Alex Mold
Biographic Data
| ID | 311927 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Alex Mold |
| GIVEN NAMES | Alex |
| FAMILY NAME | Mold |
| SIGNATURE | MOLD A |
| AFFILIATIONS | London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9674-9953 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 41 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 61 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 41 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Seeing the world upside down
In a world that is increasingly globalised and fragmented, medical education is shaped by complex political, social, and economic forces at local and international levels. This article argues that preparing for the future of medical education in such a changing landscape requires engagement with long-term historical perspectives. Drawing on the history of empires, it highlights how former imperial metropoles, entrenched colonial legacies, and ine…
Defining the public in public health after Lalonde
Ryosuke Yokoe. Alcohol and Liver Cirrhosis in Twentieth-Century Britain
Fun, running and the jogging boom in Britain, 1970s–1980s
During the 1970s and 1980s, Britain experienced a ‘jogging boom’. Jogging, a slower form of running, became popular as a leisure activity and to improve health. All over the country, joggers took part in ‘fun runs’, short events which contrasted with longer, more serious competitive running races. By 1978, there were over a million runners in Britain. The sudden, rapid growth of jogging and fun running is a phenomenon that needs explaining, espec…
Locating Medical Television
International audience
The Harms of Constructing Addiction as a Chronic, Relapsing Brain Disease
As an international network of historians and social scientists who study approaches to the management of drugs across time and place, we have noticed the effort to redefine addiction as a chronic, relapsing brain disease (CRBD). The CRBD model is promoted as a route to destigmatize addiction and to empower individuals to access treatment that works within that model’s terms.1 CRBD usefully recognizes that brain-based neural adaptations place ind…
Alcohol, health education and changing notions of risk in Britain, 1980–1990
This article explores the contentious definition and communication of alcohol consumption limits and their relationship to ideas about risk through an analysis of the development of health education materials during the 1980s. It argues that changing ideas about alcohol and risk, and their communication to the public, were a reflection of both specific developments in thinking about alcohol and the harm it could pose as well as broader shifts wit…
Just say know
Until the 1980s, anti-drug education campaigns in the UK were rare. This article examines the reasons behind a policy shift that led to the introduction of mass media drug education in the mid 1980s. It focuses on two campaigns. 'Heroin Screws You Up' ran in England, and 'Choose Life Not Drugs' ran in Scotland. The campaigns were different in tone, with 'Heroin Screws You Up' making use of fear and 'shock horror' tactics, whereas 'Choose Life Not…
Food hygiene, public health education and citizenship in Britain, 1948–1967
This article examines food hygiene campaigns in Britain between 1948 and 1967, using these as a way to explore the making of health citizenship and the relationship between state and citizen. The projection of hygienic citizenship amalgamated old concerns around morality, modernity and cleanliness, as well as new issues surrounding the changing position of women, the home and the rise of consumerism. Other ways of thinking about citizenship, such…
Injections-While-You-Dance’
This article discusses the production and dissemination of the emotive and informative messages promoting polio vaccination registration in Britain from 1956-1962 through the lens of public health press advertisements and posters. It argues that as the press reported on the problems which beset the vaccine campaign, and the various publics who could register for the polio vaccination multiplied, the campaign's content changed. Material was adapte…
Growing old in New Towns
This paper focuses on the planning of New Towns in the UK in order to explore what the design and planning of urban spaces can tell us about which populations and their health matter and are prioritized, at different points in time. We concentrate on how ageing was conceptualized, and what this tells us about how ageing societies and bodies are accounted for and understood. Through the dynamic evolution of people and place, we can also come to se…
Health Education Films in the Twentieth Century
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. …
Cannabis; Getting High
For some American liberals, one of the few bright spots of the 2016 US elections was the number of pro-marijuana initiatives passed at the state level. California, Massachusetts, Maine and Nevada j
The Recovery Revolution
How do you treat drug addiction? What is the goal of treatment? Is it to render the patient drug free? Is it a lifetime of abstinence? Or to improve the addict’s life and those of others by addressing physical and mental health issues, reducing criminal behaviour, and so on? A satisfactory answer to such questions is still waiting to be found. Indeed, it is something that those involved in treating addiction have grappled with for decades. In The…
