Biosecurity in times of COVID19 or how to take it seriously

The biosafety associated with biomedical laboratories and the biosafety associated with clinical establishments do not seem to go together. There is a biosafety manual in each country and there are basic biosafety standards that do not seem to be applied or taught in specialized centers. Thus, along with thanking the great participation of the medical establishment and associated professions, we must not lower our guard against this pathogen or any other that surrounds us. Although the biosafety standards are taught in some of the higher education centers, they are not necessarily followed by the same ones who mention them in their speech, as if they only applied to others. This article may cause resentment, however, it is a national reality that I hope will not be repeated in many countries. Nor do I intend to draw attention to the misuse of clothing or instruments, but rather to diminish this fashion and that we recognize our fragility in the face of the world around us.

Conspiracy Theorists and Con Men

This chapter discusses the 1930s through the 1960s, an anomalous period of American history in which the people’s confidence in major national institutions was at its peak. Most people trusted government health regulators, the medical establishment, and pharmaceutical companies to do the right thing. Consequently, medical freedom of choice activism occurred mainly on society’s margins, voiced by peddlers of fraudulent products and right-wing cranks. The most persistent and cantankerous promoter of medical freedom during this period was the National Health Federation (NHF), the publisher of “Health Freedom News.” This organization, founded by manufacturers of dietary supplements and quack medical devices, resisted FDA regulation of alternative treatments, as well as the fluoridation of municipal water supplies. Although the NHF sometimes exemplified paranoid, Red-Scare politics, it also employed more conventional libertarian arguments of the sort that infused medical freedom rhetoric in other periods of American history.

Insidious Trauma – Between the Political and the Psychoanalytical

The article attempts to understand the affliction known as insidious trauma and its link to social and political situations. The medical establishment finds itself hard pressed to provide an adequate response to traumas of social and political origin, rooted in oppressive regimes or environments. To the best of our knowledge the psycho-political model of recovery should take into account active resistance on the part of the individual suffering from insidious trauma. Subjectivity that is exposed to insidious trauma, but is not at the same time exposed to representations of resistance, remains external to the discourse. By assigning a name, a language and a voice to insidious trauma, the discourse is shifted from intrapsychic psychopathology to social psychopathology, thereby imparting to it both a social and a political context.

War of conscience: antivaccination and the battle for medical freedom during World War I

The nineteenth century British antivaccination movement attracted popular and parliamentary support and ultimately saw the 1853 law which had made smallpox vaccination compulsory nullified by the 1898 ‘conscientious objector’ clause. In keeping with popular public health discourse of the time, the movement had employed rhetoric associated with sanitary science and liberalism. In the early twentieth century new discoveries in bacteriology were fuelling advances in vaccination and the medical establishment was increasingly pushing for public health to move towards more interventionist medical approaches. With the onset of war in 1914, the medical establishment hoped to persuade the government to introduce compulsory typhoid inoculation for soldiers. This article analyses antivaccination literature, mainstream newspapers and medical press along with parliamentary debates to examine how the British antivaccination movement engaged with this new threat of compulsion by expanding the rhetoric of ‘conscience’ and emphasising medical freedom while also asserting scientific critique concerning the effectiveness of vaccines and the new laboratory based diagnostic practices. In spite of ‘conscience’ fitting well with an emerging public health discourse of individual subjectivity, the mainstream press ridiculed the idea of working-class soldiers having a conscience, coalescing around the idea that ‘conscientious objection’ be reserved for spiritual, philosophical and educated men who objected to military service. Moreover, in spite of engaging in reasoned scientific critique, parliament and press consorted in the demarcation of scientific knowledge as exclusive to medical scientists, reflecting a growing allegiance between the state and the medical establishment during the war. Any scientific arguments critical of medical orthodoxy were subjugated, labelled as ‘crank’ or ‘faddist’ as well as unpatriotic. The antivaccination narratives around conscience contributed to or were part of an evolving discourse on consent and ethics in medicine. Potential parallels are drawn with current and likely future debates around vaccination and counterhegemonic scientific approaches.

