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A Hospital of Their Own

Lisa Levenstein

in A Movement Without Marches: African American Women and the Politics of Poverty in Postwar Philadelphia

This chapter examines the publicly provided health care at Philadelphia General Hospital (PGH), which was of critical importance to poor African American women, who needed a safe and respectful place ... More

This chapter examines the publicly provided health care at Philadelphia General Hospital (PGH), which was of critical importance to poor African American women, who needed a safe and respectful place to care for their own and their children's medical needs. This hospital was the most successful institution in the city in terms of the quality of the services it provided and the loyalty it commanded from a wide range of citizens. As increasing numbers of African American women sought and received subsidized treatment at PGH, critics charged that its policies encouraged “illegitimacy” and irresponsible state expenditures. Yet these same policies played a vital role in encouraging and enabling working-class African American women to choose PGH over all of the other hospitals in the city and turn it into a place they called their own.Less

Maximalist Medicine at Walter Reed

in War's Waste: Rehabilitation in World War I America

This chapter reports that rehabilitation played a role in the shaping of the modern American hospital. Leo Mayer and other like-minded rehabilitation advocates supported state medicine rather than ... More

This chapter reports that rehabilitation played a role in the shaping of the modern American hospital. Leo Mayer and other like-minded rehabilitation advocates supported state medicine rather than state pensions. William Borden's most powerful argument for the creation of Walter Reed Hospital was that it would “reduce the pension list.” As Borden showed using the pension system numbers, additional medical services would cost the government less. In addition to the appliance shop, orthopedists at Walter Reed and Letterman General Hospitals supervised the construction of physiotherapy buildings, spaces outfitted for hydrotherapy, mechanotherapy, electrotherapy, massage, and exercise. The most crucial part of making these rehabilitation hospitals was the introduction of “curative workshops.” In general, rehabilitation hospitals such as Walter Reed and Letterman tried to decrease long-term involvement of the government in the veterans' everyday life through medicine.Less

Perspective: Actor Tristan Rogers on Changes in Soaps’ Industry, Audiences, and Texts

Abigail De Kosnik

in The Survival of Soap Opera: Transformations for a New Media Era

This chapter presents Rogers’ views about the many changes in soap operas during his stints on ABC’s General Hospital, in a role that has spanned almost three decades. Topics discussed include the ... More

This chapter presents Rogers’ views about the many changes in soap operas during his stints on ABC’s General Hospital, in a role that has spanned almost three decades. Topics discussed include the impact of the current economic crisis; the 1980s as the golden age of soaps; the advent of the Internet; and age as both the strength and the weakness of the daytime drama genre.Less

“What the Hell Does TIIC Mean?”: Online Content and the Struggle to Save the Soaps

Elana Levine

in The Survival of Soap Opera: Transformations for a New Media Era

This chapter presents an overview of the soaps’ range of online enterprises. It considers the fact that soap audiences have criticized many of these steps, demanding that writers, producers, and ... More

This chapter presents an overview of the soaps’ range of online enterprises. It considers the fact that soap audiences have criticized many of these steps, demanding that writers, producers, and networks better serve what fans see as the true nature of soaps. To examine these contentions, the chapter analyzes the character blogs of ABC Daytime. In particular, it examines the ways in which the blog of General Hospital (GH) character Robin Scorpio has served as a site of struggles between ABC Daytime executives, GH creative staff, and GH audiences. Such struggles offer insight into the tensions between daytime soaps and the audiences they are so desperate to maintain and grow, suggesting that the use of new media outlets in and of itself cannot save the genre.Less

From Daytime to Night Shift: Examining the ABC Daytime/Soapnet Primetime Spin-Off Experiment

Racquel Gonzales

in The Survival of Soap Opera: Transformations for a New Media Era

This chapter examines the development of General Hospital’s spin-off General Hospital: Night Shift (GH:NS) on SOAPnet. GH:NS experimented with the traditional U.S. soap serial format by airing once a ... More

This chapter examines the development of General Hospital’s spin-off General Hospital: Night Shift (GH:NS) on SOAPnet. GH:NS experimented with the traditional U.S. soap serial format by airing once a week for thirteen episodes in the first season and fourteen for the second. The ambitious goal for the producers of GH:NS was to gain new viewers, specifically the primetime cable audience, while testing the possible migration of daytime broadcast viewership to an original primetime series on SOAPnet. The chapter also considers the poor reception of the show’s first season compared with much stronger feedback for its second season.Less

Between asylum and community: DGH psychiatric nurses at Withington General Hospital, 1971–91

Val Harrington

in Mental health nursing: The working lives of paid carers, 1800s-1900s

The post-war history of mental health services is dominated by the shift from the mental hospital to the community; with a corresponding shift within nursing from asylum nurse to community ... More

