On the Cover: Showcasing China's On-the-Job Training in Rural Africa.

The cover of this issue of Technology and Culture illustrates how China implemented-and promoted-on-the-job training in Africa. The image shows a Tanzanian dentist practicing dentistry under the supervision of a Chinese doctor in rural Tanzania, probably in the 1970s. Despite the ineffectiveness of the on-the-job training model, the photograph attempts to project the success of the dental surgery techniques exchanged between China and Tanzania, using simple medical equipment rather than sophisticated medical knowledge. The rural setting reflects the ideological struggle of the Cold War era, when Chinese doctors and rural mobile clinics sought to save lives in the countryside, while doctors from other countries engaged in Cold War competition worked primarily in cities. This essay argues that images were essential propaganda tools during the Cold War and urges historians of technology to use images critically by considering the contexts that influenced their creation.

"The Noblest Roman of them all?" Professional versus Popular Views of America's Country Doctors.

This essay studies the images, perceptions, and values of the professional medical journals, as well as popular sources such as magazine and films, to show that the country doctor was a contested figure in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The country doctor's image embodied competing ideals of a racialized professional and masculine identity that included both place as well as visions of science. Medical professionals pressed an image in their journals and professional advice books that mapped a celebration of science and its predictive value onto urban places that were enshrined in hospitals and laboratory facilities. The public, while embracing this image, also embraced a second one shown in popular media that glorified the self-sacrificing rural solo practitioner. This practitioner's wisdom came from long contact with patients, he was dedicated to seeing patients in their homes, and his identity was based in the larger needs of the entire community.

La Seguridad Social llegó al campo: resistencias y limitaciones en la España del segundo franquismo (1959-1975) / A Segurança Social chegou ao campo: resistências e limitações na Espanha do segundo franquismo / Social Security arrives in the country: resistance and limitations in Spain during the late Franco regime (1959-1975)

El objetivo del artículo es analizar dos aspectos de la asistencia sanitaria en el medio rural español durante el segundo periodo de la dictadura franquista (1959-1975). Primero analizamos la implantación del Régimen Especial Agrario de la Seguridad Social (1966), que proporcionó asistencia sanitaria a los trabajadores del campo. Hasta entonces, habían sido excluidos del Seguro Obligatorio de Enfermedad (1944), destinado a obreros industriales y otros asalariados con bajos ingresos. En segundo lugar, analizamos la oposición de los médicos rurales a la ampliación de la cobertura sanitaria a los trabajadores agrícolas. Para lograr ambos objetivos analizamos las limitaciones del ejercicio médico en el ámbito rural y cómo la Dictadura intentó solucionar infructuosamente estos problemas. Las fuentes empleadas han sido: disposiciones legislativas, publicaciones de los colegios profesionales oficiales, prensa dedicada a discutir problemas del ejercicio médico, informes sociológicos y documentación de archivo. (AU)

O objetivo do artigo é analisar dois aspectos da atenção à saúde na Espanha rural durante o segundo período da ditadura de Franco (1959-1975). Em primeiro lugar, analisamos a introdução do Regime Especial de Previdência Social Agrária (1966), que proporcionou assistência médica aos trabalhadores rurais. Até então, eram excluídos do Seguro Obrigatório de Saúde (1944), destinado aos operários da indústria e demais trabalhadores com baixos salários. Em segundo lugar, analisamos a oposição dos médicos rurais à extensão da cobertura de saúde aos trabalhadores agrícolas. Para alcançar ambos os objetivos, analisamos as limitações da prática médica no meio rural e como a ditadura tentou resolver esses problemas, sem sucesso. As fontes utilizadas são: disposições legislativas, publicações de associações profissionais oficiais, imprensa dedicada a discutir problemas da prática médica, relatórios sociológicos e documentação arquivística. (AU)