Nancy Tomes, Remaking the Modern Patient
There can be few places in the world where the notion of the patient as consumer has taken a firmer hold than in the USA. Television viewers are bombarded by advertisements for prescription drugs and over-the-counter medications; individuals engage in ‘doctor shopping’; and patients are presented with minutely itemised bills following any medical encounter. The US health system is the most expensive in the world and yet it is far from the best. I…
Everybody Likes a Drink. Nobody Likes a Drunk’. Alcohol, Health Education and the Public in 1970s Britain
This article examines the development of alcohol health education in Britain during the 1970s, using this as a way to explore the nature of public health and the place of the public within it. Focusing on a set of local health education campaigns, an expert committee report on alcohol prevention and a public consultation exercise on alcohol, the article highlights the presence of three different 'publics'. Health education campaigns tended to foc…
George Weisz, Chronic Disease in the Twentieth Century
Journal Article George Weisz, Chronic Disease in the Twentieth Century: A History Get access George Weisz, Chronic Disease in the Twentieth Century: A History, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. Pp. vii + 307. $24.95. ISBN 978 1421 4130 37. Alex Mold Alex Mold London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Social History of Medicine, …
Special Issue on Concepts of Addiction in Europe, 1860s–1930s
From Inebriety to Addiction
The aim of the research presented in this article was to explore how key addiction terminology was used in medical publications in Britain between 1860 and 1930 exploiting the possibilities of digitised resources. Specifically, it sought to identify differences in use of concepts over time and between sources. It also sought to identify if quantitative research on digital resources confirmed conclusions drawn from well-known qualitative research.…
Addiction in Europe, 1860s–1960s
Concepts play a central part in the formulation of problems and proposed solutions to the use of substances. This article reports the initial results from a cross European historical study, carried out to a common methodology, of the language of addiction and policy responses in two key periods, 1860–1930 and the 1950s and 1960s. It concludes that the language of addiction was varied and nonstandard in the first period. The Anglo-American model o…
Assembling Health Rights in Global Context
Introduction -- Global Assemblages of Virtue and Vitality: Genealogies and Anthropologies of Rights and Health David Reubi and Alex Mold Part 1: Rights, Citizenship and Subjectivities 1. Not Rights but Reciprocal Responsibility: the Rhetoric of State Health Provision in Early Twentieth Century Britain Jane Seymour 2. Unauthorised Immigrants and the Denial of the Right to Health Care in the United States Beatrix Hoffman 3. Rights, Responsibility, …
Cannabis Nation
Journal Article Cannabis Nation: Control and Consumption in Britain, 1928-2008. By James Mills. Get access Cannabis Nation: Control and Consumption in Britain, 1928-2008. By James Mills. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013. vii-282 pp. ISBN 978-0-19-928342-2, £35 (hardback). Alex Mold Alex Mold London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Twentieth Century British Histor…
Repositioning the Patient
This article explores how and why the patient came to be repositioned as a political actor within British health care during the 1960s and 1970s. Focusing on the role played by patient organizations, it is suggested that the repositioning of the patient needs to be seen in the light of growing demands for greater patient autonomy and the application of consumerist principles to health. Examining the activities of two patient groups-the National A…
Social Poison
Reviewed by: Social Poison: The Culture and Politics of Opiate Control in Britain and France, 1821–1926 Alex Mold Howard Padwa. Social Poison: The Culture and Politics of Opiate Control in Britain and France, 1821–1926. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012. x + 232 pp. $55.00 (978-1-4214-0420-2). Although opium has been used across the globe for thousands of years, the control and regulation of opiate drugs is a much more recent phenom…
Making the Patient-Consumer in Margaret Thatcher's Britain
This article examines the role played by patient organizations in the making of the patient as consumer during Margaret Thatcher's term as prime minster. It details a crucial moment in the reconstitution of the relationship between state and citizen, as universal entitlements to welfare gave way to individualistic rights to, and choice of, services. Though patients had been regarded as consumers prior to this period, it was during the 1980s that …
Patient Groups and the Construction of the Patient-Consumer in Britain
