Christa Teston
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780226450520
- eISBN:
- 9780226450834
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226450834.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
Uncertainty in cancer care is mitigated, albeit only in part, through medical evidence. But not all evidences are equally persuasive. What materials and methods, therefore, make some medical ...
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Uncertainty in cancer care is mitigated, albeit only in part, through medical evidence. But not all evidences are equally persuasive. What materials and methods, therefore, make some medical evidences mean more than others? What historical, political, economic, and ideological assumptions are built into the biomedical backstage’s evidential practices? This book seeks to answer such questions by investigating the inventive ways humans and nonhumans work together to manufacture medical evidence. Each chapter analyzes one specific scientific method for negotiating medical uncertainty in cancer care: evidential visualization, evidential assessment, evidential synthesis, and evidential computation. Case studies unveil how practitioners, researchers, and policy-makers rely on technically sophisticated visualization techniques to evince and make decisions about disease, mobilize inferential statistics to assess a drug’s effectiveness, synthesize hundreds of clinical trials to compose a cancer-screening recommendation, and compute and commoditize genetic material. Analyses rely on theories in material feminism while reanimating classical and contemporary constructs in rhetorical theory (e.g., kairos, enthymeme, poiesis, boundary objects, phronesis). After propping open cancer care’s black boxes, biomedicine is characterized as a practice that requires rhetorical skill—including the capacity to attune to and dwell with constantly changing phenomena. The book concludes by advocating for an ethic of care that pushes back against the fetishization of certainty and, in its stead, honors both bodily flux and human fragility.Less
Uncertainty in cancer care is mitigated, albeit only in part, through medical evidence. But not all evidences are equally persuasive. What materials and methods, therefore, make some medical evidences mean more than others? What historical, political, economic, and ideological assumptions are built into the biomedical backstage’s evidential practices? This book seeks to answer such questions by investigating the inventive ways humans and nonhumans work together to manufacture medical evidence. Each chapter analyzes one specific scientific method for negotiating medical uncertainty in cancer care: evidential visualization, evidential assessment, evidential synthesis, and evidential computation. Case studies unveil how practitioners, researchers, and policy-makers rely on technically sophisticated visualization techniques to evince and make decisions about disease, mobilize inferential statistics to assess a drug’s effectiveness, synthesize hundreds of clinical trials to compose a cancer-screening recommendation, and compute and commoditize genetic material. Analyses rely on theories in material feminism while reanimating classical and contemporary constructs in rhetorical theory (e.g., kairos, enthymeme, poiesis, boundary objects, phronesis). After propping open cancer care’s black boxes, biomedicine is characterized as a practice that requires rhetorical skill—including the capacity to attune to and dwell with constantly changing phenomena. The book concludes by advocating for an ethic of care that pushes back against the fetishization of certainty and, in its stead, honors both bodily flux and human fragility.
Jeremy A. Greene, Flurin Condrau, and Elizabeth Siegel Watkins (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780226390734
- eISBN:
- 9780226390901
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226390901.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
Histories of medicine in the twentieth century are often illustrated with specific pharmaceuticals: antibiotics that defeated infectious diseases, vaccines that prevented childhood diseases, ...
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Histories of medicine in the twentieth century are often illustrated with specific pharmaceuticals: antibiotics that defeated infectious diseases, vaccines that prevented childhood diseases, antineoplastic drugs that fought cancers, cardiovascular drugs that helped stem the epidemic of heart disease, immuno-suppressants that made complex organ transplants possible, psychotropic drugs that controlled the demons of psychosis and lifted the veil of depression. These stories have become familiar catechisms of the biomedical present: they suggest sudden and dramatic forms of social change that followed in the wake of a series of magic bullets discovered over the course of the twentieth century. The collected essays of this volume seek to challenge the linearity of this historical narrative, provide thicker descriptions of the process of therapeutic transformation, and explore the complex relationships between medicines and social change. Working on three continents and touching upon the lived experiences of patients and physicians, consumers and providers, marketers and regulators, and many other actors and agents, the contributors to this volume cumulatively reveal the tensions between universal claims of therapeutic knowledge and the specificity of local sites in which they are put into practice. Collectively they ask: what is revolutionary about therapeutics?Less
Histories of medicine in the twentieth century are often illustrated with specific pharmaceuticals: antibiotics that defeated infectious diseases, vaccines that prevented childhood diseases, antineoplastic drugs that fought cancers, cardiovascular drugs that helped stem the epidemic of heart disease, immuno-suppressants that made complex organ transplants possible, psychotropic drugs that controlled the demons of psychosis and lifted the veil of depression. These stories have become familiar catechisms of the biomedical present: they suggest sudden and dramatic forms of social change that followed in the wake of a series of magic bullets discovered over the course of the twentieth century. The collected essays of this volume seek to challenge the linearity of this historical narrative, provide thicker descriptions of the process of therapeutic transformation, and explore the complex relationships between medicines and social change. Working on three continents and touching upon the lived experiences of patients and physicians, consumers and providers, marketers and regulators, and many other actors and agents, the contributors to this volume cumulatively reveal the tensions between universal claims of therapeutic knowledge and the specificity of local sites in which they are put into practice. Collectively they ask: what is revolutionary about therapeutics?
