'Monty, Bring the Blood Can!' Pulling Teeth in Working-Class Lancashire, 1900-48.

Working-class health cultures before the National Health Service have long been of scholarly interest but those related to oral health are chronically underexamined. This article examines one important aspect of this history-tooth pulling-in early twentieth-century Lancashire. By highlighting the dynamics of market supply and demand, it demonstrates how and why the tooth pulling services of non-orthodox practitioners called dental mechanics remained popular despite the increasing monopolization of oral health by dentists.

Use of a chatbot to increase uptake of cascade genetic testing.

Successful proband-mediated family communication and subsequent cascade genetic testing uptake requires interventions that present information clearly, in sufficient detail, and with medical authority. To facilitate family communication for patients receiving clinically actionable results via the MyCode® Community Health Initiative, a Family Sharing Tool (FST) and a cascade chatbot were developed. FST is an electronic mechanism allowing patients to share genetic test results with relatives via chatbot.

Personalities, Preferences and Practicalities: Educating Nurses in Wound Sepsis in the British Hospital, 1870-1920.

The history of nursing education has often been portrayed as the subordination of nursing to medicine. Yet, as scholars are increasingly acknowledging, the professional boundaries between medicine and nursing were fluid in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when both scientific knowledge and systems of nurse training were in flux. Through its focus on the role of medical practitioners in educating nurses in wound sepsis at four British hospitals between 1870 and 1920, this article attempts to further unite histories of medicine and nursing.

A barrier to medical treatment? British medical practitioners, medical appliances and the patent controversy, 1870-1920.

From the late nineteenth century onwards there emerged an increasingly diverse response to escalating patenting activity. Inventors were generally supportive of legislation that made patenting more accessible, while others, especially manufacturers, saw patenting culture as an impediment. The medical profession claimed that patenting represented 'a barrier to medical treatment' and was thus detrimental to the nation's health, yet, as I argue, the profession's development of strict codes of conduct forbidding practitioners from patenting resulted in rebellion from some members, who increasingly sought protection for their inventions.

(Re-)reading medical trade catalogs: the uses of professional advertising in British medical practice, 1870-1914.

This article explores how medical practitioners read, used, and experienced medical trade catalogs in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Britain. Reader responses to the catalog, a book-like publication promoting medical tools, appliances, and pharmaceuticals, have been chronically understudied, as have professional reading practices within medicine more generally. Yet, evidence suggests that clinicians frequently used the catalog and did so in three main ways: to order medical products, to acquire new information about these products, and to display their own product endorsements and product designs.