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 article traces the remarkable transition of the Dutch neurosurgeons from a rather shielded group of specialists in the early 1950s to a publicly accountable professional community by the mid-1980s. It describes how the neurosurgeons aligned their specialty to the problems and sentiments of the welfare state. In doing so, they exchanged traditional notions of expert authority and doctor anonymity for public performances of expertise that enabled them to stage their specialty in a way that resonated with society and served their professional goals. During this professionalization process, they increasingly came to embody the public image they enacted, seamlessly blending strategic role-play with the genuine performance of professional identity. By analyzing the way the Dutch neurosurgeons adapted their expert performances to the changing rules of expertise in postwar society, the article addresses the entangled relationship between medicine, media, the state, and society in the second half of the twentieth century.

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.