Dally A
Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, London.
Soc Hist Med. 1997 Aug;10(2):291-304. doi: 10.1093/shm/10.2.291.
This paper explores the social and medical history and context of pink disease (acrodynia), a serious disease of infants and young children that baffled the medical world during the first half of the twentieth century until it was shown to be caused by mercury poisoning. In the English-speaking world the commonest source of the mercury was teething powders, which were widely available and advertised with increasing sophistication. Efforts to control them (such as the BMJ's campaign against 'Secret Remedies') were as yet unsuccessful. The article discusses the social conditions that influenced the existence and recognition of pink disease, the delay in finding its cause, the way in which it was explained as a virus infection or nutritional deficiency and why it seldom occurred outside the teething period. It discusses both professional and lay attitudes to health and diseases during the early twentieth century and provides a model of how the disease developed in a specific social setting and how the medical profession attempted to deal with it within the limitations of contemporary professional thought. The resistance to the evidence of mercury poisoning is typical of resistance to new medical knowledge and declined only when the opponents and sceptics grew old and disappeared from the scene. Meanwhile, the cause having been identified and accepted, pink disease disappeared, but its consequences emerged much later, in an unexpected quarter, as a cause of male infertility.
本文探讨了粉红病（肢痛症）的社会和医学史及背景，这是一种婴幼儿严重疾病，在20世纪上半叶一直困扰着医学界，直到后来被证明是由汞中毒引起。在英语国家，汞的最常见来源是出牙粉，这类产品随处可得，且广告宣传日益精巧。控制这些产品的努力（如《英国医学杂志》发起的反对“秘方药”运动）尚未成功。本文讨论了影响粉红病存在与认知的社会状况、病因发现的延迟、该病被解释为病毒感染或营养缺乏的方式，以及为何该病很少在出牙期之外出现。文章探讨了20世纪初专业人士和普通大众对健康与疾病的态度，并提供了一个模型，说明该病在特定社会环境中的发展情况，以及医学界如何在当代专业思维的局限内试图应对它。对汞中毒证据的抵制是抵制新医学知识的典型表现，只有当反对者和怀疑者变老并退出舞台时才有所减弱。与此同时，病因被确认并得到认可后，粉红病消失了，但它的后果在很久以后在一个意想不到的领域出现，成为男性不育的一个原因。
