Using Digitised Medical Journals in a Cross European Project on Addiction History

This article draws on research conducted as part of a European project on the changing terminology used to conceptualise habitual drug, alcohol or tobacco use. We wanted to find out what language was utilised in Italy, Poland, Austria and the UK and how those concepts had changed since the mid-nineteenth century. We intended to make use of digitised journals for key word searches to enable comparisons to be made across countries and across time. Nothing, however, was straightforward. Few countries had digitised medical journals, so researchers had to use traditional search methods. Even in the UK, where journals were available digitally, there were problems with access and the searches that could be made. Digitisation did not provide a quicker way of researching cross nationally. Nonetheless our work did arrive at some valuable new conclusions. Our experiences also raise wider questions about using digitised journals for historical research

Lessons from the History of British Health Policy

‘Health policy’ is a slippery concept. In Britain, since the establishment of the National Health Service, it has often come to be associated only with the NHS, but it has a longer running and wider history. Health policy both predates the NHS and goes beyond it. In this introduction we set the chapters in this report in context by exploring some of the issues that run through the history of health policy in Britain. We focus on five areas: (1.) What was or is ‘health policy’? (2.) Where was health policy made? (3.) Who were the policymakers? (4.) What were some of the persisting policy challenges? (5.) What are the politics of health policy

‘The rise of the user’? Voluntary organizations, the state and illegal drugs in England since the 1960s

This article examines the place of the drug user in drug policy and practice in England since the 1960s. It argues that though the drug user has 'risen' in the sense that users now play a key role in contemporary policy and practice, this was not a neat, linear process. Moreover, the current position of the drug user is constrained by a range of wider forces