Sarah L. Berry // If you’re a female voter, thank a woman doctor. Without 19th-century female physicians, we might not soon be celebrating the 100th anniversary of suffrage. In 1849, Elizabeth Blackwell became the first woman to earn a Doctor of Medicine degree just as the women’s rights movement kicked off in Seneca Falls, NY….
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Write/Right About Your Body
Madeleine Mant // I teach Introduction to the Anthropology of Health to an exquisitely diverse group of second-year undergraduate students. The class is a gateway prerequisite to all upper-level health-stream courses, thus it necessitates a balance between the biological and sociocultural aspects of health anthropology. Students are exposed to the work of Gregor Mendel and…
From Healing to Feeling: Two Experiments with Electric Shocks
Pauline Picot // 2013. Lyon, France. A young woman is sitting on a chair. She has long, well-groomed hair and is wearing a denim jacket. She knows what is about to happen. She agreed to participate. There is a disposable camera in front of her. She hesitates for a moment. Then she suddenly presses the…
Environmental Neurodiversity and Systems Change
Neşe Devenot // Neurodivergent perspectives inspired two of the biggest environmental justice movements of 2019—Extinction Rebellion and Greta Thunberg’s “Fridays for Future”—and I don’t think that’s a coincidence. For her part, Thunberg garnered widespread media attention for linking her global impact to having Asperger’s, an autism-spectrum condition that Thunberg calls her “superpower.” According to Thunberg,…
Zombie Epic: Medicalized Politics on Screen
Erik Larsen // Of all the monsters populating modern culture, zombies have lurched into a dominant position in our television and film. Despite varied examples across media forms, one trait unites these mindless eaters: zombies are distinctly unhealthy. Whether decaying bodies or the hosts for a decimating plague, zombies incarnate our sense of health’s absence,…
Desire I: Desire and the Formulation of Bourgeois Subject
Chia Yu Lien// In this and the following posts, I would like to talk about the concept of desire—more specifically, the desire of the bourgeois subject, or in Lauren Berlant’s words, “capitalist subject” (2007, 779). I am not talking about desire as a primary physiological drive, such as the desire to breathe or to eat,…
Pat-a-caking One’s Way into the World of Blindness
Botsa Katara// “But he wouldnay get his fucking Dysfuckingfunctional Benefit man he would be lucky to get fucking re-registered … and the actual compen was a joke. Nay chance.” (Kelman 248) The epigram belongs to James Kelman’s Booker Prize winning novel, How Late It Was, How Late. Published in 1994, the novel documents the travails…
Part III: Keeping Up (Virginal) Appearances: Secrets, Morality and Women’s Sexual Health
Claire Litt // The Countess of Forlì, Caterina Sforza (1463-1509) is a woman whom history remembers primarily because of an apocryphal story recounted by none other than Machiavelli. In his Discourses, Machiavelli described a coup d’etat during which Caterina tricked her enemies into allowing her to regain entrance to her castle by leaving her children…
Reading Neurotica: Or, the Caregiver and Her Heartache
Lauren A. Mitchell // I am helping a group of medical students learn how to take a comprehensive sexual history with a colleague, inspired by the interview template that Fenway Health in Boston uses. This interview model expands on the usual “5 Ps of Sexual History Taking” (Pregnancy, Practices, Partners, Past History of…
Mid-Century Satyrs: Another Dead End in the Pathologization of Sexual Behavior
Brent Arehart // “The ‘stud’ suffers from a pathological need for excessive sexual intercourse, which can only be satisfied by one or more willing partners.” So wrote Dr. Franklin Klaf in 1966 in the opening pages of Satyriasis: A Study of Male Nymphomania. He then went on to make a case for the severity of…
