David Robertson // Over the last twenty years, considerable scholarly contributions have been made to the history of psychiatry. We have had historical analyses of the concept of “nerves” and “neurasthenia,” of “trauma” and the emergence of diagnoses such as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.[1] Historians have examined the material settings of neuropsychiatric efforts to localize brain…
Tag: History
Don Pedro Jaramillo and Curanderismo: Healing, Faith, and Community in South Texas
John A. Carranza // “A man who didn’t have much faith in Don Pedrito as a healer asked him for a remedy for the malady from which he suffered. The curandero gave him such a simple prescription that the man doubted his power still more. He asked him, ‘Are you sure this remedy will cure…
Ancient Medicine, Future Bodies
Calloway Scott // I want to make a case for looking back to the Corpus Hippocraticum—the Hippocratic Corpus—as a valuable site for thinking about the medical humanities and its future. The 60 odd medical treatises which make up the Corpus are really the works of many hands working at different times and places over the course…
Immigrant Organizing for Care in the Territory of Hawai’i: The Chinese Old Men’s Home
Julia Katz // How do non-citizens lobby the states and societies that exclude them for greater investment in the welfare of their communities? The case of the Chinese in post-annexation Hawai‘i reveals a unique moment in the midst of global Progressive reform when racialized migrants ineligible for citizenship mobilized claims of economic exceptionalism and autonomous care…
Review—Blue Dreams: The Science and the Story of the Drugs that Changed Our Minds by Lauren Slater
John Carranza // “I wrote this book because I have been taking psychotropic drugs for thirty-five years, with different drugs or drug combinations during different decades of my life.”[1]Lauren Slater’s frank disclosure of taking psychiatric medications and the effect they had, and continue to have, on her body opens her new book Blue Dreams:…
The Complicated History of the Visual Analog Scale: Part 1
Gabi Schaffzin // A few hours after knee surgery, a nurse or doctor might come into your room and ask how you’re feeling. They might show you a scale of 6 faces like this: Maybe a notched line like this: Or, they might show you this line. It will probably have two phrases on it:…
The Politics of Outing and AIDS Activism in the 1980s
John A. Carranza // “Archibald Anson Gidde, a prominent San Francisco realtor and social leader, died Tuesday at his home in Sea Cliff after a bout with liver cancer. He was 42./Mr. Gidde was a witty and flamboyant figure who distinguished himself by spearheading some of the City’s most notable real estate transactions…/A member…
A social and scientific history of hormones
Kathryn Cai // In her forthcoming book Aroused: The History of Hormones and How They Control Just About Everything (June 2018), Randi Hutter Epstein faces a daunting challenge in charting the history of hormonal science from the late nineteenth to the twenty-first century United States. Beginning with the freak shows of the 1890s, which Epstein…
Outing Oliver Sipple: The Health Effects of Being Outed as a Gay Hero
John A. Carranza // Last month, Love, Simon the film adaptation of the young adult novel Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda by Becky Albertalli was released. The movie has garnered recognition for being one of the first major motion pictures that addressed the experience of being a gay teenager struggling with his identity under…
Review-Bellevue: Three Centuries of Medicine and Mayhem at America’s Most Storied Hospital, by David Oshinsky
John A. Carranza Nothing is as important in American culture as the place of the hospital. Hospitals are spaces that we inhabit when we are at our most vulnerable and want to be healed. They are spaces where scientific knowledge manifests and intricate power relations occur. Perhaps this is why hospitals have been the locus…
