Think of childbirth and you’re likely to picture a woman lying on her back on a hospital bed. That’s the position most (78%) Australian women adopt to give birth birth, despite growing evidence that being…
Among American institutions, it’s the military that has done most to eliminate racial bias.
DVIDSHUB/Flickr
The idea that discredited, repugnant ideas about racial differences might play a role in medical diagnoses and treatment today is one that doctors ought to find profoundly disturbing. The racially biased…
The centuries-long practice of blood letting was finally proven to be ineffective, thanks to clinical trials in the 19th century.
The Medieval Cookbook/Wikimedia Commons
MEDICAL HISTORIES – The final instalment in our short series discusses the evolution of evidence-based medicine.
Like bleeding, doctors' intuition was a central part of medical practice until it was…
AA’s Twelve Steps program emphasises spiritual awakening and is not at all medical.
Nikhil/Flickr
MEDICAL HISTORIES – The fourth instalment in our short series provides a brief overview of Alcoholics Anonymous and considers the reasons for its success.
Alcoholics Anonymous provides a non-medical…
Psychiatrists identified widespread alcohol abuse amongst the Chinese population of Borneo.
Tropenmuseum of the Royal Tropical InstituteWikimedia Commons
MEDICAL HISTORIES – The third article in our short series discusses the long history of culture-based understandings of mental illnesses.
Culture has been taken more seriously by psychiatrists since…
Spermatorrhoea was said to be ‘the most dire, excruciating and deadly maladies to which the human frame is subject.’
Guillaume Duchenne
MEDICAL HISTORIES – The second instalment in our short series examines how the spermatorrhoea epidemic changed the scope of medicine.
Every period arguably invents its own illnesses, medical disorders…
Doctors treated the bodies – and minds – of those suffering from hypochondriac disease.
Domenico di Bartolo/Wikimedia Commons
Welcome to Medical Histories, a series that brings you curious stories from the history of medicine. In this first instalment, we look at the apparent epidemic of “hypochondriac disease” in the early modern…
