The Proceedings Of The 18th Annual History Of Medicine Days Conference 2009

This volume is the first one in a peer-reviewed series of Proceedings Volumes from the Calgary History of Medicine Days conferences, which are now produced with Cambridge Scholars Publishing. The History of Medicine Days are two-day Nation-wide conferences held annually in spring at the University of Calgary (Canada), where undergraduate and early graduate students from across Canada, the United States, United Kingdom and Europe give paper and poster presentations on a wide variety of topics from the history of medicine and health care. The selected 2009 conference papers that are assembled in this volume, particularly comprise the history of Ancient Medicine, Canadiana, Eugenics, Military Medicine, Public Health, Surgery, Diseases, as well as Sex and Gender perspectives. Distinguished Professor of Biology and Chair of the History of Biology Program at Washington University in St. Louis (USA), Dr. Garland E. Allen, held the 2009 keynote address at the conference. His topic “Evolution, Genetics and Eugenics: The Misuse of Biological Theory, 1900–1945” was largely based on an earlier article in the scholarly journal Endeavour. With the permission of the author and editors-in-chief of Endeavour, this article could be reprinted in the current volume where it represents the 2009 keynote address. This volume also includes the abstracts of all 2009 conference presentations and is well-illustrated with diagrams and images pertaining to the history of medicine.

This volume is the second in a peer-reviewed series of Proceedings Volumes from the Calgary History of Medicine Days conferences, produced by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. The History of Medicine Days is a two day, national conference held annually at the University of Calgary, Canada, where undergraduate and early graduate students from across Canada, the US, the UK and Europe give paper and poster presentations on a wide variety of topics from the history of medicine and health care. The selected 2010 conference papers assembled in this volume particularly comprise the history of Applications of Science to Medicine, Nursing, Public Health, Illness and Disease, Stigma and Gender, Neurology and Psychiatry, and Eugenics. The 2010 keynote address was delivered by Distinguished Professor of the History of Nursing and Public Health, Dr Geertje Boschma from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, and is reprinted in the current volume. This volume also includes the abstracts of all 2010 conference presentations and is well-illustrated with diagrams and images pertaining to the history of medicine.

The Proceedings of the Calgary History of Medicine Days represent a series of volumes in the history of medicine and healthcare that publishes the work of young and emerging researchers in the field, hence providing a unique publishing format. The annual Calgary History of Medicine Days Conference, established in 1991, brings together undergraduate and early graduate students from across Canada, the USA, the UK, and Europe to give paper and poster presentations on a wide variety of topics from the history of medicine and healthcare from an interdisciplinary perspective. The History of Medicine Days offers an annual platform for discussions and exchanges between participants over recent research findings, methodological perspectives, or work-in-progress descriptions of ongoing historiographical projects. This book brings together a number of reviewed and edited conference papers, comprising topics from historical medical classics, physicianship and the doctor’s role, military medicine, and disfigured bodies in anatomical and media perspectives. In addition, it includes the papers given by the conference’s internationally renowned keynote speaker, Dr Guel Russel. It further comprises all of the abstracts of the conference for documentation purposes and is well illustrated with diagrams and images pertaining to the history of medicine.

The Proceedings of the Calgary History of Medicine Days can be seen as a Series in the History of Medicine and Health Care that publishes the work of young and emerging researchers in the field, hence providing a unique publishing format. The annual Calgary History of Medicine Days Conference, established in 1991, brings together undergraduate and early graduate students from across Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom and Europe to give paper and poster presentations on a wide variety of topics from the history of medicine and health care from an interdisciplinary perspective. The History of Medicine Days offers an annual platform for discussions and exchanges between participants over recent research findings, methodological perspectives, or work-in-progress descriptions of ongoing historiographical projects. This book brings together a number of reviewed and edited conference papers, comprising topics from the history of health care systems, medical sciences, psychiatry and neuroscience, public health, and historical issues of gender in medicine. Furthermore, it includes the paper given by the conference’s internationally-renowned keynote speaker, Dr. Theodore M. Brown, Professor of History and Medical Humanities and Charles E. & Dale L. Phelps Professor of Public Health and Policy, University of Rochester, New York. It also comprises all of the abstracts of the conference for documentation purposes and is well illustrated with diagrams and images pertaining to the history of medicine.

From 1928 to 1972, the Alberta Sexual Sterilization Act, Canada’s lengthiest eugenic policy, shaped social discourses and medical practice in the province. Sterilization programs—particularly involuntary sterilization programs—were responding both nationally and internationally to social anxieties produced by the perceived connection between mental degeneration and heredity. Psychiatry and the Legacies of Eugenics illustrates how the emerging field of psychiatry and its concerns about inheritable conditions was heavily influenced by eugenic thought and contributed to the longevity of sterilization practices in Western Canada. Using institutional case studies, biographical accounts, and media developments from Western Canada and Europe, contributors trace the impact of eugenics on nursing practices, politics, and social attitudes, while investigating the ways in which eugenics discourses persisted unexpectedly and remained mostly unexamined in psychiatric practice. This volume further extends historical analysis into considerations of contemporary policy and human rights issues through a discussion of disability studies as well as compensation claims for victims of sterilization. In impressive detail, contributors shed new light on the medical and political influences of eugenics on psychiatry at a key moment in the field’s development. With contributions by Ashley Barlow, W. Mikkel Dack, Diana Mansell, Guel A. Russell, Celeste Tuong Vy Sharpe, Henderikus J. Stam, Douglas Wahlsten, Paul J. Weindling, Robert A. Wilson, Gregor Wolbring, and Marc Workman.

As this book shows, between 1910 and 1942, social feminists in New Jersey waged an unsuccessful campaign for legislation that would permit eugenic sterilization of ‘feebleminded’ and other ‘undesirable’ citizens. Church archives and religious periodicals described the conflict between Catholic and Protestant citizens regarding this issue. Reform-minded women persisted in their quest for such progressive state legislation despite repeated failures. Their number of potential voters was very small compared to the organized bloc of Catholic citizens who viewed such legislation as immoral and based on bad science, and threatened to unseat any legislator who supported such a notion. This insightful text highlights that public officials would only enact such laws when they were convinced that many citizens supported a particular eugenic goal and then would vote for legislators who satisfied this moral challenge. Public opinion was unprepared for such radical legislation in New Jersey, and legislators learned that to even consider a eugenic sterilization notion would be political suicide.

The present volume offers a systematic discussion of the complex relationship between medicine and paradoxography in the ancient world. For a long time, the relationship between the two has been assumed to be virtually non-existent. Paradoxography is concerned with disclosing a world full of marvels and wondrous occurrences without providing an answer as to how these phenomena can be explained. Its main aim is to astonish and leave its readers bewildered and confused. By contrast, medicine is committed to the rational explanation of human phusis, which makes it, in a number of significant ways, incompatible with thauma. This volume moves beyond the binary opposition between ‘rational’ and ‘non-rational’ modes of thinking, by focusing on instances in which the paradox is construed with direct reference to established medical sources and beliefs or, inversely, on cases in which medical discourse allows space for wonder and admiration. Its aim is to show that thauma, rather than present a barrier, functions as a concept which effectively allows for the dialogue between medicine and paradoxography in the ancient world.