In 1748, as yellow fever raged in Charleston, South Carolina, doctor John Lining remarked, "There is something very singular in the constitution of the Negroes, which renders them not liable to this ...fever." Lining's comments presaged ideas about blackness that would endure in medical discourses and beyond. In this fascinating medical history, Rana A. Hogarth examines the creation and circulation of medical ideas about blackness in the Atlantic World during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. She shows how white physicians deployed blackness as a medically significant marker of difference and used medical knowledge to improve plantation labor efficiency, safeguard colonial and civic interests, and enhance control over black bodies during the era of slavery.Hogarth refigures Atlantic slave societies as medical frontiers of knowledge production on the topic of racial difference. Rather than looking to their counterparts in Europe who collected and dissected bodies to gain knowledge about race, white physicians in Atlantic slaveholding regions created and tested ideas about race based on the contexts in which they lived and practiced. What emerges in sharp relief is the ways in which blackness was reified in medical discourses and used to perpetuate notions of white supremacy.
This modern biography provides a comprehensive and balanced view of a legendary figure in American medicine. Controversial because of his fierce fight against women’s rights, Mitchell achieved ...stunning success through his experimentation with venomous snakes, treatment of Civil War soldiers with phantom limbs and burning pain, and creation of the rest cure to treat hysteria and neurasthenia. Mitchell’s life was extraordinary—interesting in its own right and as a case study in the larger inquiry into nineteenth-century medicine and culture.
Meticulously researched and beautifully written,Fit to Be Citizens?demonstrates how both science and public health shaped the meaning of race in the early twentieth century. Through a careful ...examination of the experiences of Mexican, Japanese, and Chinese immigrants in Los Angeles, Natalia Molina illustrates the many ways local health officials used complexly constructed concerns about public health to demean, diminish, discipline, and ultimately define racial groups. She shows how the racialization of Mexican Americans was not simply a matter of legal exclusion or labor exploitation, but rather that scientific discourses and public health practices played a key role in assigning negative racial characteristics to the group. The book skillfully moves beyond the binary oppositions that usually structure works in ethnic studies by deploying comparative and relational approaches that reveal the racialization of Mexican Americans as intimately associated with the relative historical and social positions of Asian Americans, African Americans, and whites. Its rich archival grounding provides a valuable history of public health in Los Angeles, living conditions among Mexican immigrants, and the ways in which regional racial categories influence national laws and practices. Molina's compelling study advances our understanding of the complexity of racial politics, attesting that racism is not static and that different groups can occupy different places in the racial order at different times.
Karl Ulrichs's studies of sexual diversity galvanized the burgeoning field of sexual science in the nineteenth century. But in the years since, his groundbreaking activism has overshadowed his ...scholarly achievements. Ulrichs publicly defied Prussian law to agitate for gay equality and marriage, and founded the world's first organization dedicated to the legal and social emancipation of homosexuals. Ralph M. Leck returns Ulrichs to his place as the inventor of the science of sexual heterogeneity. Leck's analysis situates sexual science in a context that includes politics, aesthetics, the languages of science, and the ethics of gender. Although he was the greatest nineteenth-century scholar of sexual heterogeneity, Ulrichs retained certain traditional conjectures about gender. Leck recognizes these subtleties and employs the analytical concepts of modernist vita sexualis and traditional psychopathia sexualis to articulate philosophical and cultural differences among sexologists. Original and audacious, Vita Sexualis</> uses a bedrock figure's scientific and political innovations to open new insights into the history of sexual science, legal systems, and Western amatory codes.
Among the most far-reaching effects of the modern environmental movement was the widespread acknowledgment that human beings were inescapably part of a larger ecosystem. With this book, Linda Nash ...gives us a wholly original and much longer history of "ecological" ideas of the body as that history unfolded in California's Central Valley. Taking us from nineteenth-century fears of miasmas and faith in wilderness cures to the recent era of chemical pollution and cancer clusters, Nash charts how Americans have connected their diseases to race and place as well as dirt and germs. In this account, the rise of germ theory and the pushing aside of an earlier environmental approach to illness constituted not a clear triumph of modern biomedicine but rather a brief period of modern amnesia. As Nash shows us, place-based accounts of illness re-emerged in the postwar decades, galvanizing environmental protest against smog and toxic chemicals. Carefully researched and richly conceptual,Inescapable Ecologiesbrings critically important insights to the histories of environment, culture, and public health, while offering a provocative commentary on the human relationship to the larger world.
