Claire Litt // By the end of the 16th century sugar prices were within reach of the European middle class, and a dental crisis was upon them. The Portuguese colonized Brazil in 1516, establishing a sugar industry through the enslavement of African and Indigenous peoples. The effect was a dramatic fall in sugar prices in…
Tag: History of Medicine
Nursing, Social Drama, and the Coronavirus Pandemic
John A. Carranza // Coronavirus, or COVID-19, has disrupted daily life for people around the world as medical experts, scientists, and nations rush to halt the spread of this virus. In the United States, Americans have put their lives on hold to practice social distancing and quarantine when infected. Grocery store employees, delivery service workers,…
Selling Sex: Erectile Dysfunction Treatments, Consumption, and Culture
John A. Carranza // In January 2020, Governor Gary Herbert of Utah suspended an HIV prevention campaign that used state-related sexual innuendo on condom packages to promote safer sex. For example, “Don’t Go Bare” was written over a bear’s backside. The issue, at least for Governor Herbert, was the use of taxpayer money that utilized…
Listening to patients: learning from sobreparto
Emilie Egger // Imagine calling to check up on a friend who has recently given birth. Five weeks postpartum, she tells you she barely has the energy to get out of bed to take care of her baby. Because her family had moved to a new city for work—away from her support system—her partner couldn’t…
“Young people never are what they were in somebody else’s day.”: Sex Education, Margaret Mead, and History
John A. Carranza // On October 29, 2019, the Austin Independent School District’s Board of Trustees approved a new sex education curriculum that will teach students about gender identity and same-sex relationships, consent and interpersonal relationships, as well as abstinence-plus (abstinence is the best way to avoid pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections, but still conveys…
Review: Cesarean Sections & Risk: Ongoing Evolution of a Procedure
John A. Carranza // On September 19, 2019, the website Motherly posted an article entitled “These Birth Photos Prove How Beautiful Clear Drape C-Sections Can Be.” Heather Marcoux, the author, explained what “gentle cesarean sections” are and how they have come to transform the cesarean section procedure in contemporary medicine. Previously, the operation included physicians…
Bentham’s Auto-Icon
Lesley Thulin // Jeremy Bentham, one of the founders of modern utilitarianism, has an old saw about pushpin. In The Rationale of Reward (1825), a treatise on the legislation of discipline, Bentham invokes the nineteenth-century tavern game to weigh the relative virtues of recreational activities and art. Framing the issue in the terms of his…
Natural Birth: An Introduction
Jennifer Edwell // Recently, there have been a number of articles by health journalists and bioethicists critiqing the concept of “natural birth.” In these projects, writers investigate where the term natural birth comes from and how it affects the way people understand and regard birth experiences (see Martucci, 2018; Tucker, 2018). For example, in May…
Colonizing the Womb: How William Hunter’s Enlightenment-Era Gynecological Images Redefined Personhood
Jessica M.E. Kirwan // Pictures are received information. We need no formal education to ‘get the message.’ The message is instantaneous.-Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics. New York: Harper Collins, 1993.
Images of an Imagined Future: Photographing Deinstitutionalization in a Developing World
David Robertson // In the 1950s, the World Health Organization (WHO) engaged in a global effort to improve the treatment of institutionalized psychiatric patients. In the newly coined “developing nations” this support tended to target those in which a sizeable psychiatric infrastructure was already in place, including postcolonial nations like India and the Philippines. A…
