Aya Homei

Fungal disease in Britain and the United States 1850-2000 : mycoses and modernity

This book is open access under a CC BY license. Acknowledgements Introduction 1. Ringworm: A Disease of Schools and Schooling 2. Athletes Foot: A Disease of Fitness and Hygiene 3. Candida: A Disease of Antibiotics 4. Endemic Mycoses, Mycotoxins and Allergies: Diseases of Social Change 5. Aspergillosis: A Disease of Medical Progress Conclusion

The contentious death of Mr Kuboyama: Science as politics in the 1954 Lucky Dragon incident

Abstract This article analyses ties among medicine, science, society and politics by examining a dispute between Japanese and American medical scientists over the death of Mr Kuboyama Aikichi, a member of the crew of the Japanese tuna trawler Lucky Dragon No. 5, who fell ill after he was exposed to the radioactive fallout produced by an American thermonuclear bomb detonated on 1 March 1954. In Japan, he was regarded as the first Japanese victim of the H-bomb, whereas American medical experts challenged this interpretation, suggesting that Kuboyama had been killed by the treatment he had received. The dispute serves as a case study to demonstrate that the interpretation of illness and the medical efforts to identify physical symptoms of radiation sickness have long been more than purely a matter of scientific objectivity. Rather, what we view as objective science is the product of historical negotiations informed by the cultural politics associated with nuclear warfare, the power relations emerging around the peaceful use of nuclear energy and the professional interests of scientists, all mediated by news agencies and newspapers. Studying this debate in its 1950s context leads to the conclusion that scientific findings relating to the effects of radiation are never neutral.

Medical mycology development and epidemiology in the USA, UK and Japan

Medical mycology is a relatively young sub-discipline of medicine, institutionalized principally after the Second World War. In this paper, I will trace the process leading to the establishment of medical mycology in the United States, United Kingdom and Japan, three of the most important players in the International Society for Human and Animal Mycology (ISHAM) today. Throughout the paper, I will highlight both common features and the unique trajectory found in each country. The latter point resulted from the relative emphasis placed upon certain phenomena in each country. In the US, it was environmental conditions, tradition of soil sciences and particular settings of public health, which all created a stage for medical mycology. In Britain, among many medical specialists involved in building a society for medical mycology, contributions of those in tropical medicine and veterinary science stood out, and after the war, studies of allergy and bronchopulmonary aspergillosis and participation of the MRC were decisive. In Japan, concrete reports on visceral candidiasis and the so-called Bikini Incident were critical determinants. It appears that, although medical mycology emerged almost concomitantly in the three countries, the paths taken were different, thus seemingly the origins and pathways of modern medical mycology in each country ought to be understood in terms of broader historical themes.

Midwife and Public Health Nurse Tatsuyo Amari and a State-Endorsed Birth Control Campaign in 1950s Japan.

Abstract Mrs. Tatsuyo Amari, a qualified midwife and nurse, served Japan’s state-endorsed birth control campaign as a “birth control field instructor” in rural Minamoto Village of Yamanashi Prefecture just west of Tokyo. Her work sheds light on the role of female health-care workers in health and population governance in 1950s Japan. Amari not only facilitated the “top-down” transfer of the state-sanctioned idea of birth control and contraceptives, as did other birth control field instructors, but also enabled the “bottom-up” flow of knowledge about people’s reproductive lives through her participation in the policy-oriented birth control research called the “three model-village study.” Contextualizing Amari’s engagement with the study elucidates how the state relied on the established role of female health-care workers as intermediaries between the state and the people. Finally, Amari’s contribution to the scientific aspect of the campaign may motivate historians to recognize the politics around the participation of female health-care workers in the science of birth control.

Between the West and Asia: "Humanistic" Japanese Family Planning in the Cold War

This article studies the formation of Japanese ventures in family planning deployed in various villages in Asia from the 1960s onward in the name of development aid. By critically examining how Asia became the priority area for Japans international cooperation in family planning and by analyzing how the adjective humanistic was used to underscore the originality of Japans family planning program overseas, the article shows that visions of Japanese actors were directly informed by Japans delicate position in Cold War geopolitics, between the imagined West represented by the United States and “underdeveloped” Asia, at a time when Japan was striving to (re)establish its position in world politics and economics. Additionally, by highlighting subjectivities and intra-Asian networks centered on Japanese actors, the article also aims to destabilize the current historiography on population control, which has hitherto focused either on Western actors in the transnational population control movement or on non-Western “acceptors” subjected to the population control programs.

Ajia no shussan to kazoku keikaku—“umu, umanai, umenai” shintai wo meguru seiji アジアの出産と家族計画—「産む・産まない・産めない」身体をめぐる政治 [Childbirth and Family Planning in Asia: The Politics of Women's Reproductive Bodies]

Sociopolitical implications of women’s reproductive bodies have been subject to historical scrutiny over the decades since the second wave of feminism and since Foucault provided the notion of biopower. Yet over the last decade, additional— and exciting—scholarship has emerged that encourages historians to reappraise the significance of reproductive bodies in terms of political economy and international diplomacy. These works have aptly characterized how cultural and political elites, including population scientists andmedics specializing in human reproduction, understood reproduction as consisting of the problematics of its aggregate form, namely, population. They also have pointed out the transnational aspect within the politics of reproduction, precisely because the problem of population dovetails with issues that straddle national borders, such as food, land, resources, security, andmigration. These works have also identified how Asia’s “overpopulation” has surfaced as a contested theme in international politics during the mid-twentieth century, when demographic transition theory, implying the intricate link between high fertility and socioeconomic “underdevelopment,” was being established at the dawn of the Cold War. This is the historiographical background to the collection under review, but it can also be read as a response to the above-mentioned scholarship. With the objective that it “traces the changing state of reproduction in various countries and areas inAsia from the middle of the twentieth-century to present and examines its meanings pluralistically with the comparative perspective” (7), the collection, based on the notion of reproductive health and sensitivity to gender dynamics, introduces eight case studies on the politics of reproduction in Japan, Okinawa, the People’s Republic of China, Nepal, Laos, and the Republic of Korea.

