Global maternal health and newborn health: Looking backwards to learn from history.

The late appearance of the 'M' on the international health agenda - in its own right and not just as a carrier of the intrauterine passenger - is thought-provoking. The 'M' was absent for decades in textbooks of 'tropical medicine' until the rhetoric question was formulated: 'Where is the "M" in MCH?' The selective antenatal 'high-risk approach' gained momentum but had to give way to the fact that all pregnant women are at risk due to unforeseeable complications. In order to provide trained staff to master such complications in impoverished rural areas (with no doctors), some countries have embarked on training of non-physician clinicians/associate clinicians for major surgery with excellent results in 'task-shifting' practice. The alleged but non-existent 'human right' to survive birth demonstrates that there have been no concrete accountability and no 'legal teeth' to make a failing accountability legally actionable to guarantee such a right.

Medicine and public health in Latin America: a history / New approaches to the Americas

All students of Latin American and Caribberan history learn early that disease and suffering, health and medicine, are woven into the main plot lines. This is true from the demographic collapse that decimated indigenous populations during and after the encounter known as the conquest to the shocking health indicators and rural immiseration motivating modernizationists, revolutionists, and neoliberals in the post-World War II era. The social and political consequences of disease and health have been at the center of hemispheric history. Until recently, however, questions of medicine and healing were relagated to the margins of serious discussion among historians. When health and disease were the focus, they were framed by other specialties - the mortality disaster that be fell the Aztec and Inca populations, for example, was an isse identified and debated by geographers and demographers. The specialized historical discussion of medicine, meanwhile, was the preserve of a small and isolated group - mostly retired physicians interested in curiosities of pre-Columbian healing, hagiographic portraits of the great men in their profession, or the charting of the arrival in Latin Amrica of technological breakthroughs made in the metropolitan centers of Europe and the United States. (AU)

Science in the service of colonial agro-industrialism: the case of cinchona cultivation in the Dutch and British East Indies, 1852-1900.

The isolation of quinine from cinchona bark in 1820 opened new possibilities for the mass-production and consumption of a popular medicine that was suitable for the treatment of intermittent (malarial) fevers and other diseases. As the 19th century European empires expanded in Africa and Asia, control of tropical diseases such as malaria was seen as crucial. Consequently, quinine and cinchona became a pivotal tool of British, French, German and Dutch empire-builders. This comparative study shows how the interplay between science, industry and government resulted in different historical trajectories for cinchona and quinine in the Dutch and British Empires during the second half of the 19th century. We argue that in the Dutch case the vectors of assemblage that provided the institutional and physical framework for communication, exchange and control represent an early example of commodification of colonial science. Furthermore, both historical trajectories show how the employment of the laboratory as a new device materialised within the colonial context of agricultural and industrial production of raw materials (cinchona bark), semi-finished product (quinine sulphate) and plant-based medicines like quinine. Hence, illustrating the 19th century transition from 'colonial botany' and 'green imperialism' to what we conceptualise as 'colonial agro-industrialism'.

[Collecting medical knowledge during the Dutch expedition to Brazil in 1639]. / Verzamelen van medische kennis tijdens Nederlandse expeditie in Brazilië, 1639.

The Dutch expansion into tropical climates, starting in the 1590s, posed practical problems of prevention and therapy for the doctors and surgeons of the trading companies (the Dutch West India Company (WIC) and the Dutch East India Company (VOC)). The first specialised manual on tropical medicine was published in Dutch in 1694. It presented information that was based on practical experience and on knowledge obtained from earlier colonists and from the indigenous population. Obtaining information from the latter required the help of a specific kind of researcher, the so-called 'adventurer-scientists'. One of the most important among them was the German Georg Marcgraf, who in 1639 joined an expedition of slave traders to the inlands of Brazil to collect botanical and zoological information, including information on medicinal plants.

Medicina tropical / Tropical medicine

Faz uma abordagem sobre a descoberta da cura do escorbuto através do tratamento com ervas e frutas nativas do Brasil. Da natureza brasileira vieram as práticas médicas utilizadas desde o período colonial. A literatura médica credita ao cirurgião inglês James Lind a descoberta da cura do escorbuto. Em serviço no Hospital Real da Marinha inglesa, em 1747, começou a empregar frutas cítricas para combater o mal muito recorrente entre os marinheiros, tratamento que, mais tarde, foi divulgado em seu livro 'A Treatise of the Scurvy (1753)'. No entanto, foi o português João Cardoso de Miranda quem realizou primeiramente a descoberta. (AU)

The Zhang on Chinese southern frontiers: disease constructions, environmental changes, and imperial colonization.