Revitalizing homoeopathic medical education for the COVID-19 era: Integrating Hahnemannian thought, Principles of Medical Education, and the core of the National Educational Policy, 2020

Homoeopathic medical education finds itself at a crossroad, especially in the present era of COVID-19. Homoeopathy has lived up to its reputation for effective intervention in the past epidemics; however, this time, we have been at a somewhat loose end, finding ourselves at the mercy of the dominant medical establishment. We can emerge from this scenario by appealing to the sound principles enunciated by our Master, Dr. Hahnemann, but not shying away from incorporating the considerable advances that have taken place in the world of Medical education. The country’s health needs have changed significantly; the post-COVID-19 changes are likely to be far reaching. The current climate in which the National Educational Policy 2020 has been instituted and the National Homoeopathy Commission Act passed by the Parliament is propitious to bring about far-reaching changes in our educational system and institutions. This concept paper explores each of these strands and then weaves them together to suggest some guidelines for academicians, clinicians, and researchers to work on to revitalize homoeopathic education in the years to come.

The Making of Viequenses

This article delves into the history of medical institutions, birthing practices, and reproductive rights in Vieques. The exploration exposes contradictions at the heart of Puerto Rico’s colonial modernity. Around the middle of the twentieth century, Puerto Ricans were encouraged to depend on the colonial state and medical establishment for guarantee of life, health, and general well-being. This encouragement clashed with the militarized colonialism imposed on Viequenses. The 1940s expropriations—through which the U.S. Navy gained control over three-fourths of Vieques—devastated the community. And the interventions by the colonial state and medical establishment proved at times meek, complicit, and ineffective. In 2003, unruly colonial citizens evicted the Navy. Their actions were part of a struggle for the survival and well-being of the Viequense island community. In this article, the author argues that la lucha viequense has been fundamentally shaped by the concerns and actions of women who placed reproductive rights at the center of the struggle.

The 1869 controversy of cellular theory: Goodsir versus Virchow

The Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE) is Scotland’s national academy of science and letters and has been in existence since the eighteenth century. On 23 November 1868, a general meeting was held by the RSE at which members nominated the German academic, Professor Rudolf Virchow, as an Honorary Fellow in recognition of his key contributions to cellular theory. This nomination was opposed by the Reverend Joseph Taylor Goodsir, brother of the late Professor of Anatomy at Edinburgh University, John Goodsir. Reverend Goodsir went on to accuse the German professor of plagiarising his late brother’s pioneering work in the formulation of cell theory. The resultant furore created by the Reverend Goodsir led to an acrimonious scientific dispute in the Edinburgh medical establishment, then one of the leading centres of medical education. The current work describes the history of cellular theory as it pertains to John Goodsir and Rudolf Virchow, discusses the history behind the scientific dispute and interprets Reverend Joseph Taylor Goodsir’s role relating his actions to his continuing battle with mental illness, and the aftermath of the dispute as it affected the reputation of John Goodsir.

Reconfiguring health knowledges? Contemporary modes of self-care as ‘everyday fringe medicine’

The contestation of expertise is perhaps nowhere more pronounced than in the field of health and well-being, on which this article focuses. A multitude of practices and communities that stand in contentious relationships with established forms of medical expertise and promote personalised modes of self-care have proliferated across Euro-American societies. Drawing on multi-sited ethnography in three domains – body–mind–spirit therapies, vaccine hesitancy and consumer-grade digital self-tracking – we map such practices through the concept of ‘everyday fringe medicine’. The concept of everyday fringe medicine enables us to bring together various critical health and well-being practices and to unravel the complex modes of contestation and appreciation of the medical establishment that are articulated within them. We find three critiques of the medical establishment – critiques of medical knowledge production, professional practices and the knowledge base – which make visible the complexities related to public understandings of science within everyday fringe medicine.