Despite the increasingly widespread availability of psychotropics believed to restore biochemical equilibrium in the brains of persons diagnosed with mood disorders, the number of people suffering from such medical conditions appears to be increasing. According to The Royal College of Psychiatrists, ‘by 2020 it is estimated that depression will be the second most common disabling condition in the world’, a figure it derives from the World Health Organization. Depression is, it seems, rapidly becoming a global threat. In a trend that is mirrored in much of the West, the number of prescriptions dispensed for antidepressants in the UK has doubled in the last decade and is continuing to rise. The need for a critical perspective on mood disorders is growing.

American psychiatry on the eve of Pearl Harbor was a small, stigmatised, and isolated specialty, for the most part confined as surely inside the high walls of its barrack-asylums as the patients over whom it exercised near-autocratic powers. The number of mentally ill patients incarcerated in state and county mental hospitals had grown sharply, from 150,000 at the turn of the century to 445,000 in 1940. The fiscal crisis of the states that accompanied the Great Depression had produced a steady deterioration of conditions in these institutions, a deterioration that would intensify as a result of the exigencies of total war. In the immediate aftermath of that prolonged conflict, conditions had degenerated to such a parlous state that a number of outside observers compared America's asylums to Nazi death camps.

The historian of science, Lorraine Daston, has written about things that talk. But how much can an artefact in a museum communicate its history to the public? Artefacts in museums speak, but it is not necessarily, or even at all, in the language of their original time and place. Cultural baggage, memories, and imagination all come into play, including those held by museum curators, and not least those contained within the operational and historical frameworks of such institutions. At the Museo di Storia della Medicina della Sapienza at the University of Rome we are organising an exhibition around an artefact that more than any other elicits emotive reactions – the Bini–Cerletti apparatus for the administration of electro-shock. This prototype of the first ECT machine, along with various historical documents, manuals, and textbooks relating to it, is a valued part of the Museo's collection. We are proud of it, yet as a display item, it is also something of golden chalice. Leaving aside the ethical question of whether we can (or should) convey to visitors the anxiety and pain of the patients who once submitted to the device, and leaving aside the different loads of historical and contemporary baggage that visitors will bring to it, how can such an object be represented in an historically honest way? This is the problem, for while we might be true to the context of its emergence, within that context (of Fascist Italy) the Bini–Cerletti apparatus was at one and the same time a blessing, a hope, a lie, and a profitable commercial product.

2011 marks the 175th anniversary of the United States National Library of Medicine (NLM) that traces its origins to 1836 and the commitment of the second US Army Surgeon General, Thomas Lawson (1789–1861), to purchase books and journals for active-duty medical officers. The occasion affords an opportunity to focus on the contributions of the NLM to the history of medicine and public health, and to look forward into the digital world of the twenty-first century as the NLM joins with like-minded institutions, scholars, educators, writers, students, and others to expand knowledge of medical and public health history for the advancement of scholarship across the disciplines and for the education of the general public. As more audiences become interested in medical and public health history, opportunities abound to broaden and deepen understanding of the past, present, and future of medicine and public health in order to help refine critical thinking about medicine and science, promote deeper understanding of medical and scientific concepts, and generally humanise medicine and public health by revealing the implications of disease and healthcare for individuals and communities in the United States and around the world.

During the Second World War, approximately 3,500 Australian military nurses served in combat regions throughout the world. The vast majority were enlisted in the Australian Army Nursing Service (AANS), but after the Japanese advance and the fall of Hong Kong (December 1941) and Singapore (February 1942), a significant number of these nurses spent three-and-a-half years as POWs in Indonesia, Hong Kong, Japan and the Philippines. To date, considerable research has been undertaken on POW experiences in Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand and Japan, albeit primarily focused on the testimonies of men and civilian women. This body of research utilises various methodologies, from Yuki Tanaka and Kei Ushimura's efforts to reconcile Japanese war crimes with the corruption of the Bushido ethic and sexual violence in contemporary Japanese society, to Christina Twomey's work on the imprisonment and repatriation of Dutch, Dutch–Eurasian and Australian civilian women and children. In the past fifteen years, historians have become aware of the need to recognise the multiplicity of these experiences, rather than continuing to focus on individual community, camp or regional case studies. Nurses are by no means absent from the discussion, although the majority of notable works on this subject focus on Hong Kong or the Philippines and adopt a descriptive and somewhat anecdotal approach. At the same time, scant critical attention has been paid to the internment of nurses in Indonesia despite a wealth of material kept in the Australian War Memorial (AWM) and National Archives of Australia (NAA).