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
Considered one of the theatres of the Third Reich’s euthanasia program Am Spiegelgrund is a space where Nazi impact on paedopsychiatry is on display.
The medical supervision of anorexia responded to political and scientific stakes in order to normalize puberty.
The history of anti-drug campaigns in Canada brings out the equal parts played by international politics and public health concerns.
Over two centuries, medical, political and social circles around the world have been debating the stakes of the fight against alcoholism.
The naming of this syndrome in 1981 is loaded with potent political and historical implications.
In psychiatric institutions, clothing is a tool uniformizing the patients and the hospital staff in support of therapeutics, hygiene and order.
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The 1821 yellow fever outbreak in Barcelona made clear the political dimensions of public health legislation.
The bed is not a simple object structuring the hospital space. It is also a therapeutic instrument and an indicator for public authorities to guide hospital policy.
Human dissections have been an essential part of medicine since the fourth century B.C. Contrary to widely held belief, the Church did not prohibit them in the Middle Ages.
The naturalness of breast feeding has been subordinated to a political idea of the Nation asserted in an explicit hierarchisation of class and race.
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In 19th century Belgium, post-mortem caesarean section turned into a politicized debate.
In 1800, in the cause of health and public order, General Menou decrees the first French ban on the consumption of cannabis.
Ever since Freud, psychoanalysis has taken an interest in the psychic life of Children. First considered a minor practice, psychoanalysis with children reached its full dimension in the 1970s.
“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.
Dr Quinn, Medicine Woman can be considered as a feminist series as it highlights women's access to scientific and medical professions
Drapotemania exemplifies the existence of psychiatric diagnoses rooted in the political stigmatisation of a social group.
Scientific dream theories – as well as traditional oneirocritical discourses – have long kept dreaming outside the historical field.
There are policies of the dream, as illustrated by the different ways of apprehending the dreams in the Amerindian populations.
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is a nosological classification that has played - and continues to play - a key role in structuring psychiatric care and research.
In the collective mindscape, embalming is attached to Ancient Egypt. Such practices were part and parcel of mummification and that era’s funerary practices. They permitted the preservation of the deceased’s body prior to its inhumation. It should therefore come as no surprise that the art of thanatopraxis met with renewed interest in the 18th and 19th centuries.
The 20th century oversaw the development of emergency medicine as a new public health norm.
The European nationalisms have hindered the research on the most mysterious disease of the 20th century.
How does the history of epilepsy explain the negative image that this disease still sometimes suffers from?
Did excess mortality among the Great War insane result from a political choice?
The surgical or prophylactic mask was mainstreamed against the background of brutal epidemic episodes (Third Plague Pandemic, “Spanish flu”…) which kickstarted the development of public protection policies against diseases.
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.
The hookworm causes a parasitic infection the history of which helps show how the Rockefeller Foundation impacted on the United States federal healthcare provisions.
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.
Between the 15th and the 19th century, Venice’s reformed its quarantine system on the lazaretto model in view of its unequal successes in dealing with plague epidemics.
Lesbianism is considered in the 17th and nineteenth19th centuries, both as a physical and behavioural pathology.
In 1804, the outbreak of a suspicious disease in Livorno led to strong tensions between the Italian states.
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.
The history of “menopause” as a medical category revolves around gender relationships.
The public notoriety of the “morphinée" at the end or the 19th century is a testament to the political and professional issues at play as categories were being devised regarding substance abuse.
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 ?
For centuries, sexuality was deemed to answer the need to procreate rather than the call of desire, making of onanism a mortal sin.
Overeaters Anonymous is a therapeutic offer, both alternative and spiritual, aimed at people suffering from eating disorders.
As early as the years 1930-50, tuberculosis patient associations became significant political actors.
Eclipsed by the rise of antibiotics after the Second World War, can bacteria-eating viruses discovered at the beginning of the 20th century be therapeutic tools while resistance to antibiotic therapy emerges?
The American psychiatric classification was once a tool at the service of white political power to the detriment of the emancipation of African-Americans.
The term psychedelic was coined to refer to psychotic substances explored for use in psychiatry, but which remain under strict control
During the «Great Depression» of the 1930s, psychiatric professionals diagnosed a new disease: the «psychosis of current events».
The overlooked health provision of public baths retraces for us the history of body hygiene and the inequalities it portends.
The topicality of cases of infanticide invites us to question the historical origin of the madness of motherhood.
In 1961, the publication of an ex-internee’s memoir instigated a mental health policy reform in the State of Quebec.
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.
Starting in the autumn of 1889, a strange illness strikes Western populations: the Asiatic or Russian Flu.
There is today a growing clamour for the democratisation of vasectomy but this voluntary sterilisation practice was already in full swing in !8th century Russia.
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...
"Subtle energies" is a key term in today’s alternative medicine. It plays a central role in the area of energy healing, which includes therapies such as acupuncture, Reiki, Pranic Healing, and Therapeutic Touch.
The relationship to sugar in our society is sustainably anchored on a difference between genders.
The appearance of new syringe models in the 1850s questions the conditions of the development of medical techniques.
A body enhancing aesthetic practice, tattooing pertained, in the 19th century, to the world of crime and social deviance.
The health crisis linked to the Covid-19 epidemic has given a new impetus to the development of mental health care provision via teleconsultations.
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.
More than a simple symbol, the caduceus, inherited from Antiquity, became the emblem of pharmacy as we know it today.
Devised to control the female body, the corset has had, between the 18th and the 20th century, many detractors.
The eradication of smallpox illustrates the success of a proactive worldwide policy.
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
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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.
