This paper seeks to account for the development of a public health education policy with respect to venereal disease during the period 1916–1926. Two competing pressure groups, the National Council for Combatting Venereal Disease and the Society for the Prevention of Venereal Disease, defended opposing programmes; the one based on moral education (NCCVD) and the other (SPVD) on medical prophylaxis. Many of the interests represented by the groups and the political dimensions that they took, were influenced by factors only very tangentially connected to health education.

Any account of the development of policy in this field needs placing in the context of the early history of nineteenth-century anti-vice crusades; the role of the Army Medical Corps during the 1914–18 war; and the bureaucratic protectionism of the Ministry of Health personnel.

Adolf Meyer (1866–1950) exercised considerable influence over the development of Anglo-American psychiatry during the first half of the twentieth century. The concepts and techniques he implemented at his prominent Phipps Psychiatric Clinic at Johns Hopkins remain important to psychiatric practice and neuro-scientific research today. In the 1890s, Meyer revised scientific medicine’s traditional notion of clinical skill to serve what he called the ‘New Psychiatry’, a clinical discipline that embodied social and scientific ideals shared with other ‘new’ progressive reform movements in the United States. This revision conformed to his concept of psychobiology – his biological theory of mind and mental disorders – and accorded with his definition of scientific medicine as a unity of clinical–pathological methods and therapeutics. Combining insights from evolutionary biology, neuron theory and American pragmatist philosophy, Meyer concluded that subjective experience and social behaviour were functions of human biology. In addition to the time-honoured techniques devised to exploit the material data of the diseased body – observing and recording in the clinic, dissecting in the morgue and conducting histological experiments in the laboratory – he insisted that psychiatrists must also be skilled at wielding social interaction and interpersonal relationships as investigative and therapeutic tools in order to conceptualise, collect, analyse and apply the ephemeral data of ‘social adaptation’. An examination of his clinical practices and teaching at Johns Hopkins between 1913 and 1917 shows how particular historical and intellectual contexts shaped Meyer’s conceptualisation of social behaviour as a biological function and, subsequently, his new vision of clinical skill for twentieth-century psychiatry.

This article explores the scientific and entrepreneurial incentives for malaria research in the tea plantations of north Bengal in colonial India. In the process it highlights how the logic of ‘location’ emerged as the central trope through which medical experts, as well as colonial administrators and planters, defined malaria research in the region. The paper argues that the ‘local’ emerged as both a prerequisite of colonial governance as well as a significant component of malaria research in the field. Despite the ambiguities that such a project entailed, tropical medicine was enriched from a diverse understanding of local ecology, habitation, and structural modes of production. Nevertheless, the locality itself did not benefit from anti-malarial policy undertaken either by medical experts or the colonial state. This article suggests that there was a disjuncture between ‘tropical medicine’ and its ‘field’ that could not be accommodated within the colonial plantation system.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the development of bacteriology contributed to a heightened focus on the individual as the carrier of contagious diseases. This raised the question of how the state could shoulder the responsibility of defending public health without infringing on individual civil liberties. How much coercion of the diseased could be tolerated in order to protect the healthy? Pandemics such as plague and cholera had sometimes led to enforced isolation of the diseased; people suffering from leprosy might be confined to special institutions, and tuberculosis could result in long stays in hospitals and sanatoria. In such cases, however, it was also hoped that certain treatments might eventually cure the patients.

Historical accounts of colonial science and medicine have failed to engage with the Colonial Office’s shift in focus towards the support of research after 1940. A large new fund was created in 1940 to expand activities in the colonies described as fundamental research. With this new funding came a qualitative shift in the type of personnel and activity sought for colonial development and, as a result, a diverse group of medical and technical officers existed in Britain’s colonies by the 1950s. The fact that such variety existed amongst British officers in terms of their qualifications, institutional locations and also their relationships with colonial and metropolitan governments makes the use of the term ‘expert’ in much existing historical scholarship on scientific and medical aspects of empire problematic. This article will consider how the Colonial Office achieved this expansion of research activities and personnel after 1940. Specifically, it will focus on the reasons officials sought to engage individuals drawn from the British research councils to administer this work and the consequences of their involvement for the new apparatus established for colonial research after 1940. An understanding of the implications of the application of the research council system to the Colonial Empire requires engagement with the ideology promoted by the Agricultural Research Council (ARC) and Medical Research Council (MRC) which placed emphasis on the distinct and higher status of fundamental research and which privileged freedom for researchers.

Self-inflicted injury, or ‘self-harm’, has been a topic of much debate in recent years. The media in the Western world has tended to portray the issue as an increasing ‘trend’, relating it to various contemporary concerns, including the so-called ‘celebrity culture’ and urban decline. The past decade in the UK has seen the publication of various clinical guidelines, a National Inquiry into Self-Harm in young people, and almost continual media speculation. In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, speculation also occurred around ‘self-mutilation’, an area newly defined by alienists (asylum psychiatrists). This topic has received little historical attention; yet, had ‘self-harm’ been on the agenda in the 1970s and '80s, nineteenth-century self-mutilation would no doubt have been presented as part of a discourse on professionalisation, in which the creation of a new psychiatric category was presented as part of the ‘medicalisation’ of psychiatry, through observation and classification within asylums. More recently, a changing historiography has led to histories of self-harm being located within a schema for ‘making up’ people, such as attention to the development of a patient profile for the apparently new behaviour of ‘delicate self cutting’ in the mid-twentieth century. This article builds on this concept to explore broader social issues around the creation of the concept of ‘self-mutilation’, which help to explain the occurrence of an impetus for ‘making up people’ in a particular period or culture. In particular, the impetus is related here to changing ideas of what constituted the ‘self’ and the relation of the individual to society in the late nineteenth century.