The objective of the article is to analyze two aspects of healthcare in rural Spain during the second period of the Franco dictatorship (1959-1975). Firstly, we analyze the introduction of the Special Agrarian Social Security Regime (1966), which provided healthcare to rural workers. Until then, rural workers had been excluded from the Compulsory Health Insurance (1944), which provided healthcare to industrial and other low-income workers. Secondly, we analyze the position of rural doctors against the extension of health coverage to rural workers. To achieve both objectives, we analyze the limitations of medical practice in the rural milieu and how Franco's dictatorship unsuccessfully managed these limitations. We have used several sources: legal regulations, publications of official professional associations, press devoted to medical practice, sociological reports, and archival records. (AU)

Prophylaxis and treatment of diseases in western São Paulo state: the Sanitation Service and trachoma in the early twentieth century. / A profilaxia e o tratamento das enfermidades do oeste paulista: o Serviço Sanitário e o tracoma no princípio do século XX.

In 1906, Emílio Ribas reorganized the Sanitation Service and centralized São Paulo state public health services in the state capital. A campaign to combat trachoma, an ophthalmic disease, was implemented as part of this project. This article analyzes this campaign, which provided care for the sick living on rural properties in a process that predated the 1917 Rural Sanitary Code. The empirical data was obtained from government reports, decrees, medical journals and newspapers. We conclude that Ribas, by creating an organization that integrated the efforts of the sanitary districts and the Trachoma Commission medical teams, sought to form a complex apparatus to combat the diseases present in both urban areas and the countryside.

Em 1906, Emílio Ribas reorganizou o Serviço Sanitário e centralizou na capital os serviços de saúde pública do estado de São Paulo. Nesse projeto, a campanha de combate ao tracoma, uma enfermidade oftálmica, foi implantada. Este artigo analisa essa campanha que atendeu os enfermos das propriedades rurais em um processo que antecedeu ao Código Sanitário Rural de 1917. O material empírico foi composto por relatórios governamentais, decretos, periódicos médicos e jornais. Concluímos que Ribas, ao criar uma estrutura que unificou os esforços dos distritos sanitários com as equipes de atendimento das Comissões do Tracoma, buscou formar um complexo aparato para combater as enfermidades presentes tanto nas áreas urbanas quanto na zona rural.

A profilaxia e o tratamento das enfermidades do oeste paulista: o Serviço Sanitário e o tracoma no princípio do século XX / Prophylaxis and treatment of diseases in western São Paulo state: the Sanitation Service and trachoma in the early twentieth century

Resumo Em 1906, Emílio Ribas reorganizou o Serviço Sanitário e centralizou na capital os serviços de saúde pública do estado de São Paulo. Nesse projeto, a campanha de combate ao tracoma, uma enfermidade oftálmica, foi implantada. Este artigo analisa essa campanha que atendeu os enfermos das propriedades rurais em um processo que antecedeu ao Código Sanitário Rural de 1917. O material empírico foi composto por relatórios governamentais, decretos, periódicos médicos e jornais. Concluímos que Ribas, ao criar uma estrutura que unificou os esforços dos distritos sanitários com as equipes de atendimento das Comissões do Tracoma, buscou formar um complexo aparato para combater as enfermidades presentes tanto nas áreas urbanas quanto na zona rural.

Abstract In 1906, Emílio Ribas reorganized the Sanitation Service and centralized São Paulo state public health services in the state capital. A campaign to combat trachoma, an ophthalmic disease, was implemented as part of this project. This article analyzes this campaign, which provided care for the sick living on rural properties in a process that predated the 1917 Rural Sanitary Code. The empirical data was obtained from government reports, decrees, medical journals and newspapers. We conclude that Ribas, by creating an organization that integrated the efforts of the sanitary districts and the Trachoma Commission medical teams, sought to form a complex apparatus to combat the diseases present in both urban areas and the countryside.

