This article examines how a branch of medicine based within the criminal justice system responded to a society which by the 1970s and 1980s was increasingly critical of the prison system and medical authority. The Prison Medical Service, responsible for the health care of prisoners in England and Wales, was criticised by prison campaigners and doctors alike for being unethical, isolated, secretive, and beholden to the interests of the Home Office rather than those of their patients. While prison doctors responded defensively to criticisms in the 1970s and 1980s, comparing their own standards of practice favourably with those found in the NHS, and arguing that doctors from outside would struggle to cope in the prison environment, by 1985 their attitudes had changed. Giving evidence to a House of Commons committee, prison doctors displayed a much greater willingness to discuss how the prison system made their work more difficult, and expressed a pronounced desire to engage openly with the rest of the profession to address these problems. The change of attitude partly reflects a desire by the Home Secretary William Whitelaw to make the Prison Service more open, and an acceptance of a need for greater accountability in medicine generally. Most important, however, was a greater interest in prison health care and appreciation of the difficulties of prison practice among the wider medical profession, encouraging prison doctors to speak out. This provides a case study of how a professional group could engage openly with criticisms of their work under favourable circumstances.

From the last decades of the twentieth century, above all, in the more service-oriented post-industrial economies, and in a context of debilitation of public health systems, health care became exponentially profitable, thereby attracting new types of investors. In fact, this new stage entails moving from the commercialisation of health care to its financialisation; that is, medical care becomes just one more financial asset and its price and quality are quoted on the stock exchange. This study intends to participate in the debate initiated by historians of medicine and economic historians with the aim of tracing capitalist traits and market participation in the evolution of health coverage, a process initially promoted by professional doctors who converted their consulting rooms into small clinics and larger hospital companies and which, over time, saw the incorporation of financial capital. In particular, this paper has two specific objectives for the case of Spain. First, to analyse the relationship of collaboration and/or competition between public and private hospitals under democracy and the factors that have conditioned this relationship. Second, to make an initial contribution towards understanding how, in this context, the large private hospital groups have been created in Spain during this period, especially in recent decades with concentration in the hands of financial capital, originating from both the traditional banking sector and investment funds.

After his abdication in November 1918, the German emperor Wilhelm II continued to haunt the minds of his people. With the abolition of the lese-majesty laws in the new republic, many topics that were only discussed privately or obliquely before could now be broached openly. One of these topics was the mental state of the exiled Kaiser. Numerous psychiatrists, physicians and laypeople published their diagnoses of Wilhelm in high-circulation newspaper articles, pamphlets, and books shortly after the end of the war. Whether these diagnoses were accurate and whether the Kaiser really was mentally ill became the issue of a heated debate.

This article situates these diagnoses of Wilhelm II in their political context. The authors of these diagnoses – none of whom had met or examined Wilhelm II in person – came from all political camps and they wrote with very different motives in mind. Diagnosing the exiled Kaiser as mentally ill was a kind of exorcism of the Hohenzollern rule, opening the way for either a socialist republic or the hoped-for rule of a new leader. But more importantly, it was a way to discuss and allocate political responsibility and culpability. Psychiatric diagnoses were used to exonerate both the Emperor (for whom the treaty of Versailles provided a tribunal as war criminal) and the German nation. They were also used to blame the Kaiser’s entourage and groups that had allegedly manipulated the weak-willed monarch. Medical concepts became a vehicle for a debate on the key political questions in interwar Germany.

This article examines how international organisations with mandates in health and development interpret global economic crises and respond to disease. It contributes the perspective of World Bank to emerging scholarship on the various factors leading to the decline of the World Health Organization (WHO) and its Health for All (HFA) mission during structural adjustment. It does so by telling a story of collaboration and conflict between WHO and World Bank’s Population, Health and Nutrition (PHN) Department following the ambitious Alma Ata Declaration in 1978 until the initial global AIDS response. As debt crises emerged in Latin America in the early 1980s, WHO tried to find a way forward for HFA. However, the African crisis of 1985 fractured the international community’s support, causing WHO and PHN to dialogue more closely regarding health sector financing. As AIDS became a global crisis, this culminated in their 1987 joint research on the disease’s macroeconomic and demographic impact. However, observing WHO’s continued hesitance regarding financing and its decision to act as a donor gatekeeper, the Bank ultimately opted to work separately in AIDS. Thus, the themes of the Alma Ata versus Selective Primary Health Care debate of the late 1970s continued throughout the 1980s into the early years of the global AIDS response: a perennial conflict of financing within resource constraints and the appropriate role of donors in the grand project of health and development.

From its initial development by Carlo Forlanini at the end of the nineteenth century until the advent of antibiotics in the 1940s, artificial pneumothorax was one of the most widely used treatments for pulmonary tuberculosis. However, there were strongly held reservations about this therapy because of its risks and side effects. In the Soviet Union under Stalin, such uncertainties became instruments of political denunciation. The leading Soviet pulmonary physician Volf S. Kholtsman (1886–1941) was alleged to have used the so-called ‘aristocratic therapy’ of artificial pneumothorax to kill prominent Bolsheviks. Drawing on documents from Stalin’s personal Secretariat, this historical study of the pneumothorax scandal contributes to the cultural history of tuberculosis, showing how it was instrumentalised for political purposes.