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Volumes 80-84

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Clio Medica 84: Attending Madness

Clio Medica 84:
Attending Madness: At Work in the Australian Colonial Asylum
Lee-Ann Monk

‘He is what we would call a very good attendant, who would not run away or flinch from any patient, but would try to have his orders carried out if possible.’ Such was the view of William Coady, attendant to the insane in the British settler colony of Victoria, Australia in the 1870s.

Attending Madness is a history of William Coady’s occupation, a history of asylum work and workers in nineteenth-century Australia. It considers not only who attendants were and why they worked in the asylum, but also how they and others variously defined ‘the very good attendant’.

Colonial asylum advocates imagined the attendant as an archetype, drawing on ideas from Britain about the nature of insanity and its treatment. In exploring the articulation of these ideas in a colonial context, and their effect on the asylum workplace, Lee-Ann Monk makes an important contribution to the international history of the asylum. She also opens new dimensions in the history of this occupation, on which the fate of patients very much depended, by analysing attendants’ efforts to construct an occupational identity and give meaning to their work, thus providing new insights into their sense of themselves and their occupation.

Lee-Ann Monk is an Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow (Industry) in the History Program, La Trobe University, Australia, where she is writing a history of Kew Cottages, Australia’s first purpose-built institution for people with learning disability, as part of an interdisciplinary research team funded by an ARC-Linkage Grant.
Clio Medica 83: 'A Cheap, Safe and Natural Medicine'

Clio Medica 83:
'A Cheap, Safe and Natural Medicine': Religion, Medicine and Culture in John Wesley's Primitive Physic
Deborah Madden

John Wesley's Primitive Physic (1747) achieved twenty-three editions in his lifetime, ensuring its popular - and controversial - status in eighteenth-century medicine.

This is the first full-length study to examine the theological, intellectual and cultural background to one of the period's most successful medical texts. By exploring Wesley's work in the context of his theology, 'A Cheap, Safe and Natural Medicine' extends the on-going reconfiguration of the relationship between religion and medicine.

Wesley was on a theological mission to recover the primitive purity of the first Christians. Yet the remedies contained within Primitive Physic suggest a pragmatic thinker, whose concern for spiritual health did not prevent him from providing practical assistance to those who needed it.   The evolution of Wesley's thinking also demonstrates some of the struggles he faced as leader of the Methodist movement, such as the way he handled contemporary criticism of Primitive Physic when religious 'enthusiasm' was often conflated with medical 'quackery'.

'A Cheap, Safe and Natural Medicine' will be of interest not only to medical and literary historians, but to anyone who is interested in the way religion influences medicine.
clio82

Clio Medica 82:
Control and the Therapeutic Trial: Rhetoric and Experimentation in Britain, 1918-48
Martin Edwards

How do doctors decide whether their drugs, or other treatments, actually work? In practice this can be fiendishly difficult. Nowadays the gold standard is the randomised controlled trial (RCT). But the RCT is a recent invention, and the story of how it came to dominate therapeutic evaluation from the latter half of the twentieth century involves acrimony, confrontation, and manipulation of the powerful rhetoric of 'control'.

Control and the Therapeutic Trial examines the development of the RCT from the eclectic collection of methodologies available to practitioners in the early-twentieth century. In particular, it explores the British Medical Research Council's (MRC) exploitation of the term 'controlled' to help establish its own 'controlled trials' as the gold standard for therapeutic evaluation, and, ultimately, the MRC itself as the proper authority to adjudicate on therapeutic efficacy. This rhetorical power still clings, and is exploited today.

Control and the Therapeutic Trial will be of interest not only to historians of twentieth-century medicine and practising clinicians who take therapeutic decisions, but to anyone who seeks a broader insight into the forces that shaped, and control, the modern controlled trial.

clio81

Clio Medica 81:
British Military and Naval Medicine, 1600-1830
Edited by Geoffrey L. Hudson

Standing armies and navies brought with them military medical establishments, shifting the focus of disease management from individuals to groups. Prevention, discipline, and surveillance produced results, and career opportunities for physicians and surgeons. All these developments had an impact on medicine and society, and were in turn influenced by them. The essays within examine these phenomena, exploring the imperial context, nursing and medicine in Britain, naval medicine, as well as the relationship between medicine, the state and society.

British Military and Naval Medicine challenges the notion that military medicine was, in all respects, 'a good thing'. The so-called monopoly of military medicine and the authoritarian structures within the military were complex and, at times, successfully contested. Sometimes changes were imposed that cannot be characterised as improvements.

British Military and Naval Medicine also points to opportunities for further research in this exciting field of study.

clio80

Clio Medica 80:
Healing Bodies, Saving Souls: Medical Missions in Asia and Africa
Edited by David Hardiman

Missionary medicine flourished during the period of high European imperialism, from the late-1800s to the 1960s. Although the figure of mission doctor - exemplified by David Livingstone and Albert Schweitzer - exercised a powerful influence on the Western imagination during the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, few historians have examined the history of this important aspect of the missionary movement. This collection of articles on Asia and Africa uses the extensive archives that exist on medical missions to both enrich and challenge existing histories of the clinic in colonial territories - whether of the dispensary, the hospital, the maternity home or leprosy asylum.

Some of the major themes addressed within include the attitude of different Christian denominations towards medical mission work, their differing theories and practices, how the missionaries were drawn into contentious local politics, and their attitude towards supernatural cures.

Leprosy, often a feature of such work, is explored, as well as the ways in which local people perceived disease, healing and the missionaries themselves. Also discussed is the important contribution of women towards mission medical work.

Healing Bodies, Saving Souls will be of interest not only to students and historians but also to the wider reader as it aims to define the place of the missionary within the overall history of medicine.

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