Felipe Trigo: un escritor médico (cuasi) olvidado / Felipe Trigo: a physician writer (almost) forgotten

Felipe Trigo (1864-1916) fue uno de los médicos escritores más importantes de la época de la Restauración borbónica. Fue médico rural y médico militar pero fue especialmente conocido por su obra literaria y periodística. Entre sus obras más importantes figuran El médico rural (1912) y Jarrapellejos (1914), donde realiza una profunda crítica de la sociedad española de la época. Trigo fue conocido por sus obras de literatura erótica por las que fue atacado en su tiempo, lo que contribuyó a su olvido después de su muerte. El médico rural contiene numerosos elementos autobiográficos del tiempo que ejerció como la medicina en pueblos extremeños. Tiene un notable interés para conocer cómo era la práctica de los médicos, su conocimiento de los avances médicos del siglo XIX y las relaciones que ese establecían con el pueblo llano y la estructura caquicil dominante. Después de décadas de práctico olvido, Trigo vuelve a ser considerado como uno de los médicos escritores más notables de su generación

Felipe Trigo (1864-1916) was one of the most important writers of the Borbonic Restoration period. He was a country physician and military physician, but he was especially known by his literary and journalistic work. Among his most important literary, we should show up El médico rural (1912) and Jarrapellejos (1914), where he performed a strong critical approach of the Spanish society of his time. He was also known by his erotic novels, which were strongly attacked at the time. This fact contributed to the oblivion of his works after the Trigo’s death. El médico rural contains many autobiographical elements of the time he worked as physician in country villages of Extremadura. The novel has an outstanding interest to know how was the medical practice of country physicians, their knowledge of the medical advances of the late nineteenth century and their social relationships with plain people and the local rulers. After decades of being almost forgotten, Trigo is now recognized as one of the physician writers more noteworthy of his generation

Community Health in Rural America During the Mid-20th Century.

The Council on Rural Health (1945-1975) of the American Medical Association (AMA) collaborated with domestic health care organizations in the mid-20th century to improve access to health care in rural areas. This council promoted health and farm safety education, public health measures, insurance plans, and construction of health facilities. It also lobbied state and county medical societies to form rural health committees. AMA archive materials document these activities and demonstrate physicians' involvement and investment in the communities they served.

There is a Road, No Simple Highway: Musings on Rural Community Practice.

The article was delivered as an invited address to the 2019 SCRA Biennial. The author, the 2019 recipient of the Award for Distinguished Contributions to Practice in Community Psychology, discusses the application of community psychology practice competencies to rural mental health practice and reviews the challenges faced by rural and remote residents, and the rural idyllic myth. The author shares musings and observations of key lessons learned from mentors and practice across over three decades.

Changing Narratives and Persisting Tensions: Conflicts between Chinese and Western Medicine and Professional Profiles in Chinese Films and Literature, 1949-2009.

This paper analyses the shifting images of Chinese medicine and rural doctors in the narratives of literature and film from 1949 to 2009 in order to explore the persisting tensions within rural medicine and health issues in China. Popular anxiety about health services and the government's concern that it be seen to be meeting the medical needs of China's most vulnerable citizens - its rural dwellers - has led to the production of a continuous body of literary and film works discussing these issues, such as Medical Practice Incident, Spring Comes to the Withered Tree, Chunmiao, and Barefoot Doctor Wan Quanhe. The article moves chronologically from the early years of the Chinese Communist Party's new rural health strategies through to the twenty-first century - over these decades, both health politics and arts policy underwent dramatic transformations. It argues that despite the huge political investment on the part of the Chinese Communist Party government in promoting the virtues of Chinese medicine and barefoot doctors, film and literature narratives reveal that this rustic nationalistic vision was a problematic ideological message. The article shows that two main tensions persisted prior to and during the Cultural Revolution, the economic reform era of the 1980s, and the medical marketisation era that began in the late 1990s. First, the tension between Chinese and Western medicine and, second, the tension between formally trained medical practitioners and paraprofessional practitioners like barefoot doctors. Each carried shifting ideological valences during the decades explored, and these shifts complicated their portrayal and shaped their specific styles in the creative works discussed. These reflected the main dilemmas around the solutions to rural medicine and health care, namely the integration of Chinese and Western medicines and blurring of boundaries between the work of medical paraprofessionals and professionals.

