In Japan, schistosomiasis was endemic in Yamanashi Prefecture and a few other hotspot areas where the Miya’iri snail lived. The parasite’s lifecycle relied on the intermediary Miya’iri snail as well as the human host. Parasite eggs passed into the agrarian environment through untreated night soil used as fertiliser or through the culture of open defecation in rural Japan. Manmade rice fields and irrigation ditches, night soil covered paddies and highly refined growing seasons put people in flooded rice paddies to intensively work the land in the spring and summer. The disease was equally dependent on human intervention in the natural world as it was on the natural world intervening in the human body. It is important to stress the role of both the environment and culture in disease causation. This study posits that we view the pre- and post-war national mobilisation to remake the environmental and reform the culture of the rural sector to align with public health mandates and notions of hygienic modernity as a case of total prevention.

This article examines the introduction of the medical mask in the late nineteenth century at the intersection of surgery, bacteriology and infection control. During this important episode in the longer history of the medical mask, respiratory protection became a tool of targeted germ control. In 1897, the surgeon Johannes Mikulicz at the University of Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland), drawing on the bacteriological experiments of his colleague Carl Flügge, used a piece of gauze in front of his nose and mouth as a barrier against microorganisms moving from him to his patients. This article explores the social, cultural and medical contexts of this particular use of the mask, in connection with germ theory and surgeons’ struggle with wound infection. It explores the alignment of the new aseptic surgery with the emerging field of bacteriology in a local milieu that favoured interdisciplinary cooperation. The account also follows the uptake of the mask outside of surgery for other anti-infectious purposes and shows how the new type of anti-infectious mask spread simultaneously in operating rooms as well as in hospitals and sanatoria, and eventually in epidemic contexts.

Poliomyelitis is a disease whose incidence steadily increased during the second half of the twentieth century on both sides of the Atlantic. If in the United States the epidemics which afflicted young children each summer became a major public health issue, in France, polio was considered less pressing than other diseases. This article, based on original archives from the Pasteur and Mérieux institutes, analyses the polio control strategies and policies implemented by France from the mid-1950s to the end of the 1960s. The article examines the role of two key actors and institutions that mobilised the French health authorities against the disease: Pierre Lépine and the Institut Pasteur as well as Charles Mérieux and the Institut Mérieux. Lépine developed an effective injected polio vaccine which was first used before being supplemented with the oral polio vaccine. If the two main protagonists and their institutions worked together, they each implemented different actions and manoeuvres, at different times with the aim to raise awareness of the fight against the disease. The national and international relations of the key French actors were decisive in the development and production of the polio vaccines and their application. This work contributes to understanding processes of polio vaccines choice at the level of national institutions and analyses the political and scientific networks built in support of polio vaccination, to finally move towards compulsory vaccination. Ultimately, this study describes the historical processes by which this disease became conflated with a biotechnology of collective protection in France.

The St Petersburg declaration, signed in 1868, is a milestone in the history of warfare and humanitarian law, as it prohibits the use of explosive bullets, which are considered to cause unnecessary suffering. As this article shows, the framing of this declaration that put suffering at its centre, as well as the development of the humanitarian movement, favoured the birth of a new field of expertise: wound ballistics. The wars that broke out after the declaration was signed are the subject of intense scrutiny, while the advances in weaponry, and notably, the creation by the British of a new expansive bullet, provided physicians with new fields of investigation. Numerous experiments have attempted to reproduce the effects of bullets on different materials, including corpses. Based on numerous medical reports and publications, as well as military archives from France and the United Kingdom, this investigation critically examines the notion of pain, its assessment and its use in the monitoring of war violence. It argues that, paradoxically, the greater attention paid to suffering has resulted in a need to objectify pain. This rationalisation and the quest for the quantification of suffering have not been without bias and have shifted attention away from care and treatment.