Adopting a historicalist-conceptualist approach, this article scrutinizes from a longue durée perspective the Chinese disease concept zhang, which refers to a group of tropical and subtropical diseases on Chinese southern frontiers. It firstly reviews how the Chinese literati created and employed the term to set the southern, non-Han peoples culturally apart, then analyzes the zhang diseases and their treatment in Chinese traditional medicine. The article then turns to the question of how the zhang diseases constituted an ecological barrier that hindered Chinese southern expansions, illustrated by the Sino-Burmese War (1765-70). Finally, the case of Yunnan during the Ming-Qing period (1368-1912) will be examined to reveal how Chinese colonization reduced instances of the zhang, at least reflected in imperial texts. In sum, the Chinese notion of the zhang diseases as a distinct group interplayed with the Chinese frontier process and empire building and may shed light on the march toward the tropics in a broad context.

A medicina tropical na Bahia de 1500 a 1886: etapas anteriores ao período científico / The tropical medicine in Bahia from 1500 to 1886: anterior phasis to the scientific period

A proposta de resgate da memória histórica da Faculdade de Medicina da Bahia (FMB) no âmbito da medicina tropical promove ponderações que extrapolam a própria área médica. Esta reflexão ocorre no bojo de pesquisas e estudos de teses produzidas sobre medicina tropical, que fazem parte do acervo da primeira instituição de ensino médico no país. É apoiada pelo programa Permanecer, que faz parte de ações da Coordenadoria de Ações Afirmativas, Educação e Diversidade da Pró-Reitoria de Assistência Estudantil da Universidade Federal da Bahia (Ufba), realizada sob orientação da professora Celeste Santana, do Insituto de Ciência da Informação (ICI/Ufba) e vinculada ao Grupo de Estudo, Extensão e Pesquisa em Arquivologia e Saúde (Gepas), coordenado pela professora Zeny Duarte. O conteúdo dos documentos _ teses médicas _ sobre diversas doenças que acometiam a população em priscas eras, suas origens, manifestação, sintomas e tratamentos, bem como a descrição dos indivíduos mais propensos a manifestar essa ou aquela enfermidade, trazem informações a respeito do modo como a sociedade baiana se organizava, de hábitos alimentares, da higiene, formas de trabalho, infraestrutura, etc. Enfim, evidencia-se característica comportamental dessa população na ocupação do espaço físico e social nesse período. Entretanto, antes de a medicina alcançar a rigor científico, destaca-se o papel dos chamados leigos e sua arte de curar. Eles deixaram em nossa cultura o legado de seus conhecimentos empíricos .

A medicina tropical na Bahia de 1500 a 1886: etapas anteriores ao período científico / The tropical medicine in Bahia from 1500 to 1886: anterior phasis to the scientific period

A proposta de resgate da memória histórica da Faculdade de Medicina da Bahia (FMB) no âmbito da medicina tropical promove ponderações que extrapolam a própria área médica. Esta reflexão ocorre no bojo de pesquisas e estudos de teses produzidas sobre medicina tropical, que fazem parte do acervo da primeira instituição de ensino médico no país. É apoiada pelo programa Permanecer, que faz parte de ações da Coordenadoria de Ações Afirmativas, Educação e Diversidade da Pró-Reitoria de Assistência Estudantil da Universidade Federal da Bahia (Ufba), realizada sob orientação da professora Celeste Santana, do Insituto de Ciência da Informação (ICI/Ufba) e vinculada ao Grupo de Estudo, Extensão e Pesquisa em Arquivologia e Saúde (Gepas), coordenado pela professora Zeny Duarte. O conteúdo dos documentos _ teses médicas _ sobre diversas doenças que acometiam a população em priscas eras, suas origens, manifestação, sintomas e tratamentos, bem como a descrição dos indivíduos mais propensos a manifestar essa ou aquela enfermidade, trazem informações a respeito do modo como a sociedade baiana se organizava, de hábitos alimentares, da higiene, formas de trabalho, infraestrutura, etc. Enfim, evidencia-se característica comportamental dessa população na ocupação do espaço físico e social nesse período. Entretanto, antes de a medicina alcançar a rigor científico, destaca-se o papel dos chamados leigos e sua arte de curar. Eles deixaram em nossa cultura o legado de seus conhecimentos empíricos (AU).

