This article aims to demonstrate how researchers from different South American countries took part in the process of globalisation of the tropical medicine paradigm, through research on leishmaniasis found in this region. The main objective of the present article is to highlight the role of these researchers, as well as of their scientific institutions, in a global history of tropical medicine which surpassed European borders and its imperialistic practices. At the same time, it will be identified the renewal of the tropical medicine paradigm in the South American context. During the beginning of the twentieth century, leishmaniasis became an important health issue in tropical areas, whereas the mere usage of the repertoire of the medical knowledge, produced in Europe up until that time, revealed itself as an insufficient instrument to help solve the problem. Hereupon, this matter was, above all, an open discussion, which required great skills and refined techniques of tropical medicine for its study. For this reason, it enabled the members of the regional medical communities to establish vigorous communication channels with medical centres, located in other continents, that had already been giving much deserved importance to leishmaniasis as an exciting scientific theme.

This article describes the role of transnational anti-apartheid activism in South Africa, Britain and the United States in generating international moral outrage over the readmission of the Medical Association of South Africa (MASA) to the World Medical Association (WMA), which had taken place in 1981 after it had withdrawn from that body in 1976. It discusses an example of a controversy where an international health organisation (IHO) lost moral authority as a result of being accused of white supremacy and a pro-American engagement in Cold War politics. At the time of its readmission to the WMA, the MASA was controversial because of its failure to strike off its membership roll one of the doctors implicated the death in detention of Black Consciousness leader Steve Biko in 1977. It details how these activists viewed the American Medical Association as having campaigned for the MASA’s readmission. The WMA’s readmission of the MASA cost the former its relationships with the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the British Medical Association – a dispute which continued until South Africa’s democratic transition of 1994. With its focus on transnational activism in relation to the WMA and the effects of activists’ allegations of racism on its internal politics, this article contributes to the literature on the history of IHOs. Ultimately, this controversy shows the deficiency of international medical professional associations as ethical arbitrators of last resort.

In the Finnish medical discussion during the middle decades of the twentieth century, the challenging differential diagnostics between hyperthyroidism and various neuroses was perceived to yield a risk of unnecessary surgical interventions of psychiatric patients. In 1963, the Finnish surgeon Erkki Saarenmaa claimed that ‘the most significant mark of a neurotic was a transverse scar on the neck’, a result of an unnecessary thyroid surgery. The utterance was connected to the complex nature of thyroid diseases, which seemed to be to ‘a great extent psychosomatic’. Setting forth from this statement, the article aims to decipher the connection between hyperthyroidism, unnecessary surgical treatment and the psychosomatic approach in Finnish medicine. Utilising a wide variety of published medical research and discussion in specialist journals, the article examines the theoretical debate around troublesome diagnostics of functional complaints. It focuses on the introduction of new medical ideas, namely the concepts of ‘psychosomatics’ and ‘stress’. In the process, the article aims to unveil a definition of psychosomatic illness that places it on a continuum between psychological and somatic illness. That psychosomatic approach creates a space with interpretative potential can be applied to the historiography of psychosomatic phenomena more generally. Further inquiry into the intersections of surgery and psychosomatics would enrich both historiographies. It is also argued that the historical study of psychosomatic syndromes may become skewed, if the term ‘psychosomatic’ is from the outset taken to signify something that is all in the mind.

This article examines the case files of patients diagnosed with Transvestitismus [transvestism] in the Psychiatric Clinic of the Helsinki University Central Hospital in the years 1954–68. These individuals did not only want to cross-dress, but also had a strong feeling of being of a different sex from their assigned one. The scientific concept of transsexuality had begun to take form, and this knowledge reached Finland in phases. The case files of the transvestism patients show that they were highly aware of their condition and were very capable of describing it, even if they had no medical name for it. Psychiatrists were willing to engage in dialogue with the patients, and did not treat them as passive objects of study. Although some patients felt that they had been helped, many left the institution as frustrated, angered or desperate as before. They had sought medical help in the hope of having their bodies altered to correspond to their identity, but the Clinic psychiatrists insisted on seeing the problem in psychiatric terms and did not recommend surgical or hormonal treatments in most cases. This attitude would gradually change over the course of the 1970s and 1980s.