The post-war history of mental health services is dominated by the shift from the mental hospital to the community; with a corresponding shift within nursing from asylum nurse to community psychiatric nurse. Within this broad history, however, what is often overlooked is the role of the DGH psychiatric unit which, sited in the local district general hospital and espousing an acute, episodic model of mental illness, was explicitly designed to break down the isolation and stigma of mental health care, and to integrate mental health patients and services with their physical counterparts. This chapter focuses on the role and experiences of nurses in one such unit, Withington Psychiatric Unit in South Manchester, which opened amidst a fanfare of publicity and optimism in 1971. It draws on the oral testimonies of eight psychiatric nurses and a number of other staff, augmented by documentary evidence, including two postgraduate theses written within a few years of the unit opening. The chapter explores how nurses both contributed and adapted to their new environment, forging a new professional identity, far removed from that of the traditional asylum nurse.Less

Communicating with children when a parent is dying

Cynthia W Moore, Michele Pengelly, and Paula K Rauch

in Handbook of Communication in Oncology and Palliative Care

When a parent with dependent children is diagnosed with a life-threatening illness, it is common for a significant part of their distress to be associated with worries about their children. While ... More

When a parent with dependent children is diagnosed with a life-threatening illness, it is common for a significant part of their distress to be associated with worries about their children. While there are not yet data to support a particular approach, it is important to highlight lessons learned from existing initiatives. This chapter draws on the clinical experience from two different programmes: one an innovative programme spearheaded by nurses at a regional oncology centre in South Wales, and the other a parent-guidance programme offered by child psychologists and child psychiatrists at a major academic cancer centre in Boston, Massachusetts. In the Welsh programme, parents have an opportunity to spend quality time with their children, while facilitating play as a means of helping children express anxieties. At the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center PACT (Parenting at a Challenging Time) programme, child psychiatrists and psychologists provide free guidance to parents with cancer about communication and children's coping.Less

The Medical Student

Sue Leaf

in A Love Affair with Birds: The Life of Thomas Sadler Roberts

This chapter examines Thomas Sadler Roberts’ medical education at the University of Pennsylvania in 1882, believing that natural history was not a gentlemanly vocation. Staying in Germantown where ... More

This chapter examines Thomas Sadler Roberts’ medical education at the University of Pennsylvania in 1882, believing that natural history was not a gentlemanly vocation. Staying in Germantown where his Aunt Cornelia Roberts’s family lived, Roberts was presented with an opportunity to put down a few roots in his father’s hometown by spending some time with his Quaker relatives. During his stay, Roberts showed his skill in memory. One noteworthy display of this skill was when he quoted a textbook verbatim on an oral exam. The rigors of medical school, however, led to Roberts neglecting his bird studies. His journals omitted anything about avian presence in Philadelphia. But his interest did not vanish entirely as during his second year, he accepted an invitation to become a member of the American Ornithologists’ Union. The chapter concludes by describing his residency at the Philadelphia General Hospital.Less

The Evolution of the Fan Video and the Influence of YouTube on the Creative Decision-Making Process for Fans

Emma F. Webb

in The Survival of Soap Opera: Transformations for a New Media Era

This chapter examines the development of video production and editing practices among General Hospital (GH) fans in a study of how fans use YouTube to distribute historic soap opera content. It ... More

This chapter examines the development of video production and editing practices among General Hospital (GH) fans in a study of how fans use YouTube to distribute historic soap opera content. It suggests that many GH viewers enjoy watching and analyzing soaps online, and gravitate toward websites such as YouTube because of its ease of use and the ability to watch clips uploaded by other fans (a feature not available on any of the networks’ own sites). YouTube makes the soap opera watching experience significantly more flexible.Less

Naturphilosophie and Physiology

John H. Zammito

in The Gestation of German Biology: Philosophy and Physiology from Stahl to Schelling

Schelling’s Naturphilosophie provided a powerful theoretical support system for the innovations in physiology that established biology as a special science in the early nineteenth century. He clearly ... More

Schelling’s Naturphilosophie provided a powerful theoretical support system for the innovations in physiology that established biology as a special science in the early nineteenth century. He clearly undertook – and was taken to be undertaking – a supercession of Kant’s philosophy of science in order to open the way for the “daring adventure of reason” necessary to create an empirical science of biology as a historical-developmental understanding of life forms. This chapter demonstrates the problematic relation of Kant to empirical physiology and medicine in this period and why the latter community of inquiry turned from him to Schelling. The crucial advocacy of Henrik Steffens marks this transition. Then the chapter explores Schelling’s engagement with Brownian medicine at the Bamberg General Hospital and then the University of Würzburg, culminating in the key journal Jahrbücher der Medizin als Wissenschaft. It concludes with a consideration of Ignaz Döllinger as a key mediator between the eighteenth-century gestation of biology, culminating in its embrace of Naturphilosophie, and the early nineteenth-century figures recognized as eminently engaged in a special science of biology, like Karl Ernst von Baer.Less

That Handmaiden Business

Lisa Yarger

in Lovie: The Story of a Southern Midwife and an Unlikely Friendship

This chapter discusses Lovie Shelton’s nursing training at Norfolk General Hospital (through the U.S. Cadet Nurse Corps) and early nursing experiences in the 1940s, when delivery room nurses were ... More