Entomology in translation: interpreting French medical entomological knowledge in colonial Mali.

This essay examines how knowledge and practices around entomology and parasitology travelled and the consequences of their mobility. In exploring three anti-malaria campaigns in French Soudan before 1960, it argues that the history of medical entomology's travels entailed multiple temporal, spatial, social translations that African medical personnel, intellectuals, healers, and farmers in French Soudan reinterpreted, appropriated, and sometimes wholly rejected. This essay also focuses on "erroneous" translations, detailing how and why middle class medical personnel and intellectuals interpreted and reformulated farmers' and healers' diagnostic categories that may or may not be malaria. Anti-mosquito and antilarval interventions, and more generally anti-malaria interventions, influenced how African colonial subjects and health workers understood certain vectors and of certain maladies. These understandings, in turn, shaped the consequences of subsequent public health measures. Histories of translated parasitological and entomological knowledge and etiologies of illness have critical implications for contemporary malaria control efforts: interventions to reduce malaria transmission through various kinds of entomological controls that require active participation of local populations cannot be effective if all participants cannot agree upon what is being controlled or prevented.

Medicinal plants and Malaria: an historical case study of research at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in the twentieth century.

Interest in medicinal plants has increased in recent years. This article examines the history of medicinal plant research through a case study of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) over the past 100 years. Papers published by members of the School and documents in the School archives show a fluctuating but continuous interest in plants as sources of medicine. Research interests of individual scientists, changes in the School structure and the changing role of research affected research into medicinal plants at LSHTM. As important were external developments, including the supply of plant resources, especially during wartime, the development of drug-resistance, advances in science and technology, knowledge exchange between both disciplines and cultures, the increased influence of global organizations on policy, as well as pressure groups particularly those involved in conservation. With the revival of interest in plants and the increasing variety of influences on research, it is important to have a better understanding of how debates and subsequent policy impact at the research level, and how research in turn impacts upon policy.

Bodily differences?: Gender, race, and class in Hans Sloane's Jamaican medical practice, 1687-1688.

Despite the multitude of seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century British medical publications regarding empire and health, Hans Sloane's A Voyage To the Islands [of] Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers and Jamaica (1707) was the first to incorporate significant numbers of female and African patients among its printed case histories. Comprising some sixty-four pages of the introduction, this unique set of records affords scholars the rare opportunity to examine how patients (of both sexes and races, various ages, and all social levels) residing in a "torrid zone" were diagnosed and treated by an English physician during the 1680s. Sloane had expected to encounter illnesses vastly different from those found in England when he arrived in Jamaica, but after practicing medicine in Jamaica for over a year, he concluded that there existed very little difference in the manifestation of illnesses in different climates. Although some ailments were sex-specific and culture-specific, for the most part Sloane transgressed categories of gender and race by diagnosing and treating all his patients according to the same medical ideology. And although it did not directly challenge accepted medical views, Sloane's Voyage revealed incongruities in dealing with such categories within the context of early imperial medicine.

Curing the colonizers: highland hydrotherapy in Guadeloupe

It explores attempts by French colonial doctors in Guadeloupe to treat tropical pathologies with water and altitude cures, between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. Assuming that high morbidity rates in the Caribbean were caused by the area`s inherent "toxicity", Europeans turned to mineral water and high-altitude spas, both for the reinvigoration of settlers and to "season" new arrivals. Guadeloupean spas, though utilized by indigenous, black, creole, and white Guadeloupeans alike, soon emerged as replicas of France in the tropics, and served the socio-medical function of immersing the colonial body in familiar waters. The French obsession with "healthful space" led to the creation of an "administrative" quarter precisely in the region of Guadeloupe s spas around Basse-Terre (actually the highest part of the island). The arrival of germ theory in the nineteenth century did not fundamentally alter the rationale for water and altitude cures in Guadeloupe. Tracing the history of these "folk-cures" - often admonished by colonial doctors as "common sense", but in reality an integral part of the tropical medical canon - sheds light on some of the underlying dynamics, tensions, and continuities of French imperial medicine. (AU)

Curing the colonizers: highland hydrotherapy in Guadeloupe.

