‘The Trial the World is Watching’: The 1972 Prosecution of Derk Crichton and James Watts,Abortion, and the Regulation of the Medical Profession in Apartheid South Africa

After its formation in 1910 as a self-governing dominion within the British empire, the Union of South Africa followed a combination of English and Roman-Dutch common laws on abortion that decreed the procedure permissible only when necessary to save a woman’s life. The government continued doing so after South Africa withdrew from the Commonwealth and became a republic in 1961. In 1972 a sensational trial took place in the South African Supreme Court that for weeks placed clandestine abortion on the front pages of the country’s newspapers. Two men, one an eminent doctor and the other a self-taught abortionist, were charged with conspiring to perform illegal abortions on twenty-six white teenagers and young unmarried women. The prosecution of Dr Derk Crichton and James Watts occurred while the National Party government was in the process of drafting abortion legislation and was perceived by legal experts as another test of the judiciary’s stance on the common law on abortion. The trial was mainly intended to regulate the medical profession and ensure doctors ceased helping young white women evade their ‘duty’ to procreate within marriage. Ultimately, the event encapsulated a great deal about elites’ attempt to buttress apartheid culture and is significant for, among other reasons, contributing to the production of South Africa’s extremely restrictive Abortion and Sterilisation Act (1975).     

Cure for Empire: The ‘Conquer-Russia-Pill’, Pharmaceutical Manufacturers,and the Making of Patriotic Japanese, 1904–45

Seirogan, a popular anti-diarrhoeal pill, is arguably one of the most successful pharmaceutical products of modern Japan. What is less known is that the Japanese army initially developed Seirogan during the Russo-Japanese War as the ‘Conquer-Russia-Pill’, which was later marketed to the public by private manufacturers. Previous scholars have emphasised the top–down governmental method of mobilising private sectors to manipulate public opinion for the cause of external imperialist expansion and domestic stability during wartime Japan. But the matrix that the Conquer-Russia-Pill allows us to glimpse is an inverted power relation among the state, commercial sectors, and imperial citizens. While the Japanese government remained indifferent if not hostile to jingoistic pharmaceutical manufacturers who could easily disrupt international relations, pharmaceutical companies quickly recognised and exploited the opportunities that the Conquer-Russia-Pill and its symbolism provided under the banner of the empire. In turn, Japanese consumers reacted to commercial sermons carefully anchored in patriotic and militaristic discourses and images by opening their wallets. In other words, the popularity of the Conquer-Russia-Pill was a culmination of the convergence of a governmental initiative to enhance military capabilities, the commercial ingenuity of pharmaceutical manufacturers, and a consumer response to patriotic exhortations. Keywords and phrases : Seirogan, Conquer-Russia-Pill, Japan, Imperialism, Russo-Japanese War     

Reconstructing Harry: A Genealogical Study of a Colonial Family ‘Inside’ and ‘Outside’ the Grahamstown Asylum, 1888–1918

Recent scholarship has explored the dynamics between families and colonial lunatic asylums in the late nineteenth century, where families actively participated in the processes of custodial care, committal, treatment and release of their relatives. This paper works in this historical field, but with some methodological and theoretical differences. The Foucauldian study is anchored to a single case and family as an illness narrative that moves cross-referentially between bureaucratic state archival material, psychiatric case records, and intergenerational family-storytelling and family photographs. Following headaches and seizures, Harry Walter Wilbraham was medically boarded from his position as Postmaster in the Cape of Good Hope Colony of South Africa with a ‘permanent disease of the brain’, and was committed to the Grahamstown Asylum in 1910, where he died the following year, aged 40 years. In contrast to writings about colonial asylums that usually describe several patient cases and thematic patterns in archival material over time and place, this study’s genealogical lens examines one white settler male patient’s experiences within mental health care in South Africa between 1908 and 1911. The construction of Harry’s ‘case’ interweaves archival sources and reminiscences inside and outside the asylum, and places it within psychiatric discourse of the time, and family dynamics in the years that followed. Thus, this case study maps the constitution of ‘patient’ and ‘family’ in colonial life, c.1888–1918, and considers the calamity, uncertainty, stigma and silences of mental illness.     

‘Recharge My Exhausted Batteries’: Overbeck’s Rejuvenator,Patenting, and Public Medical Consumers, 1924–37

Although historians have shown that there has been a complex and multi-layered relationship between the body, medicine and the force of electricity, many avenues remain to be explored. One of the most prominent of these is the way in which electrotherapy technologies were marketed to a wide variety of different end users and intermediaries. This paper offers the first historical analysis of one such device – the Overbeck Rejuvenator – a 1920s electrotherapy machine designed for use by the general public. Its inventor, Otto Overbeck, was not a medical man and this enabled him to use aggressive strategies of newspaper advertising, using testimonials to market his product alongside appeals to his own scientific authority. He commissioned the prestigious Ediswan Company to manufacture the Rejuvenator on a large scale, and took out patents in eleven countries to persuade users of the efficacy of the device. In response to Overbeck’s activities, the British Medical Association enlisted an electrical engineer to examine the Rejuvenator, contacted practitioners whose endorsements were being used in publicity material, and denied Overbeck permission to advertise in the British Medical Journal. Despite this, the Rejuvenator brought its inventor wealth and notoriety, and helped redefine the concept of ‘rejuvenation’, even if the professional reception of such a device was almost universally hostile. This paper shows how the marketing, patenting and publishing of Overbeck combined to persuade members of the laity to try the Rejuvenator as an alternative form of therapy, bypassing the medical profession in the process.     

