Bulletin of the History of Medicine最新文献

summary:

This article offers a historical perspective on diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in health professions. Historians have highlighted how workforce shortages have facilitated increased gender diversity in male-dominated scientific and clinical occupations. Less attention has been given to manpower as a motivator for enhancing racial/ethnic diversity. I explore the history of minority recruitment, retention, and inclusion initiatives in occupational therapy and physical therapy after 1970 and examine the evolving ways in which the longstanding underrepresentation of racial/ethnic minority health professions students and practitioners was recognized, mobilized, and instrumentalized in each field. I argue that broad-based manpower concerns, though often compelling initial motivators for action, were insufficient for sustaining successful and long-term minority initiatives, due to constant shifts in job market demand. Instead, this article shows that annual and institutionalized minority-specific awards and fundraisers were the most effective strategies for maintaining minority recruitment initiatives over multiple decades.

In the 1950s, the idea of sex change increasingly assumed the mainstay of public interest. As psychiatrists and psychologists developed new understandings of gender, the role of surgeons is often overlooked in the early history of sex reassignment. This article explores the work of one such doctor, Elmer Belt, a urologist based in Los Angeles. Between 1953 and 1962, Belt operated on twenty-nine male-to-female patients in the face of ethical and material obstacles. Working closely with Harry Benjamin, Belt developed a surgical technique that transplanted the testes inside the abdomen rather than involving full castration. He became involved in the famous case of Agnes Torres, on which other high-profile scientists based their invention of such seminal concepts as "passing" and "gender identity." Belt's utilization of Agnes as exemplary evidence to support his technique illustrates how and why testicular retention remained a heated topic in the development of transsexual science.

This paper offers the term "eugenic maternalism" to conceptualize how eugenic thought and practice was disseminated through Progressive Era materialist reform work. Focusing on the Better Babies Contests hosted by the New York City Babies Welfare Association from 1913 to 1916, I argue that the BWA Better Babies Contest provides an opportunity to broaden our understanding of the ways eugenic logic permeated maternalist discussions of child welfare. The contests incentivized mothers and children to participate in educational programming at local community centers, enlisting families in the project of assimilation. Within these spaces, eugenics operated as a reciprocal process of environmental reform, negotiated between reformers and immigrant women. Both participants and organizers acted within a eugenic framework in which their ability to control the environment would determine their future hereditary potential and capacity for citizenship.

Over the second half of the nineteenth century, thousands of Americans were admitted to schools for so-called idiotic children, later known as institutions for the feebleminded and linked to the Eugenics movement. While idiocy is often presumed to be the antecedent of intellectual disability, an analysis of the stories of three hundred children admitted to one such institution over a forty-year period demonstrates an unexpected diversity of appearances, abilities, and behaviors. Within the walls of the institution, idiocy was composed of children whose perceived abilities deviated from the expectations of their social position. Families further shaped the diagnosis of idiocy by negotiating the timing of admission for their children, influenced not only by personal factors, but by shifting educational and employment opportunities, and cultural tolerance of diversity. Consequently, idiocy became the broadest descriptor of disability during the nineteenth century.

Following the medical breakthroughs of Pasteur and Koch after 1880, the use of simians became pivotal to laboratory research to develop vaccines and cultivate microbes through the technique of serial passage. These innovations fueled research on multiple diseases and unleashed a demand for simians, which died easily in captivity. European and American colonial expansion facilitated a burgeoning market for laboratory animals that intensified hunting for live animals. This demand created novel opportunities for disease transfers and viral recombinations as simians of different species were confined in precarious settings. As laboratories moved into the colonies for research into a variety of diseases, notably syphilis, sleeping sickness, and malaria, the simian market was intensified. While researchers expected that colonial laboratories offered more natural environments than their metropolitan affiliates, amassing apes, people, microbes, and insects at close quarters instead created unnatural conditions that may have facilitated the spread of undetectable diseases.

Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-1893), the leading neurologist of his time, is best remembered for his studies on hysteria presented in clinical lectures at the Paris Salpêtrière hospital. Developing the concept of traumatic male hysteria after accidents in which patients suffered slight physical damage led him to advance a psychological explanation for hysteria. Traumatic hysteria is the context for a close reading of Charcot's "last words" based upon a final unpublished lesson in 1893. This case history concerns a seventeen-year-old Parisian artisan whose various signs of hysteria developed following a dream in which he imagined himself the victim of a violent assault. Charcot identifies the dream/nightmare as the "original" feature determining traumatic hysteria. The dream sets in motion an overwhelming consciousness followed by a susceptibility to "autosuggestion" producing somatic signs of hysteria. Charcot's final lesson on dreams thus culminates his study of the psychological basis of traumatic hysteria.

Based on 180 censored letters and two pamphlets written by psychiatric patients committed to Jydske Asyl (Asylum of Jutland) in Risskov, Denmark, between 1895 and 1920, the authors give an account of how the patients experienced their stay at the newly established mental hospital in Risskov. In the first part of the article, the authors outline central themes. The letters and pamphlets describe how a large part of the treatment at the mental hospitals involved a significant amount of coercion in various forms. In the second part of the article, they outline the mental hospital's historical context to understand the institutional context in which the patients wrote their descriptions of everyday life. The authors focus on the ideas behind the treatments the patients experienced, which involved the ideals the psychiatrists formulated when Jydske Asyl was constructed and the reality of everyday life at the mental hospital.