This article explores attempts by French colonial doctors in Guadeloupe to treat tropical pathologies with water and altitude cures, between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. Assuming that high morbidity rates in the Caribbean were caused by the area's inherent 'toxicity', Europeans turned to mineral water and high-altitude spas, both for the reinvigoration of settlers and to 'season' new arrivals. Guadeloupean spas, though utilized by indigenous, black, creole, and white Guadeloupeans alike, soon emerged as replicas of France in the tropics, and served the socio-medical function of immersing the colonial body in familiar waters. The French obsession with 'healthful space' led to the creation of an 'administrative' quarter precisely in the region of Guadeloupe's spas around Basse- Terre (actually the highest part of the island). The arrival of germ theory in the nineteenth century did not fundamentally alter the rationale for water and altitude cures in Guadeloupe. Tracing the history of these 'folk-cures'--often admonished by colonial doctors as 'common sense', but in reality an integral part of the tropical medical canon--sheds light on some of the underlying dynamics, tensions, and continuities of French imperial medicine.

Health in the Huxleyan tropical island of Pala.

Huxley's Island: a novel (1962) is a parable on "realistic idealism"--set in an imaginary island situated in the Indian ocean between Sri Lanka and Sumatra, called Pala. The characters in the story include a doctor, a nurse and several patients. The general importance of health as a basic human need is well recognised. Vis medicatrix naturae, the natural healing powers of the body, are taken account of, along with psychotherapy and drugs. Prevention of illness is emphasised and doctors get paid for keeping people well. Since health and illness are influenced by a multitude of factors, "we attack on all the fronts at once ... from diet to auto-suggestion, from negative ions to medication".

Traditional medicine to DNA vaccines: the advance of medical research in West Africa.

West Africa has a rich medical history. Herbal medicine has been practiced for hundreds of years and the establishment of an effective herbal pharmacopoeia was probably the first medical research carried out in West Africa. Arabic medicine was practiced in the countries of the Sahel in the 15th and 16th centuries. The coming of the Europeans focused research on infectious diseases such as malaria, yellow fever and sleeping sickness, to which Europeans were very susceptible and which caused devastating epidemics among the populations of their new colonies. The end of the colonial era saw the establishment of a few large, well-equipped teaching hospitals but these proved too expensive for the newly independent states of West Africa to run effectively, and the second generation of West African medical schools was based on more modest government hospitals. This led to a change in the focus of research away from the more unusual conditions seen in a specialist referral hospital to an interest in conditions, such as the common infectious diseases, seen more frequently in district hospitals. The advent of the primary health care movement in the 1970s was followed by an increased emphasis on community studies. Molecular biology is likely to have an enormous impact on medicine in general in the coming years. One of the main challenges facing medical researchers in West Africa is how these new technologies can be used most effectively to improve health in countries with limited resources.

Tropical medicine, world diseases

It approaches the distinctive tropical medicine that arose in the last third of the nineteenth century, supplanting the traditional ´medicine of warm climates´.(AU)

[History of the birth and development of the Ecole de médecine de Hanoï]. / Histoire de la naissance et du développement de l'Ecole de médecine de Hanoï.

Between 1898 and 1900, France sent a mission to Indochina conducted by Jeanselme in order to inquire about the possible actions to protect people from infectious diseases especially plague. In the conclusions of the final report appeared the necessity to create a medical school for and with local people. Paul Doumer, governor general of Indochina, received the order from the French government to found at Hanoi such a structure with an hospital including managing staff purposing to cure all kinds of pathology principally tropical diseases. Yersin, Pasteur's disciple, was asked as its director. Several civil and military physicians formed with him a very efficient teaching group and first courses began in 1902 with thirteen french-speaking students. At the end of this year successful results were obtained. This medical school structured as a french pattern of a medical teaching hospital obtained a full legal status after many years. Galliard and Huard played a major role in its development by their rare qualities of mind. Scientific works were impressive in parasitology, anatomy and surgery. Ton-That Tung (1912-1982) was the most famous among Huard's several students. He became a great surgeon of his time, specialized in hepatology. The medical school of Hanoi illustrated a model of a well balanced development between traditional medicine strictly preserved and the resource of european medicine. It also constituted an exceptional example of possible cooperation between two peoples so different in culture.