This article presents an historical overview of the changing meaning of the patient-consumer, and specifically the role played by patient groups in constructing the patient as consumer. It is argued that patient groups were central to the formation of the patient-consumer, but as health consumerism was taken on by the state, they lost control of this figure. Competing understandings of what it meant to be a patient-consumer developed, a shift tha…
Repositioning the Patient
This article explores how and why the patient came to be repositioned as a political actor within British health care during the 1960s and 1970s. Focusing on the role played by patient organizations, it is suggested that the repositioning of the patient needs to be seen in the light of growing demands for greater patient autonomy and the application of consumerist principles to health. Examining the activities of two patient groups-the National A…
The Harms of Constructing Addiction as a Chronic, Relapsing Brain Disease
As an international network of historians and social scientists who study approaches to the management of drugs across time and place, we have noticed the effort to redefine addiction as a chronic, relapsing brain disease (CRBD). The CRBD model is promoted as a route to destigmatize addiction and to empower individuals to access treatment that works within that model’s terms.1 CRBD usefully recognizes that brain-based neural adaptations place ind…
The 'British System' of Heroin Addiction Treatment and the Opening of Drug Dependence Units, 1965-1970
This article considers the emergence of specialized Drug Dependence Units (DDUs) to treat heroin addiction in 1968. Disease-based notions of addiction had long coexisted with more 'social' understandings of the condition; those that stressed the social problems resulting from habitual drug use. Although elements of both approaches were to be found in the 'British System' of heroin addiction treatment and control prior to this period, 'social' and…
Everybody Likes a Drink. Nobody Likes a Drunk’. Alcohol, Health Education and the Public in 1970s Britain
This article examines the development of alcohol health education in Britain during the 1970s, using this as a way to explore the nature of public health and the place of the public within it. Focusing on a set of local health education campaigns, an expert committee report on alcohol prevention and a public consultation exercise on alcohol, the article highlights the presence of three different 'publics'. Health education campaigns tended to foc…
Discovering Addiction
Journal Article Discovering Addiction: The Science and Politics of Substance Abuse Research Get access Nancy D. Campbell, Discovering Addiction: The Science and Politics of Substance Abuse Research, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2007. Pp. 301. $50. ISBN 978 0 472 11610 2. Alex Mold Alex Mold London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Social History of Medicin…
The Welfare Branch of the Alternative Society?' The Work of Drug Voluntary Organization Release, 1967-1978
From Inebriety to Addiction
The aim of the research presented in this article was to explore how key addiction terminology was used in medical publications in Britain between 1860 and 1930 exploiting the possibilities of digitised resources. Specifically, it sought to identify differences in use of concepts over time and between sources. It also sought to identify if quantitative research on digital resources confirmed conclusions drawn from well-known qualitative research.…
Psychedelic Psychiatry
Journal Article Psychedelic Psychiatry: LSD From Clinic to Campus Get access Erica Dyck, Psychedelic Psychiatry: LSD From Clinic to Campus, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. Pp. 199. $35. ISBN 978 0 8018 8994 3. Alex Mold Alex Mold London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Social History of Medicine, Volume 22, Issue 2, August…
Growing old in New Towns
This paper focuses on the planning of New Towns in the UK in order to explore what the design and planning of urban spaces can tell us about which populations and their health matter and are prioritized, at different points in time. We concentrate on how ageing was conceptualized, and what this tells us about how ageing societies and bodies are accounted for and understood. Through the dynamic evolution of people and place, we can also come to se…
Addiction in Europe, 1860s–1960s
Concepts play a central part in the formulation of problems and proposed solutions to the use of substances. This article reports the initial results from a cross European historical study, carried out to a common methodology, of the language of addiction and policy responses in two key periods, 1860–1930 and the 1950s and 1960s. It concludes that the language of addiction was varied and nonstandard in the first period. The Anglo-American model o…
Patients ́ Rights and the National Health Service in Britain, 1960s–1980s
The language of rights has long permeated discussions about health care in Britain, but during the latter half of the 20th century, patients’ rights achieved a level of unprecedented prominence. By the end of the 1980s, the language of entitlement appeared to have spread into many areas of the National Health Service: consent to treatment, access to information, and the ability to complain were all legally established patients’ rights. Patient or…