Joan Judge
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780520284364
- eISBN:
- 9780520959934
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520284364.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Asian History
This book is an act of redemption. It retrieves a genre of text that has been banished to the margins of scholarly inquiry but that provides unparalleled access to the complexities of the past: the ...
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This book is an act of redemption. It retrieves a genre of text that has been banished to the margins of scholarly inquiry but that provides unparalleled access to the complexities of the past: the early Chinese commercial periodical press. Focusing on one particularly innovative example, Funü shibao (The Women’s Eastern Times), and on one of the most significant—and neglected—periods in modern Chinese history, the early Republic, it develops a methodology that both engages the full materiality of the medium and situates it within the arc of historical change. It offers a close reading of the journal’s cover art, photographs, advertisements, poetry, and discursive texts against one another, uncovering an unbounded space where text, image, and experience meet; where editors, artists, readers, and authors commune. Central to this shared space is the notion of “experience,” the meanings of which are refracted through the key tensions that underlie the journal: tensions between reform and commerce, everyday and epic agendas, male editorial strategies and female authorial tactics. Situating Funü shibao at the conjuncture of interrelated shifts in China’s knowledge, print, medical, commercial, and sexual cultures in the early twentieth century, the book further exposes productive aporias and messy hybrids that ideologically driven history has rendered invisible. It also recovers traces of the modes of reasoning, the look, and the stories of a cast of well-known, little known, and unknown historical actors, including a new demographic of Republican Ladies, all of whom were deeply engaged with the minutia and the monumentality of the twentieth century’s global transformations.Less
This book is an act of redemption. It retrieves a genre of text that has been banished to the margins of scholarly inquiry but that provides unparalleled access to the complexities of the past: the early Chinese commercial periodical press. Focusing on one particularly innovative example, Funü shibao (The Women’s Eastern Times), and on one of the most significant—and neglected—periods in modern Chinese history, the early Republic, it develops a methodology that both engages the full materiality of the medium and situates it within the arc of historical change. It offers a close reading of the journal’s cover art, photographs, advertisements, poetry, and discursive texts against one another, uncovering an unbounded space where text, image, and experience meet; where editors, artists, readers, and authors commune. Central to this shared space is the notion of “experience,” the meanings of which are refracted through the key tensions that underlie the journal: tensions between reform and commerce, everyday and epic agendas, male editorial strategies and female authorial tactics. Situating Funü shibao at the conjuncture of interrelated shifts in China’s knowledge, print, medical, commercial, and sexual cultures in the early twentieth century, the book further exposes productive aporias and messy hybrids that ideologically driven history has rendered invisible. It also recovers traces of the modes of reasoning, the look, and the stories of a cast of well-known, little known, and unknown historical actors, including a new demographic of Republican Ladies, all of whom were deeply engaged with the minutia and the monumentality of the twentieth century’s global transformations.
Joan Judge
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780520284364
- eISBN:
- 9780520959934
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520284364.003.0004
- Subject:
- History, Asian History
The nuance and insight of women’s writings is apparent in their discussion of issues related to women’s reproductive health. Chapter 4 probes the complexity of obstetrical and gynecological ...
