Mammographic screening for breast cancer is a widely used public health approach, but is constantly a subject of controversy. Medical and historical research on this topic has been mainly conducted in Western Europe and North America. In Brazil, screening mammography has been an open topic of discussion and a challenge for health care and public health since the 1970s. Effectively, Brazilian public health agencies never implemented a nationwide population-based screening programme for breast cancer, despite the pressures of many specific groups such as advocacy associations and the implementation of local programmes. This article examines the complex process of incorporating mammography as a diagnostic tool and the debates towards implementing screening programmes in Brazil. We argue that debates about screening for breast malignancies, especially those conducted in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, took place in a context of change and uncertainty in the Brazilian health field. These discussions were strongly affected both by tensions between the public and the private health care sectors during the formative period of a new Brazilian health system, and by the growing role of civil society actors. Our study investigates these tensions and their consequences. We use several medical sources that discussed the topic in Brazil, mainly specialised leading oncology journals published between 1950 and 2017, medical congress reports for the same period, books and theses, institutional documents and oral testimonies of health professionals, patients and associations collected in the framework of the ‘The History of Cancer’ project from the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation and Brazilian National Cancer Institute.

This paper looks at the journey of eleven counsellors in marital counselling centres in French-speaking Belgium, from the creation of the centres in 1953, to the 1970s, when contraception became legal, and abortion became a public issue. At the time of Humanae Vitae, groups of volunteers, working within Catholic organisations where counselling took place, began to structure their activity around Carl Rogers’s ethics of client-centred therapy, placing their religious ideology in a secondary position to focus on the problems experienced by the couples and women they were receiving in the centres. These were often challenges they were experiencing themselves in their own lives. The reiteration of the Catholic orthodox view on contraception through Humanae Vitae marked a gap between the counsellors and the Church. This contribution questions the identity-related tension of Catholics working in conjugal counselling centres and the type of commitments they made to both the conjugal centres and the Church in a moment where family planning was debated both in the Church and politically.

This article examines the research implications and uses of data for a large project investigating institutional confinement in Australia and New Zealand. The cases of patients admitted between 1864 and 1910 at four separate institutions, three public and one private, provided more than 4000 patient records to a collaborative team of researchers. The utility and longevity of this data and the ways to continue to understand its significance and contents form the basis of this article’s interrogation of data collection and methodological issues surrounding the history of psychiatry and mental health. It examines the themes of ethics and access, record linkage, categories of data analysis, comparison and record keeping across colonial and imperial institutions, and constraints and opportunities in the data itself. The aim of this article is to continue an ongoing conversation among historians of mental health about the role and value of data collection for mental health and to signal the relevance of international multi-sited collaborative research in this field.