Legionnaires’ disease is now routinely discussed as an ‘emerging infectious disease’ (EID) and is said to be one of the earliest such diseases to be recognised. It first appeared in 1976 and its cause was identified in 1977, the same year that Ebola fever, Hantaan virus and Campylobacter jejuni arrived. The designation of Legionnaires’ disease as an EID was retrospective; it was not and could not be otherwise as the category only gained currency in the early 1990s. In this article we reflect on the changing medical understanding and social profile of Legionnaires’ disease in the decade or so from its recognition to the creation of EIDs, especially its ambivalent position between public health and clinical medicine. However, we question any simple opposition, between public health experts who approached Legionnaires’ disease as a new and worrying environmental threat that could be prevented, and clinicians who saw it as another cause of pneumonia that could be managed by improved diagnosis and treatment. We argue that in the British context of public spending cuts and the reform of public health, the category of ‘new’ diseases, in which Legionnaires’ disease was central, was mobilised ahead of the EID lobby of the early 1990s, by interested groups in medicine to defend infectious diseases services.

This article examines a fifteenth-century remedy book, Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawlinson c. 299, and describes its collection of 314 medieval medical prescriptions. The recipes are organised broadly from head to toe, and often several remedies are offered for the same complaint. Some individual recipes are transcribed with modern English translations. The few non-recipe texts are also noted. The difference between a remedy book and a leechbook is explained, and this manuscript is situated in relation to other known examples of late medieval medical anthologies. The particular feature that distinguishes Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawlinson c. 299 from other similar volumes is the evidence that it continued to be used during the sixteenth century. This usage was of two kinds. Firstly, the London lawyer who owned it not only inscribed his name but annotated the original recipe collection in various ways, providing finding-aids that made it much more user-friendly. Secondly, he, and other members of his family, added another forty-three recipes to the original collection (some examples of these are also transcribed). These two layers of engagement with the manuscript are interrogated in detail in order to reveal what ailments may have troubled this family most, and to judge how much faith they placed in the old remedies contained in this old book. It is argued that the knowledge preserved in medieval books enjoyed a longevity that extended beyond the period of the manuscript book, and that manuscripts were read and valued long after the advent of printing.

Prenatal diagnosis (PND) was introduced in France in the 1970s on the initiative of medical researchers and clinicians. For many years the regulation of practices was self-imposed, decentralised and idiosyncratic. The advent of ‘therapeutic modernity’ in the 1990s gave rise to an ethical, legal and scientific framework designed to homogenise PND at a national level, with the creation of multidisciplinary centres (CPDPN) and the Agence de la biomédecine. This article first recovers the history of PND in France. It then compares the activities of two CPDPNs, using ethnographic fieldwork and by analysing national quantitative data compiled by the Agence. It argues that the official policy of nationally homogeneous practices is not born out in practice, at the local level. This lack of homogeneity is most apparent in the number of authorisations for pregnancy termination due to foetal malformation, which varies considerably from one centre to another. Rooted in local culture, this variation relates to organisational methods, decision-making processes and variable levels of tolerance towards the risk of disability. Foetal medicine practitioners, thus, maintain a certain amount of autonomy that is collective rather than individual and that is reflected in the particular ‘identity’ of a given centre.