The Secrets of Generation by
From theories of conception and concepts of species to museum displays of male genitalia and the politics of breastmilk, The Secrets of Generation is an interdisciplinary examination of the many aspects of reproduction in the eighteenth century. Exploring the theme of generation from the perspective of histories of medicine, literature, biology, technology, and culture, this collection offers a range of cutting-edge approaches. Its twenty-four contributors, scholars from across Europe and North America, bring an international perspective to discuss reproduction in British, French, American, German, and Italian contexts. The definitive collection on eighteenth-century generation and its many milieus, The Secrets of Generationwill be an essential resource for studying this topic for years to come.
Brought to Bed by
Based on personal accounts by birthing women and their medical attendants, Brought to Bed reveals how childbirth has changed from colonial times to the present. Judith Walzer Leavitt's study focuses on the traditional woman-centered home-birthing practices, their replacement by male doctors, and the movement from the home to the hospital. She explains that childbearing women and their physicians gradually changed birth places because they believed the increased medicalization would make giving birth safer and more comfortable. Ironically, because of infection, infant and maternal mortality did not immediately decline. She concludes that birthing women held considerable power in determining labor and delivery events as long as childbirth remained in the home. The move to the hospital in the twentieth century gave the medical profession the upper hand. Leavitt also discusses recent events in American obstetrics that illustrate how women have attempted to retrieve some of the traditional women--and family--centered aspects of childbirth.
The smallpox report : vaccination and the romantic illness narrative by
"After the COVID-19 pandemic, vaccination has become synonymous with an opaque biopower that legislates compulsory immunization at a distance. Contemporary illness narratives have become outlets for distrust, misinformation, reckless denialism, and selfish noncompliance. In The Smallpox Report, Fuson Wang rewinds this contemporary impasse between physician and patient back to the Romantic-era origins of vaccination. The book offers a literary-historical account of smallpox vaccination, contending that the disease's eventual eradication in 1980 was as much a triumph of the literary imagination as it was an achievement of medical Enlightenment science. Wang traces our modern, pandemic-era crisis of vaccine hesitancy back to Edward Jenner's publication of his treatise on vaccination in 1798, the first rumblings of an anti-vaccination movement, and vaccination's formative literary history that included authors such as William Wordsworth, William Blake, John Keats, Mary Shelley, and Arthur Conan Doyle. The book concludes with a re-examination of the current deeply polarized and polarizing public discourse about vaccines in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. By recovering the surprisingly literary genres of Romantic-era medical writing, The Smallpox Report models a new literary historical perspective on our own crises of vaccine refusal."-- Provided by publisher.
Vaccination : a history from Lady Montagu to genetic engineering by 
The Vaccination Controversy
Smallpox was for several centuries one of the most deadly, most contagious and most feared of diseases, which goes some way towards explaining the controversy that surrounded nineteenth-century efforts to eradicate it. On one side were the authorities and medical men who were keen to put an end to the widespread ravages of smallpox by the most expedient means, while on the other side were ranged those parents who objected to the compulsory infliction on their children of a procedure that had no absolute guarantee of success, and that represented a gross invasion of private life. In this book, Stanley Williamson traces the origins of the vaccination controversy from the introduction from the Orient by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu of the practice of inoculation, through the championing by Edward Jenner of the new method of vaccination using cowpox, and the successive Acts of Parliament that attempted to impose the practice on a sometimes recalcitrant populace. Using contemporary newspaper accounts and the writings of those close to the centre of the controversy, Williamson paints a vivid picture of the full-scale OCyvaccination warOCO that raged between the passage of the 1867 Compulsory Vaccination Act and the eventual relaxation of its demands just before the turn of the century. As well as offering a fascinating account of one of the earliest public health controversies, this book also raises issues relating to the balance between personal liberties and societal obligations that remain relevant for contemporary debates about infant vaccination.
Chemistry and Crime (Print Book) by
An illuminating view of forensic science in fact and fiction. Underlines the relationship between detective fiction and the development of modern forensics. Begins with examples of chemistry at work in the novels of crime fiction writers such as Arthur Conan Doyle and Dorothy L. Sayers. Recounts how the sleuthing techniques in detective fiction laid the foundation for the sophisticated analytical methods of modern forensic science. Relates case histories in which modern forensics played a keynote role.