The Making of Addiction
In The Making of Addiction, Louise Foxcroft aims to present a social and intellectual history of the concept of addiction. Focusing on the use of opiates in nineteenth-century Britain, she argues that ‘while personal accounts reveal that opium experiences remained essentially similar, attitudes to it continued to change’ (p. 165). For Foxcroft there was a marked move away from the perception of opium use ‘as a creative sensibility and an intellec…
Crisis and Opportunity in Drug Policy
During the 1980s illegal drug use in Britain appeared to be increasing at an alarming rate and spreading across the country on an unprecedented scale. An apparent growth in the use of heroin caused particular concern: the number of known heroin addicts rose from just over two thousand in 1977 to more than ten thousand by 1987. Moreover, heroin use was being reported in urban areas throughout the country. This was in contrast to previous decades, …
The 'British System' of Heroin Addiction Treatment and the Opening of Drug Dependence Units, 1965-1970
This article considers the emergence of specialized Drug Dependence Units (DDUs) to treat heroin addiction in 1968. Disease-based notions of addiction had long coexisted with more 'social' understandings of the condition; those that stressed the social problems resulting from habitual drug use. Although elements of both approaches were to be found in the 'British System' of heroin addiction treatment and control prior to this period, 'social' and…
The transformation of British life, 1950-2000
The Welfare Branch of the Alternative Society?' The Work of Drug Voluntary Organization Release, 1967-1978
Consuming Habits’
Keywords: illegal drugsaddictionhealthmoralitydisease
The Making of Addiction
In The Making of Addiction, Louise Foxcroft aims to present a social and intellectual history of the concept of addiction. Focusing on the use of opiates in nineteenth-century Britain, she argues that ‘while personal accounts reveal that opium experiences remained essentially similar, attitudes to it continued to change’ (p. 165). For Foxcroft there was a marked move away from the perception of opium use ‘as a creative sensibility and an intellec…
Crisis and Opportunity in Drug Policy
During the 1980s illegal drug use in Britain appeared to be increasing at an alarming rate and spreading across the country on an unprecedented scale. An apparent growth in the use of heroin caused particular concern: the number of known heroin addicts rose from just over two thousand in 1977 to more than ten thousand by 1987. Moreover, heroin use was being reported in urban areas throughout the country. This was in contrast to previous decades, …
Illicit drugs and the rise of epidemiology during the 1960s
Epidemiology has been crucial to the understanding of both tobacco smoking and illicit drug taking as public health issues in Britain since the 1960s. There were, however, siginificant differences in the way in which epidemiology was used between the two psychoactive substances
Grave Cause for Concern’? Private Practice, Professional Disputes and the Treatment of Heroin Addiction in Britain During the 1980s
This article examines the debate surrounding the role played by private doctors in the treatment of heroin addiction in Britain during the 1980s. Whilst there were a number of problems connected with the treatment of addiction in private practice, this debate was something of a surface issue masking a deeper professional dispute. The involvement of general practitioners, whether in private or National Health Service practice, posed a threat to th…
Discovering Addiction
Journal Article Discovering Addiction: The Science and Politics of Substance Abuse Research Get access Nancy D. Campbell, Discovering Addiction: The Science and Politics of Substance Abuse Research, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2007. Pp. 301. $50. ISBN 978 0 472 11610 2. Alex Mold Alex Mold London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Social History of Medicin…
Not This Time
Psychedelic Psychiatry
Journal Article Psychedelic Psychiatry: LSD From Clinic to Campus Get access Erica Dyck, Psychedelic Psychiatry: LSD From Clinic to Campus, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. Pp. 199. $35. ISBN 978 0 8018 8994 3. Alex Mold Alex Mold London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Social History of Medicine, Volume 22, Issue 2, August…
Voluntary Action and Illegal Drugs
A unique exploration of the changing ideas about the place of voluntarism and health care within society in Britain since the 1960s. By considering the work of voluntary organisations with illegal dru
Michael Shiner. Drug Use and Social Change
Patient Groups and the Construction of the Patient-Consumer in Britain
This article presents an historical overview of the changing meaning of the patient-consumer, and specifically the role played by patient groups in constructing the patient as consumer. It is argued that patient groups were central to the formation of the patient-consumer, but as health consumerism was taken on by the state, they lost control of this figure. Competing understandings of what it meant to be a patient-consumer developed, a shift tha…
