Duty to Entitlement: Work and Citizenship in the Finnish Post-War Disability Policy, early 1940s to 1970
This paper analyses Finnish disability policies from the early 1940s to 1970. It focuses on the conceptualisation of work and citizenship in the discussions on the legal provision of welfare for invalids and for the mentally deficient/developmentally disabled. It is shown that during this period, a considerable change took place in the relationship of these concepts. During the period of 1940 to the 1950s, work was viewed as an important civic duty. Accordingly, disability policies focused on groups having the best chances of being rehabilitated into economically productive members of the society. During the 1960s, policies' expediency began to be estimated more on individual interests than on public gain and rehabilitation was extended into groups which had previously been viewed as unprofitable targets. As every individual was viewed as entitled to participation and work was understood as important for achieving this goal, its role changed from being viewed as a citizens' duty to their entitlement.
Quelle: http://shm.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/27/1/144?rss=1
Roy Porter Student Prize Essay For the People’s Health: Ideology, Medical Authority and Hygienic Science in Communist Czechoslovakia
The communist political milieu offered distinct professional, scientific and socio-political advantages to agents of public health and hygiene in post-war Czechoslovakia. Hygienists employed the imperatives of Marxist-Leninism and Sovietisation to call for a fundamental reformulation of state and professional perspectives on population health, and further, to seek sweeping prerogatives over all the conditions of work and life in Czechoslovak society. Such an active and interventionist approach to preventive medicine, these hygienists asserted, was the primary route to the eradication of disease, the broad improvement of public health and the continued development of communism itself. The political and ideological demands of the regime largely aligned with existing environmentalist traditions in public health, and the leadership of Czechoslovakia's nascent state hygiene services therefore coordinated their research aims, professional programme and practical efforts with the philosophical and institutional imperatives of Soviet-style communism in their own disciplinary interests.
Quelle: http://shm.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/27/1/122?rss=1
‚Therapy Means Political Change, Not Peanut Butter‘: American Radical Psychiatry, 1968-1975
As early as the 1950s, the profession of psychiatry in the United States began to experience a series of subtle adjustments. By the mid-1960s, the American Psychiatric Association was gripped and bound by the larger social, economic and political trends of the era. Widespread political activist movements focused on the Vietnam War, civil rights for blacks, and the elevation of feminism. Amid this contentious, transitional climate, factions in the field of mental health deliberated over best practices as well as broader questions of modernisation, scientific legitimacy and human rights. The Radical Caucus of the American Psychiatric Association was one such faction. It included black and women's wings and challenged other members of the APA to embrace the transformative zeitgeist of the 1960s, as well as connect these tenets to the practice of psychiatry. This paper offers a snapshot of an important period in the history of American psychiatry, politics, and culture.
Quelle: http://shm.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/27/1/104?rss=1
Anthony J. Lanza, Silicosis and the Gauley Bridge ‚Nine‘
Gauley Bridge was the scene of America's biggest industrial disaster, in which hundreds of workers died from silicosis in the aftermath of the drilling in 1930–31 of a hydro-electric tunnel at Hawk's Nest. This article scrutinises for the first time the role of Dr A. J. Lanza (a medical director of Metropolitan Life Insurance Company) in hiding the extent of acute silicosis amongst the tunnellers. Lanza and his allies in the medical profession were able to impose their own interpretation on events at Gauley Bridge. Their analysis of nine autopsies ignored the evidence of acute silicosis, in favour of one which emphasised tuberculosis, racial susceptibility, syphilis, the supposed negligence of the workforce and alleged racketeering by lawyers. The result was that acute silicosis largely disappeared from medical discourse and Gauley Bridge was denied a place in America's national consciousness.
Quelle: http://shm.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/27/1/86?rss=1