Medical education reform efforts and failures of U.S. medical schools, 1870-1930

The dramatic decline in the number of US medical schools in the early twentieth century has been traced to a medical education reform movement that gained momentum after the Civil War. The major parties to reform-the universities themselves, the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), state licensing boards, the American Medical Association (AMA), and Flexner-had different interests and strategies, however, and scholars have continued to debate the impact each had on the decline. To isolate the independent effects that the temporally intertwined forces for reform had on medical school failures, this study applies statistical survival analysis to an extensive and unique data set on medical schools operating in the United States between 1870 and 1930. Contrary to the views of some scholars, the results indicate that schools closed in response to critical evaluations published by the Illinois State Board of Health in the nineteenth century and the AMA and Flexner in the twentieth century. Additionally, the results indicate that schools were less likely to have failed if they adopted certain reforms implemented at leading schools or joined the AAMC, and were more likely to have failed if their state's licensing regulations mandated lengthier premedical and medical training.     

Releasing mother's burdens: child abandonment and retrieval in Madrid, 1890-1935

In nineteenth-century Europe, the foundling hospital grew beyond its traditional purpose of mitigating the shame of unwed mothers by also permitting widows, widowers, and poor married couples to abandon their children there temporarily. In the Foundling Hospital of Madrid (FHM), this new short-term abandonment could be completely anonymous due to the implementation of a wheel—a device on the outside wall of the institution that could be turned to place a child inside—which remained open until 1929. The use of survival-analysis techniques to disentangle the determinants of retrieval in a discrete framework reveals important differences in the situations of the women who abandoned their children at the FHM, partly depending on whether they accessed it through the Maternity Hospital after giving birth or they accessed it directly. The evidence suggests that those who abandoned their children through the Maternity Hospital retrieved them only when they had attained a certain degree of economic stability, whereas those who abandoned otherwise did so just as soon as the immediate condition prompting the abandonment had improved.     

From territorial to ethnographic colonies and back again: The politics of Italian expansion, 1890-1912

For Italy, unprecedented mass migration in the late nineteenth century overshadowed the European Scramble for Africa. To secure Italy's place in the new imperial order, Francesco Crispi proposed to harness emigration for colonial expansion, by settling Italy's East African colonies with the surplus Italian population. Defeat at Adwa in 1896 shattered Crispi's project, and turned attention to colonial possibilities elsewhere. Luigi Einaudi and other Liberals trumpeted the value of Italian collectivities or colonie across the Atlantic, where Italy exerted only indirect influence. In theory, these 'spontaneous colonies' would boost the Italian economy at little expense. Italian colonialist societies turned from Africa to the Americas, working to make Italian migration more prestigious, successful and profitable. After 1908, however, Enrico Corradini and the Italian Nationalists mocked these initiatives, and called upon the Italian state to return to traditional imperialism in Africa.     

Wilhelminian myelinated fibers-Theodor Kaes, myeloarchitectonics and the asylum Hamburg-Friedrichsberg 1890-1910

Since the 1890s Theodor Kaes (1852-1913), then alienist at the Hamburg asylum Friedrichsberg, began to explore myeloarchitectonics. He was particularly interested in dementia paralytica and the fibers of the association system. Following Paul Flechsig (1847-1929) and Theodor Meynert (1833-1892), Kaes read class and ethnical hierarchies into myelinated fibers and so could "decipher" the hierarchical structure of Wilhelminian society in the brain. Since 1908 he was in a fierce dispute with Korbinian Brodmann (1868-1918) about the correctness of his measurements. The article depicts the life and work of Kaes against the backdrop of the development of German neurosciences around 1900.