Book Notes
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUPThe casebook kept by W. G. Stutter spans the years when he worked as house apothecary and house surgeon at the Suffolk General Hospital in Bury St. Edmunds, England. In addition to annotating the casebook, the editors have also provided a list of abbreviations used by Stutter; a general introduction to the casebook and its context; a "pharmaceutical introduction"; a comment on their editorial methods; an index of patients discussed by Stutter; biographies of doctors and nurses mentioned in the general introduction; a discussion of diseases mentioned in the casebook and introduction; a section on diagnostic methods, physical treatments, and drugs and chemicals used by physicians at the time; a bibliography; and three indexes: "People and Places," "General and Medical Subjects," and "Pharmaceutical Materials and Methods." The illustrations include photographs of pages in the casebook itself, as well as drawings of implements and plants. The authors intend that this edited version of the casebook act as "a kind of 'Rosetta Stone' to those who attempt to read the original document" (p. xi).
Presented in 2003 during a conference organized in Córdoba, Argentina, this selection of ten papers reveals the growing historiographic sophistication of Latin American historians interested in health-related topics. The essays range widely in time and space, eschewing the almost exclusive and traditional focus on events in the city of Buenos Aires, a large metropolis housing nearly half of the country’s [End Page 802] population. With the aid of more recent sociocultural approaches, the authors probe rich and diverse, previously untapped archival sources. Among the local themes chosen for historical scrutiny are the appearance and control of epidemics from the 1880s to the early 1900s in Buenos Aires; discourses, policies, and practice regarding madness in La Pampa; and private philanthropic sponsorship of antituberculosis campaigns in Córdoba and their impact on health and medical practice. Other papers examine the political discourse on eugenics in the 1930s, problems of prostitution and public health in the city of Rosario, private and government-sponsored initiatives aimed at health prevention in Tucumán, and the popular suggestions proffered for a five-year health plan in the 1950s during the presidency of General Perón. The authors and editors should be congratulated for their efforts to frame and critically reconstruct important subjects not directly related to the traditional physician-oriented history.
“This book offers a case study and critique of the medical agenda of the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa (UMCA), which operated in Malawi from about 1885 to 1964. It is written with an interdisciplinary audience in mind, and from the perspective of historical-medical geography. I examine how this high-church Anglican mission, directly inspired by David Livingstone, conceptualized its health care responsibilities to Africans, and how effectively it fulfilled its goal to provide medical services to remote rural populations in the vast region of Lake Malawi and its borderlands” (p. xiii). The chapters are entitled “Christian Medical Missions and African Societies”; “The Lake Malawi Region: Forces of Change in the Late Nineteenth Century”; “The Return of the UMCA to Malawi: Technology and Political Relations...