This chapter discusses Lovie Shelton’s nursing training at Norfolk General Hospital (through the U.S. Cadet Nurse Corps) and early nursing experiences in the 1940s, when delivery room nurses were little more than handmaidens to the doctors (often instructed, for example, to hold a laboring woman’s legs together to keep her from delivering before the doctor’s arrival). The chapter not only takes readers on an interesting historical side trip, but gives them a benchmark for gauging the significance of Lovie’s later career as a nurse-midwife attending home births by herself. The chapter also describes the highly routinized, medicalized hospital births at the time Lovie was in training and how birth in the U.S. arrived at this point. After graduation, Lovie worked for a country doctor and sometimes found herself attending deliveries of babies all on her own in homes. Wanting more training, she enrolled in the public health nursing program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she learned about nurse-midwives from visiting lecturer Laura Blackburn, a public health nurse-midwife employed by the state board of health in South Carolina. Lovie “caught on fire” to become a nurse-midwife herself.Less

1899: The Instituto Médico Nacional

Alexander S. Dawson

in Peyote Effect: From the Inquisition to the War on Drugs

While research on peyote accelerated in the United States, United Kingdom, and Germany during the last decade of the nineteenth century, Mexican scientists remained largely ignorant of the properties ... More

While research on peyote accelerated in the United States, United Kingdom, and Germany during the last decade of the nineteenth century, Mexican scientists remained largely ignorant of the properties of the cactus. This changed when Mexico’s Instituto Médico Nacional (IMN) sponsored a series of peyote studies at the turn of the century. In part, those studies relied on historical accounts and reports from government agents working in regions where indigenous peyotists lived. In part, they entailed experiments, first with a variety of animals and then with patients in the Hospital General de San Andrés in Mexico City. In contrast to their counterparts elsewhere, Mexican researchers lacked the capacity to extract mescaline from peyote, and they depended on solutions made from whole peyote buttons for their research. They were also much less inclined to experiment on themselves than researchers elsewhere, and they were more interested in the corporeal effects of peyote than its capacity to affect states of consciousness. In particular, they attempted to demonstrate peyote’s potential to be used as a heart tonic. Their work was ultimately undone by Mexico’s 1910 Revolution, which resulted in the closing of the IMN in 1915.Less

Affinities, Associations, and Projects of Charity

Alison Forrestal

in Vincent de Paul, the Lazarist Mission, and French Catholic Reform

Chapter 10 assesses the ways in which de Paul carried his preference for communal performance of Christian acts of piety and morality into associations that he did not found, promote, or run himself, ... More

Chapter 10 assesses the ways in which de Paul carried his preference for communal performance of Christian acts of piety and morality into associations that he did not found, promote, or run himself, so that he acted uniquely as a point of connection between three of them: the Lazarists, the Ladies of Charity of the Hôtel-Dieu hospital in Paris, and the influential Company of the Holy Sacrament. It uses three case studies to expose his interconnectedness, and his ability to capitalize on his relationship with each group in projects of charitable welfare: the provision of aid to war-torn regions of north-east France, the foundation of a galley hospital in Marseille, and the establishment of the General Hospital in Paris.Less

Bathhouse Daze

Andrew E. Stoner

in The Journalist of Castro Street: The Life of Randy Shilts

Shilts settles on concept that gay bathhouses in San Francisco are breeding ground for the emerging AIDS crisis and should be closed. Shilts’s reporting draws fire from gay community leaders who view ... More

Shilts settles on concept that gay bathhouses in San Francisco are breeding ground for the emerging AIDS crisis and should be closed. Shilts’s reporting draws fire from gay community leaders who view bathhouses as key component to sexual freedom of homosexuals. Shilts admits to coordinated effort to time his AIDS-related stories for highest impact, including forthcoming 1984 Democratic National Convention in San Francisco. Shilts breaks Chronicle story that Congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro will be first woman nominated for Vice President. Troubled relationship develops between Shilts and Dr. Mervin Silverman, the county health officer and Harry Britt, openly gay supervisor who succeeded Milk. Letters to the gay press cast Shilts as “uncle Tom” and sell-out. Bathhouse owners accuse Shilts of “advocacy reporting.”Less

Becoming the AIDS Scribe

Andrew E. Stoner

in The Journalist of Castro Street: The Life of Randy Shilts

Shilts joins The San Francisco Chronicle as its first openly gay reporter on the newsroom staff. Hired to cover the “gay beat” in San Francisco, Shilts also is given general assignment stories. ... More

Shilts joins The San Francisco Chronicle as its first openly gay reporter on the newsroom staff. Hired to cover the “gay beat” in San Francisco, Shilts also is given general assignment stories. Shilts coordinates Chronicle coverage of the deadly October 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. Newsroom colleagues overcome suspicions of the new “gay reporter” as Shilts lobbies publishers for non-discrimination policies and domestic partner benefits. Shilts picks up on rumors of a “gay cancer” affecting gay men in the Castro district. Reporting includes very first stories attempting to link exotic immune system related diseases with homosexual men in San Francisco and elsewhere. Shilts is becomes convinced the AIDS story is a major story and devotes himself nearly full-time to the subject.Less