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Bulletin of the History of Medicine 77.2 (2003) 482-483



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Fritz Spiegl. Fritz Spiegl's MuSick Notes: A Medical Songbook. New York: Parthenon, 2002.xvii + 279 pp. Ill. $48.95 (1-84214-086-8).

The health professions are a particularly ripe source for themes in popular songs, many of which have been used in music hall routines. Subjects include the boastful and pompous physician; diseases and ailments such as rheumatism, scarlet fever, and asthma; proprietary as well as fictional medicines; medical quackery; and even surgery, anesthesia, anorexia, and transplants. Fritz Spiegl, who has long had an interest in this repertoire, has collected forty-six examples in this book, largely from the Victorian and Edwardian eras, reproducing the covers of many and the words and music for each. The result is a mixed bag of largely British examples, including The Thyroid Gland (1921), on the Steinach operation; The Pocket Gray, on the essential anatomy text; and Mary's Ghost, on body-snatching. The songs for proprietary medicines were little more than advertisements for Beecham's Pills, Bile Beans, Perry Davis's Pain-Killer, and Mrs. Winslow's Soothing Syrup, a morphine-containing product for children's teething that later inspired a piece for wind quintet by Edward Elgar.

William H. Helfand
New York

 

Jennifer Stanton, ed. Innovations in Health and Medicine: Diffusion and Resistance in the Twentieth Century. Routledge Studies in the Social History of Medicine, no. 14. London: Routledge, 2002. xviii + 232 pp. Ill. $90.00 (0-415-24385-8).

This volume concentrates on recent innovations, especially in the period after World War II. "We range widely," writes the editor, "to include not only medical [End Page 482] and health technologies . . . but also forms of organization of health services . . . as well as innovation in the representation of medicine. . . . Comparative dimensions are unusually strong, with authors looking at the behaviour of innovations in different countries or localities, comparing innovations at different points in time, or a mixture of these approaches" (p. 2).

An introductory essay, "On Theory and Practice," by Jennifer Stanton, is followed by part 1, "Close Neighbours," which contains two chapters: "The Effects of Local Context on the Development of Obstetric Ultrasound Scanning in Two Scottish Hospitals," by Debbie Nicholson; and "Organization, Ethnicity and the British National Health Service," by Helen Valier and Roberta Bivins. Part 2, "Across Nations," comprises "The Western Mode of Nursing Evangelized? Nursing Professionalism in Twentieth-Century Japan," by Aya Takahashi; "Acupuncture and Innovation: 'New Age' Medicine in the NHS," by Roberta Bivins; and "Degrees of Control: The Spread of Operative Fracture Treatment with Metal Implants: A Comparative Perspective on Switzerland, East Germany and the USA, 1950s-1990s," by Thomas Schlich. Finally, part 3 is entitled "Re-innovation and the State," and contains the following essays: "Representing Medicine; Innovation and Resistance in 1950s Britain," by Kelly Loughlin; "The Diffusion of Two Renal Dialysis Modalities in the UK, 1960s-1980s," by Jennifer Stanton; "Midwifery Re-innovation in New Zealand," by Philippa Mein Smith; and "French Response to 'Innovation': The Return of the Living Donor in Organ Transplantation," by Martine Gabolde and Anne Marie Moulin.

Reviewed by the editors

 

Todd Savitt, ed. Medical Readers' Theater: A Guide and Scripts. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2002. xix + 192 pp. $44.95 (cloth, 0-87745-798-0), $22.95 (paperbound, 0-87745-799-9).

"The concept behind our reader's theater program is simple," writes Todd Savitt: "adapt short stories about medicine to scripts, invite medical students to serve as the readers (actors), perform the stories to public and medical audiences, and hold postperformance discussions about the issues raised by the stories with the audiences and the cast" (p. xi). The result is an exchange of ideas and perceptions that, according to the author, has a profound effect on participants on both sides of the stage. The fourteen scripts—based on stories by William Carlos Williams, Richard Selzer, Susan Onthank Mates, Pearl S. Buck, Arthur Conan Doyle, Katherine Anne Porter, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, and Margaret Lamb—are divided into four sections: "Physicians and Patients," "Being a Physician," "Ethical and Social...

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