The Research Council System and the Politics of Medical and Agricultural Research for the British Colonial Empire, 1940–52

Historical accounts of colonial science and medicine have failed to engage with the Colonial Office’s shift in focus towards the support of research after 1940. A large new fund was created in 1940 to expand activities in the colonies described as fundamental research. With this new funding came a qualitative shift in the type of personnel and activity sought for colonial development and, as a result, a diverse group of medical and technical officers existed in Britain’s colonies by the 1950s. The fact that such variety existed amongst British officers in terms of their qualifications, institutional locations and also their relationships with colonial and metropolitan governments makes the use of the term ‘expert’ in much existing historical scholarship on scientific and medical aspects of empire problematic. This article will consider how the Colonial Office achieved this expansion of research activities and personnel after 1940. Specifically, it will focus on the reasons officials sought to engage individuals drawn from the British research councils to administer this work and the consequences of their involvement for the new apparatus established for colonial research after 1940. An understanding of the implications of the application of the research council system to the Colonial Empire requires engagement with the ideology promoted by the Agricultural Research Council (ARC) and Medical Research Council (MRC) which placed emphasis on the distinct and higher status of fundamental research and which privileged freedom for researchers. Keywords : Medical Research Council, Agricultural Research Council, Colonial Office, 1940 CDW Act, Colonial Medical Research Council, East Africa     

‘The Hospital was just like a Home’: Self,Service and the ‘McCord Hospital Family’

For more than a century, McCord Hospital, a partly private and partly state-subsidised mission hospital has provided affordable health-care services, as well as work and professional training opportunities for thousands of people in Durban, a city on the east coast of South Africa. This article focuses on one important aspect of the hospital’s longevity and particular character, or ‘organisational culture’: the ethos of a ‘McCord Family’, integral to which were faith and a commitment to service. While recognising that families – including ‘hospital families’ like that at McCord – are contentious social constructs, with deeply embedded hierarchies and inequalities based on race, class and gender, we also consider however how the notion of ‘a McCord family’ was experienced and shared in complex ways. Indeed, during the twentieth century, this ethos was avidly promoted by the hospital’s founders and managers and by a wide variety of employees and trainees. It also extended to people at a far geographical remove from Durban. Moreover, this ethos became so powerful that many patients felt that it shaped their convalescence experience positively. This article considers how this ‘family ethos’ was constructed and what made it so attractive to this hospital’s staff, trainees and patients. Furthermore, we consider what ‘work’ it did for this mission hospital, especially in promoting bonds of multi-racial unity in the contexts of segregation and apartheid society. More broadly, it suggests that critical histories of the ways in which individuals, hospitals, faith and ‘families’ intersect may be of value for the future of hospitals as well as of interest in their past.     

The World of Microbes 2002: Scientific Advances and Challenges–Impressions and Highlights from the 12th Congress of Virology

Thousands of scientists participated in the World of Microbes Congress, which was organized by the International Union of the Microbiological Societies (IUMS) and took place in the Palais de Congres in Paris, France from 27 July to 1 August 2002. The attendees were members of the IUMS divisions of Bacteriology and Applied Microbiology, Mycology, and Virology. In addition to the symposia that were organized by each division, joined plenary symposia were held, which encompassed subjects of common interest to all microbiologists. The activities at the 12th Congress of Virology's plenary lectures, symposia, and poster sessions were organized to accommodate the presentation of over 1500 presentations. These brief comments are aimed to provide a sample of only a few presentations that dealt with subjects of emerging and re-emerging virus diseases, which are of general interest.     

The closer ‘We’ are,the stronger ‘I’ am: the impact of couple identity on cancer coping self-efficacy

The present study tested the supposition that greater levels of couple identity (or we-ness) increase a woman’s coping self-efficacy in relation to breast cancer, which, in turn, predicts better psychosocial adjustment. Women (N = 112) in committed relationships completed surveys assessing their levels of couple identity, cancer coping self-efficacy, and aspects of their psychosocial adjustment (specifically, depression, anxiety and functional well-being) during one of their outpatient visits to the cancer centre. As predicted, the more women identified with their relationships, the lower their levels of depression and anxiety were and the greater their functional well-being was. This relationship was mediated by coping self-efficacy: greater identification with one’s relationship predicted greater confidence in one’s ability to cope, which, in turn, predicted better adjustment. The role intimate relationships play in women’s adjustment to breast cancer, as well as directions for further research, are discussed.     

The Moral Career of ‘Outmates’: Towards a History of Manufactured Mental Disorders in Post-Socialist?China

This study focuses on ‘manufactured mentally ill’ (bei jingshenbing, 被精神病) individuals in post-socialist China. In Chinese society, bei jingshenbing is a neologistic catchphrase that refers to someone who has been misidentified as exhibiting symptoms of mental illness and has been admitted to a mental hospital. Specifically, it refers to those individuals who were subjected to unnecessary psychiatric treatment during the first decade of the twenty-first century. Based on archival analysis and ethnographic fieldwork, this study addresses the ways in which the voices of bei jingshenbing victims and those who support them reveal China’s experiences with psychiatric modernity. It also discusses the active role of these individuals in knowledge production, medical policymaking, and the implications for reforming the psychiatric and mental health systems in post-socialist China.