From Women’s Expectations to Scientific Specimens: The Fate of Miscarriage Materials in Nineteenth-Century America
This article explores physicians' and women's descriptions of miscarriage in late-nineteenth-century America. As the science of human embryology developed, doctors in the USA began seeking out miscarriage cases in order to access fetal and embryonic tissues, spurring increased medical interest in pregnancy. But women played a key role in this new medical and scientific world as well. Facing increasing restrictions upon their control over fertility, many American women understood miscarriage to be a relief, or even a joy. These positive reactions aided the medical acquisition of the newly valued specimens. Women and their doctors together shaped early embryology by deciding the identity and fate of the materials expelled during miscarriage. This investigation of women's personal writings about miscarriage also expands our understandings of the links between motherhood and femininity in nineteenth-century America.
Quelle: http://shm.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/28/2/245?rss=1
‚A Burden on the County‘: Madness, Institutions of Confinement and the Irish Patient in Victorian Lancashire
This article explores the responses of the Poor Law authorities, asylum superintendents and Lunacy Commissioners to the huge influx of Irish patients into the Lancashire public asylum system, a system facing intense pressure in terms of numbers and costs, in the latter half of the nineteenth century. In particular, it examines the ways in which patients were passed, bartered and exchanged between two sets of institution—workhouses and asylums. In the mid-nineteenth century removal to asylums was advocated for all cases of mental disorder by asylum medical superintendents and the Lunacy Commissioners; by its end, asylum doctors were resisting the attempts of Poor Law officials to ‘dump’ increasing numbers of chronic cases into their wards. The article situates the Irish patient at the centre of tussles between those with a stake in lunacy provision as a group recognised as numerous, disruptive and isolated.
Quelle: http://shm.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/28/2/263?rss=1
The Great Pox, Symptoms, and Social Bodies in Early Modern Spain
The Great Pox marked the early modern era. Not only did this chronic disease lead to long-term shifts in medical knowledge, but it also reached across the social spectrum to touch individuals, families, and communities of all guises. As such, pox infection reflected the complexity of managing symptoms that were at once medically and socially evaluated. This article explores the social and cultural meanings attached to the poxed body through an analysis of Spanish medical, literary, and patient sources. How was the poxed body understood in everyday contexts? How did social concerns affect medical discourse on the disease? What strategies did the ill use to navigate the socially-charged repercussions of visible symptoms? Ultimately, patients developed techniques of obfuscation and ambivalence to manage the social framing of their diseased bodies evident in medical and popular literature.
Quelle: http://shm.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/28/2/225?rss=1
Class, Health and the Proposed British Anthropometric Survey of 1904
In 1904, amid heightened fears of urban degeneration, members of the British Association's Anthropometric Committee drafted plans to measure thousands of citizens to establish the state of the national physique. Their proposal was presented to the Interdepartmental Committee on Physical Deterioration, which agreed that such information would help resolve the degeneration debate. However, a comprehensive anthropometric survey was never enacted, and only schoolchildren were measured in subsequent years. This article examines the state of anthropometric knowledge in the late nineteenth century, and the genesis and rejection of the 1904 survey. It reviews the political, medical and moral opinions which were cited both for and against its implementation, focusing particularly on the perceived reluctance of the working class to be measured. The decision of Campbell-Bannerman's government to institute only school medical inspections suggests that this was an area in which Liberal values ultimately prevented too close an interference with British bodies.
Quelle: http://shm.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/28/2/308?rss=1
Black Celebrities, Selfhood, and Psychiatry in the Civil Rights Era: The Wiltwyck School for Boys and the Floyd Patterson House
This paper contends that a color-blind psychologisation of black interiority constituted one way in which activists imagined African Americans as both fully human and deserving of equal citizenship during the long civil rights era. Between 1954 and 1964, the Wiltwyck School for Boys, a reform school with a predominantly black student body in Esopus, New York, expanded their therapeutic services into Manhattan, creating one of the US's first psychiatric aftercare programmes. Singer Harry Belafonte and boxing champion Floyd Patterson, two black culture heroes linked to the civil rights movement, lent their support as the Wiltwyck Board of Directors sought the funds needed to build a halfway home named in Patterson's honor. The public support of these black celebrity-activists helped create the impression that the mental health of black children was a matter of civil rights import, underscoring the black psyche as both the very source of equality between the races and as a site where racial progress could be measured.
Quelle: http://shm.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/28/2/330?rss=1
Fashioning a Role for Medicine: Alexandre-Louis-Paul Blanchet and the Care of the Deaf in Mid-nineteenth-century France
In the late eighteenth century, medicine was not part of the institutional approach to ‘deaf-mutes’ in the Western world: it was teachers rather than doctors who could claim competence for their care. Yet by the second half of the nineteenth century, doctors had supplanted teachers in this role, despite having made no major therapeutic contributions. The change proceeded via a series of crises in which specialists confronted each other on professional and disciplinary grounds. How did doctors position themselves in their dialogue with educators? How did they construct their own identity within a discipline dominated by teachers? How did they secure the support of the state and of deaf people themselves? How did they announce and consolidate their presence within a field of forces? This article illuminates the strategies pursued in the production and reception of medical knowledge, by examining the controversies around Parisian physician Alexandre Blanchet during the mid-nineteenth century.
Quelle: http://shm.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/28/2/288?rss=1