The Aristides Maltez Hospital in Salvador (Bahia) was inaugurated in 1952. The hospital was a philanthropic institution of the Bahian League Against Cancer. The Aristides Maltez Hospital specialised in cancer treatment, especially cervical cancer, and became a reference centre for the control of cancer in northeastern Brazil. This article follows the creation and consolidation of the hospital as a treatment, research, and training centre, evaluating its role in discussions and action networks on cervical cancer in the mid-20th century. The institution has been a space of transition in the use of diagnostic tools and the organisation of campaigns to control cancer in municipalities of the hinterland.

Many medical and magical texts concerning childbirth and delivery are known from ancient Egypt. Most of them are spells, incantations, remedies and prescriptions for the woman in labour in order to accelerate the delivery or protect the unborn child and parturient. The medical and magical texts do not contain any descriptions of parturition itself, but there are some literary, astronomical and mythological texts, as well as a few incantations, which describe the biological act of childbirth and also miscarriage in more detail. Besides the textual sources, the decoration of temple walls and mammisis (birth houses), as well as illustrations on a birth brick provide an insight into the moment of delivery. In this paper, I focus on the "scientific"depiction of the biological act of childbirth, on how it is described in non-medical sources. Although the main sources are mythological-theological texts with numerous analogies, it is remarkable how many details they provide. They contain descriptions that would be expected in the context of medical sources.

Las intenciones monopolistas de los veterinarios espanoles a mediados del siglo XIX tuvieron un importante escollo en la existencia de los albeitares. Los veterinarios justificaron sus aspiraciones por ejercer una funcion preferente sobre el cuidado animal por la posesion de amplios conocimientos teoricos y de unas capacidades intelectuales abstractas que debian repercutir en una mejora de la praxis veterinaria. La retorica cientifica era acorde con el clima intelectual de la epoca, pero no se correspondio con un cambio de habitos de los clientes ni con el apoyo de los poderes publicos, lo que forzo la busqueda de otras vias de legitimacion social. El presente articulo analiza las dinamicas de inclusion-exclusion que se produjeron en torno al proceso de monopolizacion de los saberes y de las practicas veterinarias a mediados del siglo XIX en Espana. Las estrategias desplegadas por ambos grupos ocupacionales a traves de la prensa veterinaria nos ofrecen una perspectiva original: la que se deriva del enfrentamiento entre dos figuras reconocidas legalmente para ejercer la misma funcion. Sobre la base de esta dicotomia, se establecio una pugna por definir el modelo de relacion entre aquellos que pretendian desempenar un papel rector en la medicina animal y los que, por su mejor encaje en la sociedad de esa epoca, defendian el mantenimiento de sus formas de vida tradicionales. Los primeros cambios efectivos en la organizacion de la actividad asistencial no vinieron refrendados por la aceptacion social ni por las preferencias de los clientes, sino que estuvieron determinados por postulados estrictamente reglamentarios.

This paper analyzes the main features of the urban reforms by Benjamin Vicuña Mackenna in Santiago de Chile between 1872 and 1875. We pay special attention to the origin of the objectives of modernization, closely related to the political agenda of Latin American elites to create an urban culture (civilization). We also analyze the strategies of social defence that these reforms implied. The influence of French positivism and the Haussmann project in Paris was very important in the Vicuña Mackenna project and its model of a segregated city: the "European city" itself,--bourgeois, civilized and hygienic--, which should be protected, and the 'African township",--lower-class feral and unhygienic--, whose population must be regenerated and colonized.

La busqueda de una respuesta europea al problema planteado por los brotes epidemicos de poliomielitis en las decadas centrales del siglo XX, desemboco en la creacion de un organismo nuevo, la Asociacion Europea contra la Poliomielitis en 1951. Los mecanismos de funcionamiento interno y las conexiones internacionales de dicha Asociacion fueron subsidiarios de un determinado contexto socio-politico que propiciaba este tipo de consorcios. Como muestra este trabajo, su labor en los dieciocho anos de existencia fue decisiva para la articulacion y el exito alcanzado por las politicas sanitarias nacionales de inmunizacion masiva frente a la enfermedad.

The organizations set up to cope with polio in the years of epidemic outbreaks in Europe constitute an interesting focus in historiography as an example of contemporary patients� associations and mutual aid groups. The main aim of this paper is to reconstruct and analyse the principal highlights in the birth and development of the British Polio Fellowship (BPF) and its historical meaning in the history of polio associationism. The Infantile Paralysis Fellowship (now BPF) was founded in 1939 and, since then, has played an important role in the development of services for disabled people. It was founded as an organization of disabled people, not an organization for disabled people and so has always been an authentic voice of polio-disabled people. Achievements during the past seventy years have included the development of employment for disabled people, improvements in financial benefits, provision of better access, provision of holidays, the creation of opportunities for respirator-dependent people to live in their own homes, and the development of disability sport.

This article discusses the construction of the first international classification of mental diseases, specifically created to allow a unified statistics on the mentally ill. This classification was discussed and approved at the International Congress of Mental Medicine held in Paris in August 1889, in response to a request made by the Society of Mental Medicine of Belgium four years earlier. A careful reading of this report helps us to understand the role of the classification and statistics of pathologies in the field of psychiatric medicine. This offers an historical perspective on an issue that remains problematic and allows analysis of the time when psychiatric classifications were first articulated and subjected to comparative statistical study.