Population Control in Cold War Asia: An Introduction

On 29 October 2015, the state-run Xinhua news agency of the People’s Republic of China reported headline news: the Communist Party of China announced that the government would allow all couples in the country to have two children. According to an official communiqué released on that day, the decision, made in the Fifth Plenary Session of the Eighteenth Communist Party of China Central Committee taking place between 26 and 29 October, was intended to balance its population and to address the issue of an aging population presently confronting the country (Xinhuanet 2016). The Communist Party’s official announcement that year, immediately characterized by the broadcast media as marking the end of the so-called one-child policy (British Broadcasting Company 2015; Jiang and Cullinane 2015; Al Jazeera 2015) and by one journalist as “China’s most radical birth control experiment” (Fong 2016), vividly illustrates one of the defining features of population control in East Asia: the leading role that the modern state has assumed in intervening in people’s reproductive lives for the sake of governing its population. Indeed, as a number of English-language works on the subject have demonstrated, postwar national governments in the region actively participated in population control by enacting birth control policy and endorsing family planning programs (Homei 2016; Chen 2011; Huang 2009; DiMoia 2008; Greenhalgh 1994, 2008; Greenhalgh and Winckler 2005; Kuo 2002). Many of these works were inspired by the concept of biopower and governmentality advanced by Michel Foucault that clarified the intricate links between issues of individual reproductive conduct and issues of national power prevailed in the politics of population (Park 2008; Greenhalgh and Winkler 2005). Drawing on Foucault, these studies have paid attention to the attribute ofmodern state as a unit of governance and consider how the notion of individuals as members of a population and a population as an aggregate

Athlete’s Foot: A Disease of Fitness and Hygiene

In May 1939, a review of the American yearbook of dermatology and syphilology observed: As usual they make a prominent feature of an introductory article on some branch of therapeutics, and this year they deal with the treatment of the deeper fungous infections of the skin, including ringworm of the scalp and bearded regions, and the comparatively rare fungous affections of the subcutaneous tissues. As a matter of fact this subject is not of great practical importance in the British Isles, especially in England, where the incidence of ringworm of the scalp has been reduced to quite a trivial number of cases per annum, and ringworm of the beard has become an actual rarity. No doubt the state of affairs is otherwise in the United States, where the standard of living, both among the large negro population and also to a lesser extent among the more recent immigrants from Central Europe, is such that these infections are much commoner; moreover, a considerable area of the U.S.A. boasts a subtropical climate in which parasitic fungi are far more active than in the temperate zones.1

Endemic Mycoses and Allergies: Diseases of Social Change

In 1950, the Biology Section of the New York Academy of Science (NYAS) held what it claimed to be the first conference on medical mycology in the United States.1 What prompted the event was not the announcement of the discovery of nystatin by Hazen and Brown, as their publication was still in press, but the growing profile of fungi and fungal infections across the nation. Fungi, not least because of interest in penicillin, were attracting the interest of biologists and biomedical researchers who, alongside screens for antibiotic activity, were adopting them as experimental models in studies of nutrition, physiology and immunology2 All the leading names of the field from the 1930s attended the meeting: Carroll Dodge, Norman Conant, Rhoda Benham and Lucille Georg, and there were new faces who had developed expertise during the war and in particular localities. Speakers drew attention to the increased incidence of systemic candidiasis, signalling a switch in the medical mycological gaze from external (exogenous) to internal (endogenous) disease. Although the incidence of endogenous, systemic fungal infections was very low, they had very high mortality and presented unusual cases that fascinated physicians. In addition, there was a new awareness of the toll of morbidity from endemic, exogenous disease, as with athlete’s foot and thrush, and with regionally specific, often sub-clinical infections, principally coccidioidomycosis, blastomycosis and histoplasmosis.

Ringworm: A Disease of Schools and Mass Schooling

Education is a near universally recognised ‘good’ across histories of the modern world, with more and better quality schooling seen as a progressive social reform and a marker of a modern, civilised society. However, the introduction of mass schooling in Britain and America was the product of a social and political struggle which was not easily won.1 Few disagreed that education improved the minds of pupils, but many people argued that it was not always good for their bodies; indeed, schools became great centres of contagion. Epidemics of major childhood infections such as measles, diphtheria and chickenpox periodically affected institutions and in some cases led to school closures.2 Less recognised then, as now, was that schools were sites of exchange of endemic, social diseases, from serious, typically fatal infections, such as tuberculosis, through to endemic conditions, such as ringworm, which had mild symptoms but carried severe social stigma. The term ‘ringworm’ is very old and comes from the circular patches of peeled, inflamed skin that characterises the infection. In medicine at least, no one understood it to be associated with worms of any description.