By tucking themselves away in the corners of beds and the folds of clothes, insects have long evolved alongside humans. […]
Sex on the Border: Policing Women in Red Light Districts
In 2001, a Dallas Observer reporter stepped into a shadowy, smoke-filled room and narrowed his eyes to see through the […]
Metaphors and Malignancy in Senator McCain’s Cancer Diagnosis
When my grandmother died from a mucosal melanoma (a form of skin cancer) in 2015, I sat around with my […]
Whose Body Is it Anyway? Decolonizing Narratives of Aboriginal Prisoners’ Health
When the British colonized Western Australia in 1829, they did so under the legal doctrine of “terra nullius,” or empty […]
On the Verge of a Nervous Breakthrough?: Interpreting Mental Illness
By Mary Elene Wood
A highway patrol officer straddles a woman who lies on her back by the side of a highway. His arm lifts high into the air, then, with what looks like substantial force, he strikes her in the face with his clenched fist. He does this over and over again. Early in July, news programs around the country quickly spread the story of a California Highway Patrol officer caught on videotape violently beating Marlene Pinnock, a 51-year-old homeless, presumably mentally ill, woman, along the side of a freeway in Los Angeles. The California Highway Patrol claimed that the officer was only trying to stop the woman from walking out into traffic, yet journalists across the U.S. decried, in one writer’s words, “the lack of training given to law enforcement officers to handle such people, even though officers all too often are society’s frontline mental health care providers.”
The Resurgence of the Horrific, Harsh, and Ugly Reality of Childhood Diseases: The Inevitable Risk of Forgoing Vaccinations
By Natisha Robb
In “When the Personal Really is Historical (and Scary!),” Jacqueline Antonovich, a gender and medicine historian, described her 21st-century experience with pertussis, a.k.a. whooping cough, an extremely contagious “good old-fashioned Oregon Trail disease” that recently reemerged since its near eradication in the 1970s. While Antonovich suggests a recent surge in the anti-vaccine movement, records unveil a history fraught with ongoing controversy. Before vaccinations became a childhood rite of passage, every family knew someone who lost a child to a now vaccine-preventable disease. Yet despite the magnitude of casualties from smallpox, measles, polio, rubella, diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis in populations lacking herd immunity, vulnerable communities did not always welcome vaccination campaigns with open arms.
A Tale of Two Diseases: ADHD and Neurasthenia
Consider two diseases: Disease A and Disease B. Children with Disease A are described as being “excitable” and “precocious,” at risk of being “overstimulated.” Thus, they are unable to balance “academic, intellectual, and physical growth.” [Schuster, 116] Children suffering from Disease B, on the other hand, are “active, restless, and fidgety” and have difficulty “sustaining attention to tasks, persistence of effort, or vigilance.” [Barkley, 57] At first glance, the symptoms of the two diseases in children seem oddly similar. Yet these are two wildly unique diseases that have never overlapped in time.
A Historian’s Guide to Summer – The Ice Cream Edition
Whether you’re overlooking the sandy shores of your local beach chowing down on a Gaytime, discretely licking the sides of […]
Institutions, Mental Health and Morality
I grew up on Hayling, a small Island off the coast of Hampshire, between the mainland cities of Portsmouth and Chichester. We moved there in 1968. It was a very rural island with several dairy and fruit farms as well as holiday camp physical and mental disabilities– differently abled children.
Gender, Medicine, and Horror, Oh My!
By Carrie Adkins
First of all, a disclaimer: in many ways, American Horror Story is not Nursing Clio material. For starters, the show features haunted houses, alien abduction, demonic possession, and an angel of death; it does not, in short, aim for realism or historical accuracy. The first season offered very little content related to Nursing Clio’s focus on gender and medicine in a historical context, and after just a few episodes, I found it uneven and disappointing. There were, at least, some interesting (and purposefully horrifying) highlights – part of the back story involved an unscrupulous 1920s abortionist, and Jessica Lange did an amazing job playing a very, very, very bad mother – but in general, that season quickly lost its scariness and became ridiculous and repetitive. But oh, the second season!