Making the Patient-Consumer in Margaret Thatcher's Britain
This article examines the role played by patient organizations in the making of the patient as consumer during Margaret Thatcher's term as prime minster. It details a crucial moment in the reconstitution of the relationship between state and citizen, as universal entitlements to welfare gave way to individualistic rights to, and choice of, services. Though patients had been regarded as consumers prior to this period, it was during the 1980s that …
Social Poison
Reviewed by: Social Poison: The Culture and Politics of Opiate Control in Britain and France, 1821–1926 Alex Mold Howard Padwa. Social Poison: The Culture and Politics of Opiate Control in Britain and France, 1821–1926. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012. x + 232 pp. $55.00 (978-1-4214-0420-2). Although opium has been used across the globe for thousands of years, the control and regulation of opiate drugs is a much more recent phenom…
Patients ́ Rights and the National Health Service in Britain, 1960s–1980s
The language of rights has long permeated discussions about health care in Britain, but during the latter half of the 20th century, patients’ rights achieved a level of unprecedented prominence. By the end of the 1980s, the language of entitlement appeared to have spread into many areas of the National Health Service: consent to treatment, access to information, and the ability to complain were all legally established patients’ rights. Patient or…
Assembling Health Rights in Global Context
Introduction -- Global Assemblages of Virtue and Vitality: Genealogies and Anthropologies of Rights and Health David Reubi and Alex Mold Part 1: Rights, Citizenship and Subjectivities 1. Not Rights but Reciprocal Responsibility: the Rhetoric of State Health Provision in Early Twentieth Century Britain Jane Seymour 2. Unauthorised Immigrants and the Denial of the Right to Health Care in the United States Beatrix Hoffman 3. Rights, Responsibility, …
Cannabis Nation
Journal Article Cannabis Nation: Control and Consumption in Britain, 1928-2008. By James Mills. Get access Cannabis Nation: Control and Consumption in Britain, 1928-2008. By James Mills. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013. vii-282 pp. ISBN 978-0-19-928342-2, £35 (hardback). Alex Mold Alex Mold London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Twentieth Century British Histor…
Repositioning the Patient
This article explores how and why the patient came to be repositioned as a political actor within British health care during the 1960s and 1970s. Focusing on the role played by patient organizations, it is suggested that the repositioning of the patient needs to be seen in the light of growing demands for greater patient autonomy and the application of consumerist principles to health. Examining the activities of two patient groups-the National A…
Special Issue on Concepts of Addiction in Europe, 1860s–1930s
From Inebriety to Addiction
The aim of the research presented in this article was to explore how key addiction terminology was used in medical publications in Britain between 1860 and 1930 exploiting the possibilities of digitised resources. Specifically, it sought to identify differences in use of concepts over time and between sources. It also sought to identify if quantitative research on digital resources confirmed conclusions drawn from well-known qualitative research.…
Addiction in Europe, 1860s–1960s
Concepts play a central part in the formulation of problems and proposed solutions to the use of substances. This article reports the initial results from a cross European historical study, carried out to a common methodology, of the language of addiction and policy responses in two key periods, 1860–1930 and the 1950s and 1960s. It concludes that the language of addiction was varied and nonstandard in the first period. The Anglo-American model o…
George Weisz, Chronic Disease in the Twentieth Century
Journal Article George Weisz, Chronic Disease in the Twentieth Century: A History Get access George Weisz, Chronic Disease in the Twentieth Century: A History, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. Pp. vii + 307. $24.95. ISBN 978 1421 4130 37. Alex Mold Alex Mold London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Social History of Medicine, …
Nancy Tomes, Remaking the Modern Patient
There can be few places in the world where the notion of the patient as consumer has taken a firmer hold than in the USA. Television viewers are bombarded by advertisements for prescription drugs and over-the-counter medications; individuals engage in ‘doctor shopping’; and patients are presented with minutely itemised bills following any medical encounter. The US health system is the most expensive in the world and yet it is far from the best. I…
Medicine (26 works) · Political science (24 works) · Sociology (18 works) · Psychiatry (16 works) · Law (14 works) · Psychology (14 works) · Historical Psychiatry and Medical Practices (13 works) · Law (13 works) · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes (10 works) · History (10 works)