The Gueules cassées, in other words facially disfigured soldiers, are recognized as war wounded people with difficulty, but they represent a turning point in surgery.
The Gym Tonic aerobics programme heralded the advent of a new politics of the female body
The medical supervision of anorexia responded to political and scientific stakes in order to normalize puberty.
The naming of this syndrome in 1981 is loaded with potent political and historical implications.
The events that took place in the district of Bafia in 1928, illustrate the political stakes of vaccine resistance in the colonial world.Roughly translated : « Sleepers of the fat kind in Cameroon taken...
The 1821 yellow fever outbreak in Barcelona made clear the political dimensions of public health legislation.
The naturalness of breast feeding has been subordinated to a political idea of the Nation asserted in an explicit hierarchisation of class and race.
In 19th century Belgium, post-mortem caesarean section turned into a politicized debate.
“Ex-GI becomes blonde beauty” : in 1953, Christine Jorgensen became the first transsexual in the media.
Almost entirely overlooked throughout the 20th century, neglected by contemporary medical manuals, the clitoris has gradually returned centre stage thanks to Western feminism.
In 1852 the criminalisation of abortion is reaffirmed after the Academy of Medicine arrived at a resolution regarding therapeutic abortion.
Time-measurement devices in clinical and experimental settings have historically tended to pathologize mental “slowness” and normalize “speed” as a signifier of mental health.
Drapotemania exemplifies the existence of psychiatric diagnoses rooted in the political stigmatisation of a social group.
The 20th century oversaw the development of emergency medicine as a new public health norm.
Did excess mortality among the Great War insane result from a political choice?
The Hollywood smile, characterized by white, straight teeth, is a complex phenomenon involving social, cultural, scientific and technological changes in the early 20th century. It emerged with the development of film, advertising, orthodontics and cosmetic dentistry.
By asserting the hymen, a ubiquitous trait of female anatomy, 19th physicians reinforced the taboos affecting women's sexuality.
From the outset, the measurement of intelligence was as much a scientific as an eminently political endeavour.
Lesbianism is considered in the 17th and nineteenth19th centuries, both as a physical and behavioural pathology.
Patients and physicians hold conflicting political and scientific views on the existence of an emerging disease caused by tick bites.
The re-naming of an illness is as much a political act as a scientific one, as shown by the case of lypemania
In 1865 cholera spread from Mecca to the rest of the world, redirecting just-born international health policy’s priorities on Muslim pilgrimage flows.
In the mid-1970s, the near-death experience emerged as a new spiritual manifestation within medicine, at the heart of a policy of survivors and their trauma.
The notion of neurodiversity appeared at the end of the 90s in an effort to de-pathologize mental illness and combat discrimination.
In the 19th century, nostalgia became a mortal illness that endangered French military and colonial might.
Over the course of the 20th century, obesity came to be seen as a public health issue.
Should the new career of assistant medical be understood as a return to the Officiers de Santé status ?
As early as the years 1930-50, tuberculosis patient associations became significant political actors.
The term psychedelic was coined to refer to psychotic substances explored for use in psychiatry, but which remain under strict control
The topicality of cases of infanticide invites us to question the historical origin of the madness of motherhood.
The lumping together of mental illness and radicalisation leads to negating the latter’s implication in individual and collective history
The category of “rare diseases” was born of the interactions between authorities, patients and the pharmaceutical industry following a consolidation of US pharmaceutical legislation.
Social paediatrics aim to think of child health holistically, within its environment and to act socially. Social paediatrics aim to think of child health holistically, within its environment and to act...
The relationship to sugar in our society is sustainably anchored on a difference between genders.
A body enhancing aesthetic practice, tattooing pertained, in the 19th century, to the world of crime and social deviance.
Does the Covid-19 health crisis mark the advent of telemedicine in our societies?
The Great War marked a second turning point in the history of social policies towards the blind.
Devised to control the female body, the corset has had, between the 18th and the 20th century, many detractors.
Knowledge of the interconnection of the gut and psyche has a longer history than scientists often admit.
Suitcases as symbols of the struggle for dignity and civil rights of people with mental illnesses
Tobacco control, for all that it serves unquestionable health purposes, remains steeped in political issues
The truth serum is not just a fantasy, the stuff of science-fiction, it is also a political and medical instrument.Screenshot from Franju, La Tête contre les murs. The truth serum is not just a fantasy...
Around 1900, a vegetarian movement was organized in France to resolve the social question.
Can an Eastern spiritual practice become a Western health practice without betraying itself?
In Haïti, some individuals come back to life whereas they had been declared dead then inhumed.