Reflections: A Conference on Children and “Imperfection”

By Adam Turner

Over the past weekend, I had the pleasure of participating in the Centre for Medical Humanities Imperfect Children conference at the University of Leicester. The conference included a wonderful mix of disciplines and both historical and present-day perspectives on the concept of “imperfection” and children. This usefully provocative focus led to an ongoing discussion during the two-day meeting about the definition of imperfection and how it relates to concepts like normality, health, and ability.

Sunday Morning Medicine

By Jacqueline Antonovich

-10 snack foods that started out as medicines.
-3 ways cooking has changed over the past 300 years.
-Did the Temperance Movement almost kill root beer?
-Do babies develop food allergies through damaged skin?
-Judge in UK authorizes a forced sterilization.
-Birth, infanticide and midwifery in early modern Scotland.

Sunday Morning Medicine

By Jacqueline Antonovich

-Coffee, the Viagra of the 17th century.
-Punishing children in Victorian England.
-Did Jane Austin novels cure WWI depression?
-LGBT history? There’s an app for that.
-Clowns have a history of being scary.
-How to cure a bubble boy.
-A brief history of men’s underwear (get it, brief?)

Let’s Talk About Gene Therapy

By Elizabeth Reis

It is exciting to read about promising new gene therapies that might make living with various disabilities easier or even render them extinct. Researchers at University of Massachusetts Medical School are working on a way to “turn off” the extra chromosome found in people with Down syndrome. If the gene therapy works as they hope, turning off the chromosome would mitigate some of the effects of Down’s. So far this possibility has only been glimmered in a laboratory dish, but ultimately the goal would be to turn off the extra chromosome prenatally, so that the brain would form without developmental and intellectual encumbrances.

Sunday Morning Medicine

By Jacqueline Antonovich

-Kosher lube is a thing now!
-Excellent salad advice from 1699.
-Disability activism through beer?
-The female fighter pilots of WWII.
-How depression went mainstream.
-How a wife should undress, circa 1930s.
-The delightful history of paper dolls.
-The summer of ’69 in New York City.