A Farmer Becoming a Quasi-doctor: The Daegok Diary and Rural Healthcare from the 1960s to the 1980s.

This article attempts to review the reality of rural health care in Korea from the 1960s to the 1980s by analyzing the Daegok Diary. There has been two myths about rural healthcare. One is that the absence of institutional medicine was replaced by folk medicine, which could be identified with folk remedies or shamanic healing distinguished from Western medicine. This is a frame that understands institutional and Western medicine as a pair and folk medicine and traditional medicine as another. Another popular belief is that rural healthcare had remained almost nonexistent, and only dramatically improved after the Regional Health Insurance was implemented. Of course, some claim that the Regional Health Insurance was disadvantageous to farmers, but it is generally understood that there was an absence of government policy regarding medical care. The Daegok Diary, telling many aspects of rural life, is a good source to reflect on these common notions. Unlike other farmers' diaries, the diary of Shin Kwonsik contains a wealth of medical culture records because he chose unique ways to cure his and neighbors' illnesses by himself. It can be summarized as the life of "quasi-doctor". Shin was distinguished from quacks in that he practiced as an intellectual in the village rather than as a profession, and that he learned official medical knowledge and recognized the difference between a licensed physician and himself. Also, he was different from doctors because of the lack of a medical license and the limited range of diseases that he could treat. The life of quasi-doctor shows the social structure of rural areas in Korea from the 1960s to the 1980s. The reality of rural healthcare can be summarized in two ways. First, the medical vacuum was filled by civilian efforts. There was virtually no institutional healthcare in rural areas, but the government did little to improve the situation . The policy of sending doctors to the countryside proved to be ineffective, and the community doctor system did not work properly. Health Insurance was also a system for city workers rather than farmers. In the late 1970s, the situation only slightly improved due to reasons unrelated to the government policy regarding rural healthcare. These were improvements in traffic conditions and the increasing popularity of private insurance, which improved the physical and economic accessibility to medical institutions. Second, Western medicine had become a part of folk medicine. Those who could not go to a hospital utilized Western medicine, which had penetrated the folk medical culture. When people were sick, they bought Western drugs from pharmacies, drug dealers, and sometimes quacks. The knowledge of Western medicine also spread widely, with family medical books such as Million People's Medicine as the medium. These two characteristics show that the existing myths that regard the absence of government policy as that of medical care and interpret the medical vacuum as the prevalence of folk remedies and shamanic healing are far from the truth. From the 1960s to the 1980s, gaps in institutional medicine was filled by Western medicine which had become part of the folk medicine already, and the accessibility of institutional medicine was improved through civilian efforts. Of course, the Daegok Diary shows more than the social structure of rural areas. It also reveals a lot about the man who wrote it, Shin Kwonsik. Unlike the others, Shin chose to become a quasi-doctor because of his separation from the tradition and his desire to learn. He grew up alone without parental care and later moved to Seoul by himself. This meant a break with the tradition. He joined the army in the wake of the Korean War and learned how to give injections there. After he was discharged, he devoured many books and newspapers including Million People's Medicine. In short, the existence of a quasi-doctor like Shin was the result of the combination of the absence of institutional medicine, the predominance of Western medicine, and the characteristic of Shin as a 'learning modern.'

An outlier in public health history in India: A.T.W. Simeons's scheme for rural medical relief, Kolhapur, 1943-47.