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The nuance and insight of women’s writings is apparent in their discussion of issues related to women’s reproductive health. Chapter 4 probes the complexity of obstetrical and gynecological discourses in the early twentieth century, a period of creative and chaotic encounters between Chinese medical principles and scientific biomedicine. The chapter examines the full range of materials related to women’s reproductive health in Funü shibao. These include Bao Tianxiao’s editorial promotion of a new biomedical imperative, advertisements for pharmaceutical products targeting women’s health, articles by obstetrical experts, and accounts of experience by women authors. The chapter highlights three tensions in the medical discourse: between reform and commerce, between experience and expertise, and between male constructions of pathologically modest women and women’s own graphically candid writings on childbirth, menstruation, and breast health.Less
The nuance and insight of women’s writings is apparent in their discussion of issues related to women’s reproductive health. Chapter 4 probes the complexity of obstetrical and gynecological discourses in the early twentieth century, a period of creative and chaotic encounters between Chinese medical principles and scientific biomedicine. The chapter examines the full range of materials related to women’s reproductive health in Funü shibao. These include Bao Tianxiao’s editorial promotion of a new biomedical imperative, advertisements for pharmaceutical products targeting women’s health, articles by obstetrical experts, and accounts of experience by women authors. The chapter highlights three tensions in the medical discourse: between reform and commerce, between experience and expertise, and between male constructions of pathologically modest women and women’s own graphically candid writings on childbirth, menstruation, and breast health.
Roger Cooter and Claudia Stein
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- October 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780300186635
- eISBN:
- 9780300189438
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- DOI:
- 10.12987/yale/9780300186635.003.0001
- Subject:
- History, Historiography
This introductory chapter discusses the theme of this volume, which is about history writing in the age of biomedicine. The volume presents an analysis about the history of medicine. It suggests a ...
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This introductory chapter discusses the theme of this volume, which is about history writing in the age of biomedicine. The volume presents an analysis about the history of medicine. It suggests a history writing that stretches to epistemic levels and discusses the importance of understanding the unspoken sensitivities or below-the-radar values and ideals of the present through which history writing is articulated.Less
This introductory chapter discusses the theme of this volume, which is about history writing in the age of biomedicine. The volume presents an analysis about the history of medicine. It suggests a history writing that stretches to epistemic levels and discusses the importance of understanding the unspoken sensitivities or below-the-radar values and ideals of the present through which history writing is articulated.
Roger Cooter and Claudia Stein
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- October 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780300186635
- eISBN:
- 9780300189438
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- DOI:
- 10.12987/yale/9780300186635.003.0004
- Subject:
- History, Historiography
This chapter presents an analysis of an essay which aimed to summarize and problematize the enormous importance that came to be attached to the human body in the field of humanities during the 1980s ...
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This chapter presents an analysis of an essay which aimed to summarize and problematize the enormous importance that came to be attached to the human body in the field of humanities during the 1980s and 1990s. It discusses the changing sociopolitical and socioeconomic context of biomedicine and biotechnology and offers a commentary on Paolo Palladino's review of Medicine in the Twentieth Century. It also considers the influence of Michel Foucault's anti-essentialist take on the body on the ground for writing the history of the body. This chapter also considers the essentialist re-animation of the body in post-modernity.Less
This chapter presents an analysis of an essay which aimed to summarize and problematize the enormous importance that came to be attached to the human body in the field of humanities during the 1980s and 1990s. It discusses the changing sociopolitical and socioeconomic context of biomedicine and biotechnology and offers a commentary on Paolo Palladino's review of Medicine in the Twentieth Century. It also considers the influence of Michel Foucault's anti-essentialist take on the body on the ground for writing the history of the body. This chapter also considers the essentialist re-animation of the body in post-modernity.
John Paul DiMoia
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780804784115
- eISBN:
- 9780804786133
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804784115.003.0002
- Subject:
- History, Asian History
This chapter considers the question of biomedicine versus traditional practice in Korea, tracing the gradual marginalization of the latter category by successive foreign regimes, first Japanese, and ...
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This chapter considers the question of biomedicine versus traditional practice in Korea, tracing the gradual marginalization of the latter category by successive foreign regimes, first Japanese, and subsequently American. Focusing on the life of one traditional hanuihak (traditional Korean medicine) practitioner, Byun Sang-hun, the chapter illustrates how this figure would be replaced by a younger generation of biomedically trained medical professionals, even as Mr. Byung would remain a powerful symbol of Korean nationalism.Less
This chapter considers the question of biomedicine versus traditional practice in Korea, tracing the gradual marginalization of the latter category by successive foreign regimes, first Japanese, and subsequently American. Focusing on the life of one traditional hanuihak (traditional Korean medicine) practitioner, Byun Sang-hun, the chapter illustrates how this figure would be replaced by a younger generation of biomedically trained medical professionals, even as Mr. Byung would remain a powerful symbol of Korean nationalism.
