This article was published on January 1, 2022, at NEJM.org. 1. Wood P. Food poisoning investigated food safety summit in Baltimore. Baltimore Sun, April 19, 2014 (https://www . baltimoresun . com/ maryland/ baltimore -city/ bs -xpm -2014 -04 -19 -bs -md -ci -food -safety -20140419 -story . html). 2. NORC at the University of Chicago. State public health agency classification: understanding the relationship between state and local public health. Association of State and Territorial Health Officials, 2012 (https://www . astho . org/ Research/ Major -Publications/ ASTHO -NORC -Governance -Classification -Report/ ). 3. National profile of local health departments. National Association of County and City Health Officials, 2019 (https://www . naccho . org/ resources/ lhd -research/ national -profile -of -local -health -departments). 4. Alfonso YN, Leider JP, Resnick B, Mc-Cullough JM, Bishai D. US public health neglected: flat or declining spending left states ill equipped to respond to COVID-19.

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Over the course of the covid-19 pandemic, scientific debate has become increasingly polarised and politicised. Rather than being a new cultural moment, Agnes Arnold-Forster argues that anger, incivility, and unprofessional conduct have always played a part in topical scientific debates

Surgeon Henry Marsh begins his autobiography, Do No Harm, with a quotation from the French practitioner René Leriche, “Every surgeon carries within himself a small cemetery, where from time to time he goes to pray—a place of bitterness and regret, where he must look for an explanation for his failures”. This article uses memoirs and oral history interviews to enter the operating theatre and consider the contemporary history of surgeons’ embodied experiences of patient death. It will argue that these experiences take an under-appreciated emotional toll on surgeons, but also that they are deployed as a narrative device through which surgeons construct their professional identity. Crucially, however, there is as much forgetting as remembering in their accounts, and the ‘labour’ of death has been increasingly shifted out of the operating theatre, off the surgeons’ hands and into the laps of others. The emotional costs of surgical care remain understudied. Indeed, while many researchers agree that undergoing surgery can be a troubling emotional experience for the patient, less scholarly attention has been paid to the emotional demands performing surgery makes on surgical practitioners. Is detachment the modus operandi of the modern surgeon and if so, is it tenable in moments of emotional intensity—like patient death?

Despite its prominent position in today's medical research, popular culture and everyday life, cancer's history is relatively unwritten. Compared to the other great 'plagues' - cholera, tuberculosis or tropical fevers, to name but a scant handful - cancer has few dedicated pages in the general surveys, and its specialists have largely failed to convince the broader community of medical historians - or indeed historians of anything at all - that histories of the disease can tell us fundamental things about the science and practice of medicine, both past and present. Moreover, cancer has a remarkably stable profile over time, at least in terms of its definition, language and terminology - a detail that only makes the disease's absence from historical literature more surprising.

Much of the current focus on doctors’ emotional health is preoccupied with piecemeal solutions

In the nineteenth century, Dr Alfred Haviland plotted the distribution of cancer on maps of England. Matured within the intellectual milieu of nascent professional public health, his work can be married to that of his fellow sanitary reformers; however, his approach to medical cartography differed from what historians expect of Victorian mapmakers. While most of his mapmaking colleagues attended to urban places, Haviland turned his attention to the English countryside. This article will thus make three interventions into the limited literature on cancer in nineteenth-century England. First, it will demonstrate how cancer came to be constituted as a problem of place. Second, it will show that Haviland understood the disease to be produced by rural environs, and thus paradoxically correlated to healthful locales rather than areas of urban squalor. Third, this article suggests an alternative to the well-travelled interpretation of nineteenth-century mapping as an exercise in power and social control.

A new research project explores how the recent spate of medical memoirs has shattered the myth of the emotionally detached surgeon.