Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences最新文献

In 1993, Foster Care Youth United published its first issue. A magazine written for and by teens in foster care, it reflected many of their key concerns of the moment. Teens wrote poignantly of abuse, separation, sexual exploitation at group homes, and the difficulties of "aging out of the system." The children's pain was palpable; Foster Care Youth United gave them a voice. Charlie Rose interviewed some of these foster youth, giving them a broad audience and national attention. This essay examines a moment in the early 1990s when young people in foster care developed a powerful voice that resonated throughout the country. Yet at the very same time, as Congress debated a law that would affect these teens' lives, their voices were not heard. Instead, numerous witnesses averred that they were speaking on behalf of children. This essay reconstructs the voices of the foster youth themselves as they shared their experiences and thoughts in their new magazine. It asks why these voices were absent from the contemporary debates preceding the passage of the 1997 Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA), and compares the use of their voices in debates around the 1999 Foster Care Independence Act.

In the early twentieth century, the diagnosis of psychopathy was among the most frequently employed in child psychiatry. The issue of "psychopathic children" also attracted considerable attention in the Danish press and political sphere, where proposals for the establishment of specialized homes for such children were actively debated. The history of childhood psychopathy exemplifies how a once-popular psychiatric diagnosis can fall into disrepute within a relatively short span of time. Yet little scholarly attention has been paid to this process. This article argues that psychopathy not only played a central role in the development of child psychiatry in Denmark, but also emerged as an important political topic that brought deviant children into the public spotlight. Drawing on psychiatric case records, institutional documents, and other archival sources, the article examines how the diagnosis was applied, interpreted, and debated both in clinical practice and in the public domain. It also situates the Danish case in a broader international context and discusses possible reasons for the abandonment of psychopathy as a diagnostic category in child psychiatry.

This article argues that Walter B. Cannon's changing model of the body tracked the transformation of twentieth-century American liberalism from laissez-faire autonomy to managed adaptation. At stake throughout was the problem of reconciling the autonomy of parts with the integrity of the whole. His early studies of digestion-an invisible hand within-aligned with faith in spontaneous self-regulation. Progressive-era work on fear and rage reframed disruption as purposeful mobilization, while World War I exposed its limits in shock and collapse. In response, Cannon articulated homeostasis as a grammar of resilience-feedback, buffers, and margins of safety-that recast purpose as regulation rather than destiny. Read together, these shifts show science and politics moving in tandem: autonomy preserved through rule-bound coordination in complex systems. This article thus revises the two-track portrait of Cannon (scientist here, citizen there) and situates his "social homeostasis" within interwar democratic reform and New Deal liberalism, where institutional redundancy and welfare safeguards stabilized freedom under strain. Recovering this liberal physiology clarifies how Cannon offered a democratic counterpoint to authoritarian decisionism and neoliberal discipline, and why his idiom of care, redundancy, and repair remains salient for crises of the twenty-first century.

The introduction of water gas for house lighting in the United States posed a significant risk to public health in the years between 1875 and World War II. Water gas was superior to the older coal gas used as an illuminant but a far more lethal source of asphyxiation. Its introduction generated a battle between gas companies and public health experts who wished to prohibit use of the new gas. The companies prevailed; Massachusetts and later national data reveal that the victory of water gas led to death rates from asphyxiation that exceeded those from communicable diseases such as measles and scarlet fever. Yet by the 1920s economics incentives were reducing the role of water gas. and, as gas use evolved from illumination to heating and cooking, the market focused gas companies on the danger that asphyxiations from faulty appliances might frighten away new businesses, a concern that was reinforced by public health experts and state and local regulation. In response, the American Gas Association developed appliance safety standards and a standard gas code that is the basis for all modern gas regulations.

Many accounts, autobiographical and scholarly, emphasize how volunteers portrayed their work in the mission established for fishers by British physician Wilfred Grenfell in Newfoundland and Labrador: as escapist adventure. Scholars have not studied women physicians or their motivations to volunteer, however. This oversight derives from their small number combined with lack of knowledge about this mission's distinction from the foreign medical missions and domestic frontier missions that drew many women physicians to permanent positions. This study therefore discusses two American physicians, Alfreda B. Withington (1860-1951) and Emma E. Musson (1862-1913), who volunteered for summer service with this mission in 1907 and 1909, respectively. Through their publications, biographical sources, and clinical accounts, it reveals the appeal to them of such temporary, accessible volunteer service as a working vacation that rejuvenated. Importantly, it counters the skewed perspective of contemporary accounts in which the connection of Withington and Musson to an international celebrity, Wilfred Grenfell, overrode fuller considerations of their own lives, careers, and experiences. Finally, this examination suggests possible differences in their volunteerism between women physicians and their male counterparts: along with other women professionals, medical women often incorporated volunteer vacation experience into a continuum of similar endeavors in their careers.