Todd A. Henry
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- September 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780520276550
- eISBN:
- 9780520958418
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520276550.003.0005
- Subject:
- History, Asian History
This chapter examines how seasonal cleanups and other neighborhood campaigns aimed to link the health of individual bodies to that of the larger collective. It argues that police enforcement of ...
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This chapter examines how seasonal cleanups and other neighborhood campaigns aimed to link the health of individual bodies to that of the larger collective. It argues that police enforcement of sanitary regulations and popular resistance to biomedical treatments produced considerable obstacles in institutionalizing a viable system of public health. In response, Japanese colonialists anxiously demonstrated that expatriates warded off contagious diseases far less successfully than allegedly less hygienic Koreans, while Korean nationalists eagerly exposed how the latter succumbed to death at a comparatively higher rate than the former. Although neither campaign managed to cure the diseased city, their combined efforts cast an increasingly wide net of power across the Keijō's neighborhoods, one that few subalterns could ever fully escape.Less
This chapter examines how seasonal cleanups and other neighborhood campaigns aimed to link the health of individual bodies to that of the larger collective. It argues that police enforcement of sanitary regulations and popular resistance to biomedical treatments produced considerable obstacles in institutionalizing a viable system of public health. In response, Japanese colonialists anxiously demonstrated that expatriates warded off contagious diseases far less successfully than allegedly less hygienic Koreans, while Korean nationalists eagerly exposed how the latter succumbed to death at a comparatively higher rate than the former. Although neither campaign managed to cure the diseased city, their combined efforts cast an increasingly wide net of power across the Keijō's neighborhoods, one that few subalterns could ever fully escape.
Stephen T. Casper
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- September 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780719091926
- eISBN:
- 9781781706992
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719091926.003.0004
- Subject:
- History, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
The culture of British medicine had changed after World War I. Medicine was slowly becoming more centralised in both governance by the British state but also in the local organisation of hospital ...
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The culture of British medicine had changed after World War I. Medicine was slowly becoming more centralised in both governance by the British state but also in the local organisation of hospital practice. Medicine had also become more technologically complex. Moreover, the specialist, especially to young aspirant doctors, appeared an ever more reasonable figure. For these reasons and others, much about interwar British culture emerges to us through an international perspective, and this is especially true of British neurology in the interwar period.Less
The culture of British medicine had changed after World War I. Medicine was slowly becoming more centralised in both governance by the British state but also in the local organisation of hospital practice. Medicine had also become more technologically complex. Moreover, the specialist, especially to young aspirant doctors, appeared an ever more reasonable figure. For these reasons and others, much about interwar British culture emerges to us through an international perspective, and this is especially true of British neurology in the interwar period.
Stephen T. Casper
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- September 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780719091926
- eISBN:
- 9781781706992
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719091926.003.0005
- Subject:
- History, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
Neurology's twin programme – its scientific research and clinical practice – never found an easy alliance. The clinical work, the research, and the bureaucratic features and administrative needs of ...
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Neurology's twin programme – its scientific research and clinical practice – never found an easy alliance. The clinical work, the research, and the bureaucratic features and administrative needs of both, often appeared disjointed. Indeed, by the 1950s, the neurologists experienced real struggles with both the organisation of medicine and the opportunities for research. To the generation of neurologists who had made their names in the interwar period and were reaching retirement age, younger generations appeared somewhat adrift and perhaps even resentful. To most neurologists in the 1950s, the field appeared to be in decline, a professional discourse that was perhaps exaggerated by similar complaints in North America. The reality, however, was more complicated.Less
Neurology's twin programme – its scientific research and clinical practice – never found an easy alliance. The clinical work, the research, and the bureaucratic features and administrative needs of both, often appeared disjointed. Indeed, by the 1950s, the neurologists experienced real struggles with both the organisation of medicine and the opportunities for research. To the generation of neurologists who had made their names in the interwar period and were reaching retirement age, younger generations appeared somewhat adrift and perhaps even resentful. To most neurologists in the 1950s, the field appeared to be in decline, a professional discourse that was perhaps exaggerated by similar complaints in North America. The reality, however, was more complicated.
