Medicine/Behavioral Science

Medicine has made tremendous progress in the 20th century. Information provided in this museum are on medicines, drugs & substances
which were in use during late 19th & early 20th century; the most important period for basic advancement of modern medicine, manufactured by nearly 148 manufacturers around the globe, in collection with a pharmacy established in 1912.

The Sigerist Circle is a group of medical historians, scholars and others interested in the history of health, health care, and the biomedical sciences who give special attention to issues of class, race, gender and /or use Marxist, feminist and other critical methodologies in the analysis of medical history.

The UK Centre for the History of Nursing is a new venture that for the first time provides a focus for nursing history in Europe. Its task is to build awareness of the importance of nursing history through education and research.

Ever wonder how people figured out there used to be such things as dinosaurs? Curious about how scientists learned to reconstruct fossil skeletons? The knowledge we take for granted today was slow in coming, and along the way, scientists and scholars had some weird ideas. This Web site shows some of their mistakes, provides a timeline of events, gives biographies of a few of the people who have gotten us where we are today, and lists resources you can use to learn more.

Andrew Balfour was a native of Edinburgh, born on March 21st 1873, the son of Dr T A G Balfour, a well known practitioner in that city. At an early age Balfour established a reputation for being a man of many talents. During his student days he was a 6-foot-tall,14 stone boxer and rugby player who appeared for Scotland against England on many occasions. He was also a novelist. His first novel By Stroke of Sword , published in 1897, was a story of romance and adventure in the high seas and Spanish America. He also wrote To Arms (1898), Vengeance is Mine (1899), Cashiered and Other War Stories (1902) and The Golden Kingdom (1903). The last novel was founded upon his scientific knowledge of sleeping sickness. After graduating MB.,C.M. at Edinburgh in 1894, he joined his father's medical practice, but soon he realized that he had more inclination towards public health than to clinical practice. Thus he entered Cambridge University in 1885 and obtained the D.P.H. degree in 1887, followed by a M.D. degree for which he was awarded a gold medal for outstanding research work. Then he obtained a BSc in public health. The first tropical experience of Balfour was a typhoid camp in Pretoria during the period 1900-1901.

This exhibit, "From Quackery to Bacteriology: The Emergence of Modern Medicine in 19th Century America," traces the development of medicine through printed works: from heroic medicine at the beginning of the century to quackery movements, the experience of the Civil War, and ending with improvements in medical education and the formulation of the germ theory at century's end. Other topics covered in the exhibit include women's health, mental health, public health, and preventative medicine as advocated through physical fitness and nutrition.

Pellagra was first identified among Spanish peasants by Don Gaspar Casal in 1735. A loathsome skin disease, it was called mal de la rosa and often mistaken for leprosy. Although it was not conclusively identified in the United States until 1907, there are reports of illness that could be pellagra as far back as the 1820s. In the United States, pellagra has often been called the disease of the four D's -- dermatitis, diarrhea, dementia, and death. National data is sketchy, but by 1912, the state of South Carolina alone reported 30,000 cases and a mortality rate of 40 percent. While hardly confined to Southern states, the disease seemed especially rampant there. A worried Congress asked the Surgeon General to investigate the disease. In 1914, Joseph Goldberger was asked to head that investigation.

Increasingly, over the past three centuries, we have come to rely upon statistical reasoning as a powerful, impartial and accurate means of understanding the social world.

However, while statistics have been used to identify and formulate effective means of addressing a range of social problems, we have used statistics in very human ways.

In this module, you will encounter a range of materials and associated learning tasks illustrating how statistical reasoning came to be applied to human affairs by six prominent European social scientists between, roughly, 1860 and 1914.