Walking London’s Medical History

The Origins of the Anglo-American Research Alliance and the Incidence of Civilian Neuroses in Second World War Britain

From August 1940 until May 1941, Germany subjected Great Britain to air bombardments by night and day. Desmond Flower recalled how London shook as the first bombs hit the docks, while in early September 1940, nurse Frances Faviell described London’s casualties as, ‘‘bodies, limbs, blood and flesh mingled with little hats, coats, and shoes’’. Despite this onslaught and the ‘‘‘Blind savagery’’ of...

Walking the Paris hospitals: diary of an Edinburgh medical student, 1834-1835.

Spectacle and Secrecy: Press Coverage of Conjoined Twins in 1950s Britain

In the early 1950s, when the National Health Service (NHS) was still in its infancy, the British public was gripped by news reports of two attempts at the surgical separation of conjoined twins. The first operation involved one-year-old twin girls from Kano, Nigeria. The twins were xiphopagus (joined at the lower sternum) and shared a liver, separation was attempted at London’s Hammersmith Hosp...

Procuring Corpses: The English Anatomy Inspectorate, 1842 to 1858

In September 1873, England’s newspapers carried stories headlined ‘Horrible Discovery in the Thames’. Parts of a woman’s body had been found in the river over the course of several days and it was proving impossible to identify her. One of London’s medical schools was rumoured to be the source of these mutilated remains. However, the Daily News reminded its readers that a law required the regis...

Introduction. Medical case histories as genre: new approaches.

The articles presented here set out the conceptual significance of case histories for the field of medical humanities and the history of medicine. The main objective of the collection is a critical inquiry into the similarities and differences among specific series of case histories in order to recover patterns and practices in texts and communicative acts about human health at different histor...