Administrations of lunacy : racism and the haunting of American psychiatry at the Milledgeville Asylum by
"Whew! They going to send around here and tie you up and drag you off to Milledgeville. Them fat blue police chasing tomcats around alleys." 'Berenice in The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers A scathing and original look at the racist origins of the field of modern psychiatry, told through the story of what was once the largest mental institution in the world, by the prize-winning author of Memoir of a Race Traitor After a decade of research, Mab Segrest, whose Memoir of a Race Traitor forever changed the way we think about race in America, turns sanity itself inside-out in a stunning book that will become an instant classic. In December 1841, the Georgia State Lunatic, Idiot, and Epileptic Asylum was founded on land taken from the Cherokee nation in the then-State capitol of Milledgeville. A hundred years later, it had become the largest insane asylum in the world with over ten thousand patients. To this day, it is the site of the largest graveyard of disabled and mentally ill people in the world. In April, 1949, Ebony magazine reported that for black patients, "the situation approaches Nazi concentration camp standards ... unbelievable this side of Dante's Inferno." Georgia's state hospital was at the center of psychiatric practice and the forefront of psychiatric thought throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in America'centuries during which the South invented, fought to defend, and then worked to replace the most developed slave culture since the Roman Empire. A landmark history of a single insane asylum at Milledgeville, Georgia, A Peculiar Inheritance reveals how modern-day American psychiatry was forged in the traumas of slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction, when African Americans carrying "no histories" entered from Freedmen's Bureau Hospitals and home counties wracked with Klan terror. This history set the stage for the eugenics and degeneracy theories of the twentieth century, which in turn became the basis for much of Nazi thinking in Europe. Segrest's masterwork will forever change the way we think about our own minds.--EBSCOhost website.
Asylum on the Hill by
Asylum on the Hill is the story of a great American experiment in psychiatry, a revolution in care for those with mental illness, as seen through the example of the Athens Lunatic Asylum. Built in southeast Ohio after the Civil War, the asylum embodied the nineteenth-century "gold standard" specifications of moral treatment. Stories of patients and their families, politicians, caregivers, and community illustrate how a village in the coalfields of the Hocking River valley responded to a national movement to provide compassionate care based on a curative landscape, exposure to the arts, outdoor exercise, useful occupation, and personal attention from a physician. Katherine Ziff's compelling presentation of America's nineteenth-century asylum movement shows how the Athens Lunatic Asylum accommodated political, economic, community, family, and individual needs and left an architectural legacy that has been uniquely renovated and repurposed. Incorporating rare photos, letters, maps, and records, Asylum on the Hill is a fascinating glimpse into psychiatric history.
A History of Psychiatry by
"PPPP . . . To compress 200 years of psychiatric theory and practice into a compelling and coherent narrative is a fine achievement . . . . What strikes the reader most] are Shorter's storytelling skills, his ability to conjure up the personalities of the psychiatrists who shaped the discipline and the conditions under which they and their patients lived."--Ray Monk The Mail on Sunday magazine, U.K. "An opinionated, anecdote-rich history. . . . While psychiatrists may quibble, and Freudians and other psychoanalysts will surely squawk, those without a vested interest will be thoroughly entertained and certainly enlightened."--Kirkus Reviews. "Shorter tells his story with immense panache, narrative clarity, and genuinely deep erudition."--Roy Porter Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine. In A History of Psychiatry, Edward Shorter shows us the harsh, farcical, and inspiring realities of society's changing attitudes toward and attempts to deal with its mentally ill and the efforts of generations of scientists and physicians to ease their suffering. He paints vivid portraits of psychiatry's leading historical figures and pulls no punches in assessing their roles in advancing or sidetracking our understanding of the origins of mental illness. Shorter also identifies the scientific and cultural factors that shaped the development of psychiatry. He reveals the forces behind the unparalleled sophistication of psychiatry in Germany during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as well as the emergence of the United States as the world capital of psychoanalysis. This engagingly written, thoroughly researched, and fiercely partisan account is compelling reading for anyone with a personal, intellectual, or professional interest in psychiatry.
