Based on a wide range of primary materials, including WHO reports and Colonial Office correspondence, this article examines the UNICEF/WHO-funded mass BCG campaigns that were carried out in seven Caribbean colonies between 1951 and 1956. It explores the reasons behind them, their nature and aftermath and also compares them to those in other non-European countries and discusses them within a context of decolonisation. In doing so, it not only adds to the scholarship on TB in non-European contexts, which had tended to focus on Africa and Asia, but also to the relatively new field of Caribbean medical history and the rapidly expanding body of work on international health, which has paid scant attention to the Anglophone Caribbean and the pre-independence period.

Although historians have shown that there has been a complex and multi-layered relationship between the body, medicine and the force of electricity, many avenues remain to be explored. One of the most prominent of these is the way in which electrotherapy technologies were marketed to a wide variety of different end users and intermediaries. This paper offers the first historical analysis of one such device – the Overbeck Rejuvenator – a 1920s electrotherapy machine designed for use by the general public. Its inventor, Otto Overbeck, was not a medical man and this enabled him to use aggressive strategies of newspaper advertising, using testimonials to market his product alongside appeals to his own scientific authority. He commissioned the prestigious Ediswan Company to manufacture the Rejuvenator on a large scale, and took out patents in eleven countries to persuade users of the efficacy of the device. In response to Overbeck’s activities, the British Medical Association enlisted an electrical engineer to examine the Rejuvenator, contacted practitioners whose endorsements were being used in publicity material, and denied Overbeck permission to advertise in the British Medical Journal. Despite this, the Rejuvenator brought its inventor wealth and notoriety, and helped redefine the concept of ‘rejuvenation’, even if the professional reception of such a device was almost universally hostile. This paper shows how the marketing, patenting and publishing of Overbeck combined to persuade members of the laity to try the Rejuvenator as an alternative form of therapy, bypassing the medical profession in the process.

During the First World War the National Hospital for the Paralysed and Epileptic, in Queen Square, London, then Britain’s leading centre for neurology, took a key role in the treatment and understanding of shell shock. This paper explores the case notes of all 462 servicemen who were admitted with functional neurological disorders between 1914 and 1919. Many of these were severe or chronic cases referred to the National Hospital because of its acknowledged expertise and the resources it could call upon. Biographical data was collected together with accounts of the patient’s military experience, his symptoms, diagnostic interpretations and treatment outcomes. Analysis of the notes showed that motor syndromes (loss of function or hyperkinesias), often combined with somato-sensory loss, were common presentations. Anxiety and depression as well as vegetative symptoms such as sweating, dizziness and palpitations were also prevalent among this patient population. Conversely, psychogenic seizures were reported much less frequently than in comparable accounts from German tertiary referral centres. As the war unfolded the number of physicians who believed that shell shock was primarily an organic disorder fell as research failed to find a pathological basis for its symptoms. However, little agreement existed among the Queen Square doctors about the fundamental nature of the disorder and it was increasingly categorised as functional disorder or hysteria.

In 1856, the mayor of Brussels proposed the establishment of a municipal laboratory with a chemist to analyse food and beverages to restrain fraud. His proposal was accepted and a laboratory – possibly one of the first municipal laboratories in Europe – was set up. The laboratory still exists today. This paper aims at tracing the conditions in which it emerged, situating it within the laissez-faire context of the time. It was brought into existence by a liberal administration, in a period of little interventionism replete with unencumbered private interests (those of bakers, butchers, grocers, millers, pharmacists, doctors and so on). What will be considered here is the general mood with regard to food fraud, fair trade, correct price, and the quality of food in the first half of the nineteenth century. On a broader level, this contribution addresses the frictions between private and public initiative, while focusing on the process of construction of expertise. The paper makes use of contemporary documents such as reviews, newspapers, association reports and city council chronicles.

Between 1822 and the late 1830s a highly personal priority dispute was fought between the celebrated surgeon and anatomist Sir Charles Bell and his ex-student Herbert Mayo. The dispute was over the motor and sensory functions of the Vth and VIIth cranial nerves. Over the course of the 1820s and the 1830s, the competing claims of Bell and Mayo were presented in newspapers, journals, and textbooks. But by the time of Bell’s death in 1842, Mayo had been discredited, a seemingly tragic footnote in the history of nervous discovery. And yet, with the benefit of hindsight, Bell’s case was at best disingenuous. His success was not due to any intrinsic scientific merit in his argument, but rather his ability to create a narrative that undermined the credibility of Mayo. However, only when Mayo’s public performances elided with Bell’s descriptions did this ploy succeed. As a result, the dispute illuminates the importance of credibility to the creation of an idealised scientific medical practitioner.

In this article, I examine Galen’s credentials as an ethical philosopher on the basis of his recently discovered essay Avoiding Distress (Peri alypias). As compensation for the scholarly neglect from which Galen’s ethics suffers, I argue that his moral agenda is an essential part of his philosophical discourse, one that situates him firmly within the tradition of practical ethics of the Roman period. Galen’s engagement with Stoic psychotherapy and the Platonic-Aristotelian educational model affirms his ethical authority; on the other hand, his distinctive moralising features such as the autobiographical perspective of his narrative and the intimacy between author and addressee render his Avoiding Distress exceptional among other essays, Greek or Latin, treating anxiety. Additionally, I show that Galen’s self-projection as a therapist of the emotions corresponds to his role as a practising physician, especially as regards the construction of authority, the efficacy of his therapy and the importance of personal experience as attested in his medical accounts. Finally, the diligence with which Galen retextures his moral advice in his On the Affections and Errors of the Soul – a work of different nature and intent in relation to Avoiding Distress – is a testimony to the dynamics of his ethics and more widely to his philosophical medicine.