In the journals…

In this month’s Journal of History of Medicine and Allied Sciences:

• In an era of uncensored scientific information and unregulated scientific conduct, “world of recrimination, gossip, misogyny, uncertainty, exaggeration, and dreams and delusions of scientific and therapeutic progress were collapsed together,” as detailed by Stephen T. Casper.
• Noémi Tousignant examines the role of analgesic research on the Hardy–Wolff–Goodell dolorimeter and its displacement by the clinical trial, and notes how social, material, and psycological milieu paved way for the clinical trial in analgesic evaluation in 1950s America.
• Sean Dyde weaves together correspondences among physicians and researchers along with experiemental results from medical journals as evidence to challenge the notion that soldier’s heart–a disease documented since the American Civil War and diagnosed in British and American soldiers–disappeared because it was thought to be psycosomatic. Rather, Dyde argues, the disease disappeared as an unintended consequence of the disease’s research.
  

Social Science and Medicine (Follow on Twitter @socsimed) touches upon how youth construct identity in reaction to healthy food choices and brands and black suicide acceptability, and the concepts of religiosity and self-expressionism.

The new special issue of Subjectivity (Follow on Twitter @PalgraveJournal) is hot off the presses with the theme of Collective Subjects and Political Transformation. Ben Pitcher explores the mainstreaming of once radical subjects, John D Márquez zeroes in on Black and Latino populations in Houston, Texas and teases out how Blackness serves as a universal signifier for Latino acculturation of anti-white supremacy opposition, and Rebecca Bramall examines the discourse surrounding the phrase Dig for victory! in the age of austerity.

Of the many interesting articles within April’s issue of Social Studies of Science, Leticia Cesarino and Naara Luna focus on the Biosafety Bill of Law and surrounding debate in the Brazil National Congress, Dimitris Papadopoulos identifies four political conceptualizations related to technoscience and argues for alter-ontologies to widen the scope of political forces, and Harry Collins makes the argument that language beats physical practice in terms of practical understanding.

Also of note, Medical Anthropology‘s new issues highlights articles surrounding HIV/AIDS and ART in East and South African settings.

Open Access Journals and Articles

In Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine, Wolf E. Mehling et al. conduct focus groups with diverse San Francisco Bay area mind-body practicioners and their clients to examine commonalities of those therapies.

Three open access articles worth noting from Social History of Medicine are written by Peregrine Horden, Laurence Totelin, and Iona McCleery.

• What is wrong with early medieval medicine? Horden attempts to resusitate the image of early medieval medicine in western Europe by taking a closer look at its contents via a sample of writings.
• Totelin draws on questions whether translation of recipes from Diseases of Women I and II from Greek to Diseases of Women and On the Diverse Afflictions of Women in Latin affected medical practice and whether these recipes molded gynaecological practice in the Middle Ages.
• Promising a “dramatic tale of political ambition and national resurgence” and using the chronicles of Fernão Lopes as a source, McCleery seeks to provide a reflection on Lopes’ use of medical “emplotments” to create his own history while simultaneously examining how health and illness emplotments provided meaning to their originial audiences.

In Sociology of Health & Illness , Simon M. Dyson et al.examined 40 interviews of schoolchildren with sickle cell in England using Bordieu’s concepts of habitus, field, and capital as a thematic framework.