When Henry T Lynch thought that he had discovered the existence of hereditary cancers among Nebraskan families in the 1960s, his hope was that it would lead to more effective means of cancer control. Lynch argued that the identification of such cancers offered tremendous opportunities for improving detection and treatment. If cancer ran in families, he claimed, the discovery of a hereditary cancer in one family member should be an alert to the possibility of cancer in others, and so prompt careful scrutiny for any signs that might indicate the presence of the disease in “healthy” individuals. Lynch hoped that by targeting cancer families it would be possible to catch more cancers at an earlier stage than was hitherto possible. Cancers caught early were often curable, the American Cancer Society (ACS) claimed.

In this paper we explore the relationship of modern architecture and modern surgery in the twentieth century. Our central argument is that environments designed for surgery in the modern hospital became more like laboratories at the end of a remarkable metamorphosis, which we explain through three distinct types of spaces in a particularly significant case study, the Royal Victoria Hospital (RVH) in Montreal, Quebec. As the changing design of surgical spaces constitutes our primary evidence, our approach engages the methods of material culture and material history, a methodology infrequently used in the history of science and medicine. In turn, in order to interpret the changes in operating room design, we situate them in the context of the history of surgery. The architecture of health care both illustrates and shapes the identity of patients and doctors, as well as their inter-relationship. It structures surgeons' activities and expresses their status as actors, as well as reinforcing specific scientific theories. Thus, spatial structures like operating rooms can be understood as material evidence of ongoing changes in the status and self-image of surgeons.

The early modern era saw important changes in the character of warfare in Europe, including the development of larger, permanent armies and navies. Historians have studied many key aspects of what some call the “military revolution”, whose character and timing have become a matter of debate; but some important features of these emerging military communities remain largely unexplored. One subject which has not attracted the attention it merits is that of the health of soldiers and sailors and of medical provision in the new armies and navies. The issue has not been entirely neglected, either generally, or as it relates to specific states, but focused studies are rare. This is unfortunate, not least because of the importance attached to the issue of sickness and medical provision by contemporaries, and the value of medical provision as a sort of test case by which to measure the effectiveness of medical services and hence to contribute to the “military revolution” debate. For some historians the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw the first significant efforts to develop a structure of military and naval hospitals; for others, however, the extent of illness and the inadequacy of medical support services before the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic era suggests that many states failed to meet the organizational challenge posed by the growth of standing armed forces in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. What follows is an investigation of the extent and nature of illness, and the effectiveness of medical provision in the armies and navies of one major player of the period, Spain in the reign of the last Habsburg, Charles II (1665–1700).

The history of the medical and nursing care given to parturient women has been approached in a number of ways. Early studies largely equated it with the development of obstetric technology that occurred from the early eighteenth century onwards, focusing on its potential to save maternal and foetal life, but without examining closely the frequency and significance of its actual use. Thereafter, feminist historians re-interpreted similar evidence to stress what they regarded as the degrading and invasive aspects of such technology, especially as it related to the increasing use of chloroform anaesthesia in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Interest then moved from the technology itself, to its effects on other aspects of care in childbirth, particularly on the eighteenth-century decline of the traditional midwife and the concomitant rise of the man-midwife.

This article contributes to the literature on the history of medico-legal practice by using a survey of 535 poisoning cases to examine the emergence of forensic toxicological expertise in nineteenth-century English criminal trials. In emphasizing chemical expertise, it seeks both to expand upon a limited literature on the history of the subject, and to offer a contrast to studies of criminal poisoning that have tended to focus primarily on medical expertise. Poisoning itself is a topic of abiding interest to historians of forensic medicine and science because (together with insanity) it long tended to attract the greatest attention (and often confrontation) in criminal proceedings. In looking at a wide number of cases, however, it becomes apparent that few aroused true medico-legal controversy. Rather, the evidence from several hundred cases tried as felonies during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries indicates that prior to the 1830s few presented any opportunity for “a battle of experts”. While Ian Burney and Tal Golan have shown that this was certainly not the case during the mid and late nineteenth century, this paper goes further by dividing the period under study into three distinct phases in order to show how expert testimony (and experts themselves) changed during the course of the century, and why this process opened a door to the potential for formalized controversy.