First edition, Winner of the Arthur J. Viseltear Prize, American Public Health Association With an emphasis on the American West, Eugenic Nation explores the long and unsettled history of eugenics in ...the United States. This expanded second edition includes shocking details demonstrating that eugenics continues to inform institutional and reproductive injustice. Alexandra Minna Stern draws on recently uncovered historical records to reveal patterns of racial bias in Californiaâs sterilization program and documents compelling individual experiences. With the addition of radically new and relevant research, this edition connects the eugenic past to the genomic present with attention to the ethical and social implications of emerging genetic technologies.
Golden holocaust Proctor, Robert N
2012., 20120129, 2012, c2011., 2012-02-28, 20110101
eBook
The cigarette is the deadliest artifact in the history of human civilization. It is also one of the most beguiling, thanks to more than a century of manipulation at the hands of tobacco industry ...chemists. In Golden Holocaust, Robert N. Proctor draws on reams of formerly-secret industry documents to explore how the cigarette came to be the most widely-used drug on the planet, with six trillion sticks sold per year. He paints a harrowing picture of tobacco manufacturers conspiring to block the recognition of tobacco-cancer hazards, even as they ensnare legions of scientists and politicians in a web of denial. Proctor tells heretofore untold stories of fraud and subterfuge, and he makes the strongest case to date for a simple yet ambitious remedy: a ban on the manufacture and sale of cigarettes.
In an effort to modernize criminal and civil
investigations, early Bolsheviks gave forensic doctors-most of whom
had been trained under the tsarist regime-new authority over issues
of sexuality. ...Revolutionaries believed that forensic
medicine could provide scientific and objective solutions to sexual
disorder in the new society. Bolshevik Sexual Forensics
explores the institutional history of Russian and Soviet forensic
medicine and examines the effects of its authority when confronting
sexual disorder. Healey compares sex crime investigations from
Petrograd and Sverdlovsk in the 1920s to the numerous publications
by forensic doctors and psychiatrists of the prerevolutionary and
early Soviet periods to illustrate the role that these specialists
played. In addition, Healey presents a fascinating look at how
doctors diagnosed and treated hermaphroditism, showing how Soviet
physicians revolutionized the standard scientific view in these
cases by taking into account individual desire.
This study sheds light on unexplored radical and reactionary
forces that shaped the Bolshevik "sexual revolution" as lawmakers
defined new ways of seeing sexual crime and disorder. Forensic
doctors struggled to interpret the replacement of the age of
consent with a standard of "sexual maturity," a designation that
made female sexuality a collective "resource," not part of an
individual's personality. "Innocence," "experience," and virginity
played a major role in the expertise doctors furnished in rape and
abuse trials. Psychiatrists recoiled from the language of sexual
psychology in their investigations of sex criminals. Yet in the
clinic, Soviet physicians probed the desires of the two-sexed
citizen, whose psychology served as the basis for a distinctly
modern approach to the "erasure" of the hermaphrodite.
Healey concludes that the vision of men and women as equals
after a "sexual revolution" was undermined from the outset of the
Soviet experiment. Law and medicine failed to protect women and
girls from violence, and Soviet medicine's physiological and
biological model of sexual citizenship erased the vision of sexual
self-expression, especially for women. This groundbreaking study
will appeal to Soviet historians and those interested in gender
studies, sexuality, medicine, and forensics.
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.
As a pioneer in the field of audiology, Dr. James Jerger has been involved in cutting-edge resource throughout the development of the field. In his new text, Audiological Research Over Six Decades, ...readers can experience the evolution of diagnostic audiology through his unique perspective. By detailing case studies from his own work over the years, Dr. Jerger gives his audience a chance to be a fly on the wall for major moments throughout the history of audiology.
Ice. Methedrine. Crank. Crystal. Whatever its guise, the social and political contexts of methamphetamine share a certain uniqueness. Nicholas Parsons chronicles the history and mythology of ...methamphetamine in the United States from the 1940s--when it was hailed as a wonder drug--to the present. In an intriguing analysis, he also makes an important contribution to our understanding of the social construction of social problems.
Over the past seventy years, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM, has evolved from a virtually unknown and little-used pamphlet to an imposing and comprehensive ...compendium of mental disorder. Its nearly 300 conditions have become the touchstones for the diagnoses that patients receive, students are taught, researchers study, insurers reimburse, and drug companies promote. Although the manual is portrayed as an authoritative corpus of psychiatric knowledge, it is a product of intense political conflicts, dissension, and factionalism. The manual results from struggles among psychiatric researchers and clinicians, different mental health professions, and a variety of patient, familial, feminist, gay, and veterans' interest groups. The DSM is fundamentally a social document that both reflects and shapes the professional, economic, and cultural forces associated with its use.
In DSM, Allan V. Horwitz examines how the manual, known colloquially as psychiatry's bible, has been at the center of thinking about mental health in the United States since its original publication in 1952. The first book to examine its entire history, this volume draws on both archival sources and the literature on modern psychiatry to show how the history of the DSM is more a story of the growing social importance of psychiatric diagnoses than of increasing knowledge about the nature of mental disorder. Despite attempts to replace it, Horwitz argues that the DSM persists because its diagnostic entities are closely intertwined with too many interests that benefit from them.
This comprehensive treatment should appeal to not only specialists but also anyone who is interested in how diagnoses of mental illness have evolved over the past seven decades—from unwanted and often imposed labels to resources that lead to valued mental health treatments and social services.
The Nazis may have given eugenics its negative connotations, but the practice—and the “science” that supports it—is still disturbingly alive in America. Tracing the historical roots and persistence ...of eugenics in the United States, Nancy Ordover explores the political and cultural climate that has endowed these campaigns with mass appeal and scientific legitimacy.
After LSD arrived in the United States in 1949, the drug’s therapeutic promise quickly captured the interests of psychiatrists. In the decade that followed, modern psychopharmacology was born and ...research into the drug’s perceptual and psychological effects boomed. By the early 1960s, psychiatrists focused on a particularly promising treatment known as psychedelic therapy: a single, carefully guided, high-dose LSD session coupled with brief but intensive psychotherapy. Researchers reported an astounding 50% success rate in treating chronic alcoholism, as well as substantial improvement in patients suffering from a range of other disorders. Yet despite this success, LSD officially remained an experimental drug only. Research into its effects, psychological and otherwise, dwindled before coming to a close in the 1970s. In The Trials of Psychedelic Therapy , Matthew Oram traces the early promise and eventual demise of LSD psychotherapy in the United States. While the common perception is that LSD’s prohibition terminated legitimate research, Oram draws on FDA files and the personal papers of LSD researchers to reveal that the most significant issue was not the drug’s illegality, but the persistent question of its efficacy. The landmark Kefauver-Harris Drug Amendments of 1962 installed strict standards for efficacy evaluation, which LSD researchers struggled to meet due to the unorthodox nature of their treatment. Exploring the complex interactions between clinical science, regulation, and therapeutics in American medicine, The Trials of Psychedelic Therapy explains how an age of empirical research and limited government oversight gave way to sophisticated controlled clinical trials and complex federal regulations. Analyzing the debates around how to understand and evaluate treatment efficacy, this book will appeal to anyone with an interest in LSD and psychedelics, as well as mental health professionals, regulators, and scholars of the history of psychiatry, psychotherapy, drug regulation, and pharmaceutical research and development.
