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This article contrasts women's auxiliaries as volunteers and fundraisers at a voluntary sanatorium and a community hospital in metropolitan Phoenix. Their experience highlights the rising importance of private investors in nonprofit health care. Nonprofit community hospitals depended on volunteer labor from women's auxiliaries to keep their doors open in the mid-twentieth-century United States. However, their position became subordinate to financial demands from bondholders—these (and other) financial influences eroded the social capital created by charitable labor. At Maryvale Hospital, one of the "eight-percenter" mortgage bond hospitals built across the Sun Belt during the early sixties, bondholders assumed much of the fundraising and advocacy activities reserved for women's auxiliaries. Once bondholders assumed the duties of women's auxiliaries, their profitability became the determinant for success in nonprofit health care. Their rise reflects a shift from the social capital associated with charitable volunteers to the bond markets necessary for modern metropolitan development.
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This article considers the establishment of the category of "hormone-dependent cancers," identified around the middle of the twentieth century as cancers sustained by particular hormones. A comparison of hormonal treatments for prostate cancer and those for breast cancer reveals that the genesis of "hormone-dependent cancer" as a biomedical category relied upon assumptions that cast androgens and estrogens as opposing ends of a gendered hormonal binary of health and disease. In the 1930s, cancer researchers claimed "female sex hormones" (estrogens) exacerbated breast cancer and "male sex hormones" (androgens) prevented it. In the early 1940s, Dr. Charles Huggins applied the opposite logic to the treatment of human prostate cancer, which he determined to be "hormone-dependent." As "hormone dependency" was also recognized in human breast cancer over the subsequent decades, estrogen claimed a prominent place in discussions of breast cancer's causation, diagnosis, and treatment. This close association between estrogen and breast cancer contributed to reinterpretations of both biomedical categories.
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This paper explores the experiences of working-class patients treated for tertiary syphilis at the Neurology Dispensary of the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and the Infirmary for Nervous Disease of the Philadelphia Orthopedic Hospital from 1878 to 1917. Using the twin lenses of medical history and disability history, it foregrounds the struggles of individuals whose physical condition cannot be reversed.
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The phrase "disease of civilization" and concomitant lexicons, such as "pathologies of modernization," frequently surface across public and global health discourses. This is particularly the case within the framework of cancer research in Africa. In this article, the authors trace the emergence of these grammars of progress at the beginning of the twentieth century as a biomedical lens through which to analyze and frame cancer in Africa. Arguing with Ann Stoler for a recursive understanding of colonial and postcolonial history, the authors follow in detail the lexical shifts and recursions across the twentieth century, as these grammars move from diseases of civilization to development and modernization. In tracing these lexical shifts, they place them within the broader understandings of Africa and the African body as an other against which Euro-America frames itself.