It is customary to date provision of health services in rural India to the Report of the Bhore Committee (1946) and its descendants. It is presumed that in pre-Bhore India (the last half-century of the British era) the rural public health scenario was devoid of discerning commentators and practical effort. The presumption is misleading. Historical material shows that attempts, official and non-official, to improve rural environments and attend to the health problems of villagers were not wanting. Such efforts followed two main, sometimes intersecting, streams, namely sanitation and medical relief. I examine a little-known, yet noteworthy effort in the latter category, connected with Bombay Province, which incorporated in fledgling form modern practice in rural healthcare delivery. The central character was a medical expatriate of German ancestry (but contested nationality), whose connection with Bombay spanned almost two decades including the period of the Second World War. Albert Theodore William Simeons (1900-70) was a specialist in tropical medicine whose intellectual interests and facile pen ranged wide. Providence and the paranoia of the war-time Government of British India saw him in 1943 as Director of Public Health in the princely state of Kolhapur. Here he set up and supervised a novel scheme for 'Rural Medical Relief' centred on trained villagers as first-line providers of medical treatment. The scheme endured after Simeons's departure from India, and worked well enough to be remembered post-1947 by senior medical personnel of the time and also (but without crediting him) in official publications. The Kolhapur experience also inspired a first-of-its kind fictional work by this multi-faceted personality. Archival material available in India relating to Simeons's years at Kolhapur is trifling. Other primary sources have therefore been utilized to rescue the history.

Barefoot Doctors and the "Health Care Revolution" in Rural China: A Study Centered on Shandong Province.

Barefoot doctors were rural medical personnel trained en masse, whose emergence and development had a particular political, economic, social, and cultural background. Like the rural cooperative medical care system, the barefoot doctor was a well-known phenomenon in the Cultural Revolution. Complicated regional differences and a lack of reliable sources create much difficulty for the study of barefoot doctors and result in differing opinions of their status and importance. Some scholars greatly admire barefoot doctors, whereas others harshly criticize them. This paper explores the rise and development of barefoot doctors based on a case study of Shandong province. I argue that the promotion of barefoot doctors was a consequence of the medical education revolution and an implementation of the Cultural Revolution in rural public health care, which significantly influenced medical services and development in rural areas. First, barefoot doctors played a significant role in accomplishing the first rural health care revolution by providing primary health care to peasants and eliminating endemic and infectious illnesses. Second, barefoot doctors were the agents who integrated Western and Chinese medicines under the direction of the state. As an essential part of the rural cooperative medical system, barefoot doctor personnel grew in number with the system's implementation. After the Cultural Revolution ended, the cooperative medical system began to disintegrate-a process that accelerated in the 1980s until the system's collapse in the wake of the de-collectivization. As a result, the number of barefoot doctors also ran down steadily. In 1985, "barefoot doctor" as a job title was officially removed from Chinese medical profession, demonstrating that its practice was non-universal and unsustainable.

The impact after 50 years of a new medical education programme with a regional workforce mission.

BACKGROUND: Tasmania established its medical programme in 1965 to produce graduates to address medical workforce recruitment challenges. Many Tasmanian graduates work in Tasmania, but workforce problems continue. This paper reports the workforce outcomes of the first 42 graduating cohorts. METHODS: A database for all University of Tasmania medical graduates from the years 1970 to 2011 was developed by combining information from university, registration and local workforce survey databases. RESULTS: A total of 2012 doctors graduated from 1971 to 2011 and 1707 (85%) were registered, most commonly in general practice (45.8%), medicine (13%), anaesthetics (7.9%), surgery (7.5%), psychiatry (4.3%), emergency medicine (35, 3.5%), paediatrics (3.4%) and pathology (3.3%). While 41.9% worked in Tasmania, they comprised 35.6% of the local workforce and were clustered around the two larger cities. The proportion entering general practice has fallen since 1980s. DISCUSSION: The contribution of the Tasmanian medical programme is substantial but appears less than other regional medical schools. Relatively few work in smaller communities, particularly in specialties other than general practice. Lifestyle choices and the availability of training opportunities and career positions might be contributing factors. The medical school has established clinical schools in rural communities, promoted admission of rural applicants and increased rural clinical placement opportunities, with some early signs of success. CONCLUSION: The Tasmanian medical programme is important in this regional, island economy, but the rural and remote communities have not benefited as much as the two larger cities. Sustaining a regional workforce mission over time might require frequent adjustments to admissions and curriculum processes.