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Poliomyelitis, better known as polio, thoroughly stumped the medical science community. Polio's impact remained highly visible and sometimes lingered, exacting a priceless physical toll on its young victims and their families as well as transforming their social worlds. This social history of infantile paralysis is plugged into the rich and dynamic developments of the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. Children became epidemic refugees because of anachronistic public health policies and practices. They entered the emerging, clinical world of the hospital, rupturing physical and emotional connections with their parents and siblings. As they underwent rehabilitation,...
First place, Large Nonprofit Publishers Illustrated Covers, 2010 Washington Book PublishersNamed one of the Top Five Books of 2009 by Anne Grant, The Providence Journal This history of father-daughter incest in the United States explains how cultural mores and political needs distorted attitudes toward and medical knowledge of patriarchal sexual abuse at a time when the nation was committed to the familial power of white fathers and the idealized white family. For much of the nineteenth century, father-daughter incest was understood to take place among all classes, and legal and extralegal attempts to deal with it tended to be swift and severe. But public understanding changed markedly durin...
The first comprehensive history of the anti-diphtheria campaign and the factors which facilitated or hindered the rollout of a national childhood immunization programme in Ireland. Dwyer charts how this national goal was marked by conflict and tragedy and placed Ireland on the European frontline of the bacteriological revolution.
A collection of essays on the AIDS epidemic, by a leading feminist cultural theorist of science
Known as "The Great Killer" and "The White Plague," few diseases influenced American life as much as tuberculosis. Sufferers migrated to mountain or desert climates believed to ameliorate symptoms. Architects designed homes with sleeping porches and verandas so sufferers could spend time in the open air. The disease even developed its own consumer culture complete with invalid beds, spittoons, sputum collection devices, and disinfectants. The "preventorium," an institution designed to protect children from the ravages of the disease, emerged in this era of Progressive ideals in public health. In this book, Cynthia A. Connolly provides a provocative analysis of public health and family welfare through the lens of the tuberculosis preventorium. This unique facility was intended to prevent TB in indigent children from families labeled irresponsible or at risk for developing the disease. Yet, it also held deeply rooted assumptions about class, race, and ethnicity. Connolly goes further to explain how the child-saving themes embedded in the preventorium movement continue to shape children's health care delivery and family policy in the United States.
During the post-World War II "wonder drug" revolution, antibiotics were viewed as a panacea for mastering infectious disease. This book narrates the far-reaching history of antibiotics, focusing particularly on reform efforts that attempted to fundamentally change how antibiotics are developed and prescribed
In Science and Social Inequality, Sandra Harding makes the provocative argument that the philosophy and practices of today's Western science, contrary to its Enlightenment mission, work to insure that more science will only worsen existing gaps between the best and worst off around the world. She defends this claim by exposing the ways that hierarchical social formations in modern Western sciences encode antidemocratic principles and practices, particularly in terms of their services to militarism, the impoverishment and alienation of labor, Western expansion, and environmental destruction. The essays in this collection--drawing on feminist, multicultural, and postcolonial studies--propose w...
Original and compelling, Laura Briggs's Reproducing Empire shows how, for both Puerto Ricans and North Americans, ideologies of sexuality, reproduction, and gender have shaped relations between the island and the mainland. From science to public policy, the "culture of poverty" to overpopulation, feminism to Puerto Rican nationalism, this book uncovers the persistence of concerns about motherhood, prostitution, and family in shaping the beliefs and practices of virtually every player in the twentieth-century drama of Puerto Rican colonialism. In this way, it sheds light on the legacies haunting contemporary debates over globalization. Puerto Rico is a perfect lens through which to examine co...
How rabid dogs, the struggles to contain them, and their power over the public imagination intersected with New York City's rise to urban preeminence. Rabies enjoys a fearsome and lurid reputation. Throughout the decades of spiraling growth that defined New York City from the 1840s to the 1910s, the bone-chilling cry of "Mad dog!" possessed the power to upend the ordinary routines and rhythms of urban life. In Mad Dogs and Other New Yorkers, Jessica Wang examines the history of this rare but dreaded affliction during a time of rapid urbanization. Focusing on a transformative era in medicine, politics, and urban society, Wang uses rabies to survey urban social geography, the place of domestic...
"This anthology of original historical essays examines how social relations are enacted in and through computing using the twin frameworks of abstraction and embodiment. The book highlights a wide range of understudied contexts and experiences, such as computing and disability, working mothers as technical innovators, race and community formation, and gaming behind the Iron Curtain"--