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short & insightful writing about a long and complex history

Joint Blog of the Alcohol & Drugs History Society and the American Institute of the History of Pharmacy

ttravis | January 20, 2011

Points (n.)

1. marks of punctuation. 2. something that has position but not extension, as the intersection of two lines. 3. salient features of a story, epigram, joke, etc.:  he hit the high points. 4. (slang; U.S.) needles for intravenous drug use.

From Colonial Indifference to Capital Punishment: A History of Drug Use and Responses in the Malay Peninsula

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Contributing editor Capu Barcellona gives a historical overview of drug use patterns and regulatory responses in the Malay peninsula, including Singapore and Malaysia, from opium to cannabis.

Opium Connoisseurs: The Rajas and the Padshahs of India

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By the sixteenth century, in India, opium was more than a mere herbal medicine or a valuable item of maritime trade. From its earliest introduction around the tenth century AD, to its wide and swift diffusion by the fifteenth-sixteenth centuries, the assimilation and the subsequent ‘Indianisation’ of opium proved to be a major cultural watershed, particularly in Bengal, Behar, North-Western Frontier provinces, Central India, and certain parts of Rajputana. Here, opium attained the status of connoisseurship, like that in China, where the thakurs of Rajputana, the rajas of Punjab, the kathis of Kathaiawar and the Mughals padshahs, perfected and refined opium eating into an art and craft.

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Welcoming our new Contributing Editors

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Capucine Barcellona
Steve Beitler
Juliet Flam-Ross
Christopher Hallam
Kawal Deep Kour

Points is delighted to introduce five new Contributing Editors who were welcomed to the Editorial team this month. Here’s a sneak preview of who they are and the topics they’ll be writing about in the coming months.

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Call for Nominations for the George Urdang Medal

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AIHP Logo

he American Institute for the History of Pharmacy is now accepting nominations for the George Urdang Medal, which recognizes the lifetime achievements of a person who has made important scholarly contributions to the field of the history of pharmacy and pharmaceuticals. The deadline for nominations is June 1, 2023.

Sobriety as self-care?

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Since the turn of the 21st century there has been increasing popular engagement with the phenomenon of self-care. By this I mean those (sometimes everyday) activities that individuals carry out to manage and restore their own health, both mental and physical. This is how self-care has been most commonly understood within Western healthcare and clinical settings (Levin and Idler, 1983). However, themes of self-care have been co-opted by consumer brands within marketing campaigns, particularly targeted at women. Products and services are sold with the promise of relaxation, fulfilment and wellness – sometimes with a substantial price-tag attached, and with the expectation that consumers are able-bodied. Alcohol brands have also been found to draw upon similar, feminised themes of respite, reward and time-out within their marketing in order to present a healthful interpretation of alcohol-consumption. Wine or gin is sometimes portrayed as a key, constituent part in a woman’s self-care routine (Atkinson et al., 2021). Indeed, this is quite the departure from the self-care that was practiced within radical feminist circles of the Women’s Liberation Movement (Dudley-Shotwell, 2020) and Audre Lorde’s writings on living with cancer: Lorde described her self-care as ‘a political decision as well as a life-saving one’ (1988 [2017], p. 130).

This rise to prominence of self-care has coincided with the emergence of women-founded, UK-based online sobriety communities that utilise social media platforms to help people change their relationship with alcohol, such as Club Soda, Sober Girl Society and Sober & Social. These communities primarily facilitate peer to peer support and sometimes provide additional services, including coaching and social events. The majority of their members are women, compared to men, who are less likely to utilise traditional, evidence-based treatment programmes (Davey, 2021).

In a recent open-access, peer-reviewed article (Davey, 2022), I explored the ways in which women, who utilise or lead online sobriety communities, conceptualise their sobriety as a form of physical and mental self-care. I found that women draw on discourses of wellbeing to position sobriety as a practice of individualised, embodied self-care whereby they experience improvements to their physical, mental and menstrual health. Women used sobriety as a strategy of care for their minds and bodies when medical assistance was lacking or not forthcoming.

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Points Interview: ‘Controlling the Uterus’ with Naomi Rendina

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Ad for Pitocin showing descriptive text, several diagrams of the pituitary gland, and the label July, 1939

Today’s post features an interview with Naomi Rendina, a US-based historian. Naomi focuses on the history of reproduction and pharmaceuticals involved in childbirth. Naomi recently authored ‘Controlling the Uterus: A History of Labor Augmentation Drugs in Childbirth, 1900–1970‘ in the recently-published issue of the History of Pharmacy and Pharmaceuticals. Find out more about Naomi’s background, article and future research plans in this interview.

Women and Alcohol conference workshop: Drinking studies. Crossing Boundaries 2023.

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The ‘Women and Alcohol’ research cluster of the Drinking Studies Network are excited to announce a conference workshop on women and alcohol as part of their research project, “Between the drunken ‘mother of destruction’ and the sober ‘angel of the house’: Hidden representations of women’s drinking in Polish and British public discourses in the second half of the 19th century’. Although the project focuses on 19th Century culture, the workshop will cross chronological and disciplinary boundaries. 

This conference workshop will take place at the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw on 25 and 26th July 2023. There will also be the opportunity to attend a special workshop by historian and psychiatrist, Dr Iain Smith, on finding and using medical sources on the afternoon of 24th July 2023. 

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A Tale of Success and Exchange: the Stories of Chinese Pharmacy Students in the Early 20th Century at the University of Wisconsin

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Despite being thousands of miles across the Pacific Ocean, at the turn of the 20th century, the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Pharmacy became a hotspot for Chinese students interested in researching medicinal plants in China. Under the advisement of Dr. Edward Kremers, these Chinese students brought their knowledge of medicine to American pharmaceutical research with a broader goal of equalizing China and its traditional knowledge on an international stage. PhD student JJ Strange recounts the stories of these students, found in the AIHP archive.