The Guarded Gate by
NAMED ONE OF THE "100 NOTABLE BOOKS OF THE YEAR" BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW "An extraordinary book, I can't recommend it highly enough." -Whoopi Goldberg, The View By the widely celebrated New York Times bestselling author of Last Call--the powerful, definitive, and timely account of how the rise of eugenics helped America close the immigration door to "inferiors" in the 1920s. A forgotten, dark chapter of American history with implications for the current day, The Guarded Gate tells the story of the scientists who argued that certain nationalities were inherently inferior, providing the intellectual justification for the harshest immigration law in American history. Brandished by the upper class Bostonians and New Yorkers--many of them progressives--who led the anti-immigration movement, the eugenic arguments helped keep hundreds of thousands of Jews, Italians, and other unwanted groups out of the US for more than 40 years. Over five years in the writing, The Guarded Gate tells the complete story from its beginning in 1895, when Henry Cabot Lodge and other Boston Brahmins launched their anti-immigrant campaign. In 1921, Vice President Calvin Coolidge declared that "biological laws" had proven the inferiority of southern and eastern Europeans; the restrictive law was enacted three years later. In his characteristic style, both lively and authoritative, Okrent brings to life the rich cast of characters from this time, including Lodge's closest friend, Theodore Roosevelt; Charles Darwin's first cousin, Francis Galton, the idiosyncratic polymath who gave life to eugenics; the fabulously wealthy and profoundly bigoted Madison Grant, founder of the Bronx Zoo, and his best friend, H. Fairfield Osborn, director of the American Museum of Natural History; Margaret Sanger, who saw eugenics as a sensible adjunct to her birth control campaign; and Maxwell Perkins, the celebrated editor of Hemingway and Fitzgerald. A work of history relevant for today, The Guarded Gate is an important, insightful tale that painstakingly connects the American eugenicists to the rise of Nazism, and shows how their beliefs found fertile soil in the minds of citizens and leaders both here and abroad.
Defending the Master Race by
Scholars have labeled Madison Grant everything from the "nation's most influential racist" to the "greatest conservationist that ever lived." His life illuminates early twentieth-century America as it was heading toward the American Century, and his legacy is still very much with us today, from the speeches of immigrant-bashing politicians to the international efforts to arrest climate change. This insightful biography shows how Grant worked side-by-side with figures such as Theodore Roosevelt to found the Bronx Zoo, preserve the California redwoods, and save the American bison from extinction. But Grant was also the leader of the eugenics movement in the United States. He popularized the infamous notions that the blond-haired, blue-eyed Nordics were the "master race" and that the state should eliminate members of inferior races who were of no value to the community. Grant's behind-the-scenes machinations convinced Congress to enact the immigration restriction legislation of the 1920s, and his influence led many states to ban interracial marriage and sterilize thousands of "unworthy" citizens. Although most of the relevant archival materials on Madison Grant have mysteriously disappeared over the decades, Jonathan Spiro has devoted many years to reconstructing the hitherto concealed events of Grant's life. His astonishing feat of detective work reveals how the founder of the Bronx Zoo wound up writing the book that Adolf Hitler declared was his "bible."
War Against the Weak by
Genetics is in the news. What's not in the news are its origins in a racist 20th-century pseudoscience called eugenics. In 1904, the U.S. began a large-scale eugenics movement that was championed by the nation's medical, political, and religious elite. Eugenics sought to eliminate social "undesirables" and was eventually copied by the Third Reich. Whites, blacks, Native Americans nearly everyone was subject to sterilization, castration, and in some cases, euthanasia. In the aftermath of world revulsion over Nazi atrocities, eugenics was reborn with a new name and new packaging: genetics. This is an explosive, detailed, and vigorously researched account of U.S. race science and its "enlightened" reincarnation worldwide as human engineering. Illustrations accompany this startling investigation of America's century-long attempt to create a master race through mass sterilization and human breeding programs.
Writing disability : a critical history by
"What accounts for the differing ways that individuals and cultures have tried to make sense of mental and physical disabilities? Can we see a pattern of change over time? Sara Newman examines personal narratives across a broad sweep of history--from ancient Greece to the present day--to reveal the interplay of dynamics that have shaped both personal and societal conceptions of mental and physical difference."-- Publisher's website.