When asked why nearly all doctors refer their breech cases to surgery, despite non-surgical breech birth being permitted throughout the United States, an obstetrician will likely cite the Term Breech Trial (TBT). This study, conducted in 2000, decisively concluded that planned cesarean delivery is safer than vaginal breech delivery. However, a review of the literature suggests that the decline of vaginal breech deliveries was a long time in the making. From the 1950s, once the perceived risks of breech births were accepted as a fact, numerous studies advocated more liberal use of cesarean delivery for breech babies and suggested strategies to limit vaginal breech births. By the late 1970s, as the majority of breech patients underwent surgery, a vicious cycle of collective forgetting began. Hospitals and medical training programs abandoned the non-surgical option, leaving younger generations of unskilled doctors reluctant to perform the complex procedure. As health organizations criticized the overuse of cesarean sections in the ensuing decades, obstetricians faced a growing dilemma in breech management, continuing to perform surgeries even while questioning their benefits. The 2000 study sanctioned this existing state of practice, which had been evolving over decades and in which collective forgetting played a crucial part.

This paper offers the first case study of Phospho-Energon - an early twentieth-century Swedish patent medicine believed to cure nervousness. Using a large dataset of newspaper advertisements, it explores how the product was presented through scientific and medical language, which drew upon a range of visual and verbal rhetoric to convince consumers of its benefits. It finds that pseudoscientific discourse focusing on self-help was regularly used to sell Phospho-Energon, with consumers warned that their nerves were "not allowed to fail" and required "protection" in order to remain healthy. Furthermore, the "science" supporting this discourse gradually shifted over time as neurosis replaced neurasthenia as a diagnostic category and the concept of spring lethargy became popularised. Overall, this study argues that Phospho-Energon stands as an important example of how partial scientific/medical claims can be used as a rhetorical device to sell products to consumers looking for a quick-fix cure for their perceived mental health conditions.

During the mid-twentieth century, the Soviet Union developed ambitious hygiene standards for clean air that were grounded in extremely sensitive methods of physiological research. As Western experts sought to develop universal standards for environmental regulation, Soviet hygiene research posed a challenge. This article examines the discussions surrounding the Soviet approach at international conferences on air pollution and industrial hygiene during the mid-twentieth century. The article shows that although the Soviet approach was rejected especially by United States experts, many of its qualities resonated with the ongoing discussions about environmental health in the US. The sensitive and holistic methods of the Soviets were compelling in the effort to reveal the most subtle effects environments had on human health. This article shows how the rejection of Soviet standards stemmed not from different scientific methods but from the differences in the overall ideals of environmental regulation. I argue that Soviet hygiene can be seen as an extreme version of technocratic expertise, and its failure highlights the limits of scientific expertise in managing environmental pollution.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, commercialized reproductive technologies experienced a reputational crisis as news about the hormonal birth control pill's possible side effects reportedly caused 18-30% of women to stop taking it. While secondary literature has followed patients' and legislatures' actions, few histories have focused on physicians' responses. How did physicians manage this public crisis of confidence? This article contributes to existing literature through a backstage look at the work of Elizabeth B. Connell (1925-2018), whose wide-ranging career in medicine, academia, government, industry consulting, and popular writing embroiled her at the center of these controversies. To counter critique from legislatures and consumer reformers, Connell became a mediator for medicine in the public sphere, dispensing select information and arguing for limits on others - for the patient's sake. If legislative inquiry's primary havoc was unleashing information, Connell would help the profession moderate it. Because Connell was a woman doctor whom health feminists who were her contemporaries denied was a feminist doctor, the existing scholarship has occluded her. This article reconstructs the contributions of this important and flawed doctor, illuminating how she contorted herself to suit her various public messages, constrained by her conflicting, dual identities as woman and doctor.

Decades before medical definitions of developmental normalcy revolved around statistical averages, nineteenth-century medical scientists identified a non-statistical "normal" that cohered within racial groups but was not generalizable across them. Using early child medicine treatises and anatomical, physiological, and ethnological texts, this article argues that nineteenth-century child development science was a race-making enterprise. The first sections analyze texts on child development and disease, identifying the racial parameters of developmental norms and the developmental events most frequently associated with racial differentiation: cranial suture closure and puberty. The following sections argue that variable rates of development and the degree of synchronicity between mental and physical development produced racial hierarchies and threatened racial degeneration. By examining "ethnic" classifications of idiocy, in which developmental timing considered typical for Black children was pathologized in White children, this article argues that developmental disorder posed a threat to racial order. As Darwinian evolutionism introduced scientific and social concerns about the historical contingency of racial progress, the clinical management of child development acquired newfound importance as a safeguard for White racial purity. Joining histories of nineteenth-century child development science and antebellum medical cultures with disability history, this article offers a pre-history of "developmental disability" as a racial category.