotherapy as such, but rather to sensitize his colleagues in view of the prevailing solely materialistic-somatic approach in order that they should not neglect the psychological component of all illness, both in clinical practice and in research. A singular and very special event illustrates the heated debate among German-speaking neurologists on the psychological/suggestive effects of electrotherapy in the last decade of the 19th century-namely the 'Frankfurt Council' of 1891. The statements made at the Frankfurt convention of 35 leading electrotherapists in opposition to Möbius's criticism very much resemble present-day arguments and attitudes. Yet neuroscientists of earlier generations also found very individual answers to fundamental questions in their field that might help both to understand problems from a long-term perspective and enrich present-day discussion as a beneficial corrective.

Locality and circulation in the Habsburg empire: disputing the Carlsbad medical salt, 1763-1784.

By looking at the fierce debates in the city of Carlsbad in Bohemia around the fabrication of medical salt by a local doctor, David Becher, from 1763 to 1784, the paper examines the interactions between different spheres or levels of circulation of knowledge in the Habsburg Empire. The dispute crystallized around the definition of the product, about its medical qualities and its relation with the water of the local mineral spring. The city's inhabitants contested the vision of the medical experts, fearing that the extraction of the medical salt from the spring water and its sale outside the town would have a negative effect on the number of visitors to the spa. Their vision implied a more or less 'popularized' form of alchemical thinking as it identified the mineral water with the extracted 'salt', conceived as the 'essence' of the water, produced by evaporation. The Carlsbad salt dispute highlights the complex interactions among the different networks in which knowledge circulated through the Habsburg Empire in the eighteenth century. The different actors relied on specific networks with different logics of discourse and different modes of circulation. In each case the relation between the local, the regional and the imperial had to be negotiated. The paper thus sketches out the different geographies of knowledge in the Habsburg Empire but also its localization in and around Carlsbad.

The repeating history of objections to the fortification of bread and alcohol: from iron filings to folic acid.

The fortification of staple foods has eliminated many deficiency diseases. Despite this, "tampering" with people's food always provokes opposition, much of it from health professionals. Opposition is often based on self-interest, tunnel vision and theory rather than research. A historical perspective of the patterns of objections to fortification and its outcomes may help resolve the anxieties and opposing ethical positions of advocates and opponents of fortification.

The creation of prehistoric man. Aimé Rutot and the Eolith controversy, 1900-1920.

Although he died in obscurity, the Belgian museum conservator Aimé Rutot (1847-1933) was one of the most famous European archaeologists between 1900 and 1920. The focus of his scientific interest was stone flints, which he claimed to be the oldest known human tools, so-called eoliths. Skeptics maintained that the flints showed no marks of human workmanship, but Rutot nevertheless managed to spread his "Eolithic theory" in an important part of the scientific community. This essay demonstrates how material objects--series of stone flints and sets of statues that purported to reconstruct prehistoric "races"--were given scientific meaning by Rutot. Rutot diffused his ideas by disseminating his stones and statues, thus enlarging his networks of influence. For a time he managed to be at the material center of a trade network as well as at the intellectual center of archaeological debate. The essay shows how Rutot achieved this status and how he eventually fell from favor among serious scientists.