Camps are emblems of the modern world, but they first appeared under the imperial tutelage of Victorian Britain. Comparative and transnational in scope, Barbed-Wire Imperialism situates the ...concentration and refugee camps of the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902) within longer traditions of controlling the urban poor in metropolitan Britain and managing "suspect" populations in the empire. Workhouses and prisons, along with criminal tribe settlements and enclosures for the millions of Indians displaced by famine and plague in the late nineteenth century, offered early prototypes for mass encampment. Venues of great human suffering, British camps were artifacts of liberal empire that inspired and legitimized the practices of future regimes.
Doctors of empire Kim, Hoi-eun
Doctors of empire,
2014, 20140723, 2014, 2015-03-18
eBook
In Doctors of Empire, Hoi-eun Kim recounts the story of the almost 1,200 Japanese medical students who rushed to German universities to learn cutting-edge knowledge from the world leaders in ...medicine, and of the dozen German physicians who were invited to Japan to transform the country's medical institutions and education.
Between 1965 and 1987, the cesarean section rate in the United States rose precipitously—from 4.5 percent to 25 percent of births. By 2009, one in three births was by cesarean, a far higher number ...than the 5–10% rate that the World Health Organization suggests is optimal. While physicians largely avoided cesareans through the mid-twentieth century, by the early twenty-first century, cesarean section was the most commonly performed surgery in the country. Although the procedure can be life-saving, how—and why—did it become so ubiquitous?
Cesarean Section is the first book to chronicle this history. In exploring the creation of the complex social, cultural, economic, and medical factors leading to the surgery’s increase, Jacqueline H. Wolf describes obstetricians’ reliance on assorted medical technologies that weakened the skills they had traditionally employed to foster vaginal birth. She also reflects on an unsettling malpractice climate—prompted in part by a raft of dubious diagnoses—that helped to legitimize “defensive medicine,” and a health care system that ensured cesarean birth would be more lucrative than vaginal birth. In exaggerating the risks of vaginal birth, doctors and patients alike came to view cesareans as normal and, increasingly, as essential. Sweeping change in women’s lives beginning in the 1970s cemented this markedly different approach to childbirth.
Wolf examines the public health effects of a high cesarean rate and explains how the language of reproductive choice has been used to discourage debate about cesareans and the risks associated with the surgery. Drawing on data from nineteenth- and early twentieth-century obstetric logs to better represent the experience of cesarean surgery for women of all classes and races, as well as interviews with obstetricians who have performed cesareans and women who have given birth by cesarean, Cesarean Section is the definitive history of the use of this surgical procedure and its effects on women’s and children’s health in the United States.
While much has been written about immigrant traditions, music, food culture, folklore, and other aspects of ethnic identity, little attention has been given to the study of medical culture, until ...now. In Medical Caregiving and Identity in Pennsylvania’s Anthracite Region, 1880–2000, Karol Weaver employs an impressive range of primary sources, including folk songs, patent medicine advertisements, oral history interviews, ghost stories, and jokes, to show how the men and women of the anthracite coal region crafted their gender and ethnic identities via the medical decisions they made. Weaver examines communities’ relationships with both biomedically trained physicians and informally trained medical caregivers, and how these relationships reflected a sense of “Americanness.” She uses interviews and oral histories to help tell the story of neighborhood healers, midwives, Pennsylvania German powwowers, medical self-help, and the eventual transition to modern-day medicine. Weaver is able to show not only how each of these methods of healing was shaped by its patrons and their backgrounds but also how it helped mold the identities of the new Americans who sought it out.
The research of pandemics, epidemics, and pathogens like COVID-19 reaches far beyond the scope of biomedicine. It is not only an objective for the health, political and social sciences, but epidemics ...and pandemics are a matter of geography: foci and vectors of communicable diseases continue to test the efficacy of medical control at state borders.
This volume illuminates these issues from various disciplinary viewpoints. It starts by exploring historical models of quarantine, spatial isolation and detention as precautionary means against the dissemination of disease and contagion by border crossers, migrants and refugees. Besides the patterns of prejudice with which these groups are confronted, the book also deals with various kinds of fear of contamination from outside of the nation state. The contributors address the implementation of medical techniques at state borders in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, as well as the presently practiced measures of medical and biometric screening of migrants and refugees. Uniquely, this volume shows that the current border security regimes of Western states exhibit a high share of medicalised techniques of power, which originate both in European modernity and in the medical and biological disciplines developed during the last quarter of the millennium.
Drawing on the collective expertise of a network of international researchers, this interdisciplinary volume is essential reading for those wishing to understand the medicalisation of borders across the globe, from the early eighteenth century up to the present day.
