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In wartime Harlem, liberal mental health professionals, eager to serve the black freedom struggle, sought to depict the minds of troubled black children as human without reinforcing pernicious racial stereotypes. This paper examines how psychiatrist Viola W. Bernard and the Community Service Society struggled to portray the black community as both psychologically damaged and morally beyond reproach when publicly presenting the cases of her male and female clients. As a consequence, liberals helped champion the mental health needs of delinquent black males as a matter of racial justice while rendering young unmarried mothers effectively invisible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A list of books received for review is presented, including "Special Delivery: The Life and Times of the Celebrated British Obstetrician William Nixon," by Geoffrey Chamberlain, "Patients, Potions and Physicians: A Social History of Medicine in Ireland," by Tony Farmar, and "The Birth of the Mind: How a Tiny Number of Genes Creates the Complexities of Human Thought," by Gary Marcus.

Yet, as Smith explicitly states in the book's introduction, nurses were also complicit in maintaining many of psychiatry's racial, structural, and gendered hierarchies and power structures. Smith brings us up to 1942, when the American Psychiatric Association appointed its inaugural nurse consultant, nurse Laura Wood Fitzsimmons, who traveled throughout North America to document the state of psychiatric nursing and to issue recommendations for the field. Yet as Smith explains, the number of nurses trained as therapists was small and did not meaningfully affect overall patient care, as the 1950s so increased inpatient admissions in crowded psychiatric hospitals that relied heavily on restraints and somatic treatments. [Extracted from the article]

This article explores the history of what the German-American endocrinologist Harry Benjamin labeled in 1966, "the transsexual phenomenon." By mid-century, a growing number of individuals in both Europe and America were approaching physicians such as Benjamin searching for answers and means to change their bodies to match their gender. This phenomenon had started in Europe in the 1930s, when the Danish painter Einar Wegener underwent a series of operations that transformed a body defined at birth as male into the female body of Lili Elbe. The news of Elbe's transformation ignited interest and discussion among physicians as well as the public on the capacity science had to alter bodies to fit their intended selves. The case of Elbe combines the three main aspects studied in this article—the medicalization of the homosexual, the birth of the transsexual, and the physician–patient relationship in transsexual narratives. The study of physician and patient narratives allow us to see how the transsexual phenomenon was in fact created out of the intersection of interests from both physicians and their transsexual patients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the medical references in the writings of the German jurist and activist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs as a means of breaking new ground in diverse fields (including history of medicine, history of sexuality, and gender history). It demonstrates that the theory of bisexuality has a much deeper and more textured genealogy than has been hitherto appreciated and that dual-gendered bodies and minds must be better recognized as important through the nineteenth century. Specifically, it demonstrates that classifications and rhetoric of hermaphroditism, and other dual-gendered categories (e.g., sexual dualism and anatomical bisexuality), were deployed in diverse contexts through the period, often with little or no reference to the occurrence of genital ambiguities. Important discourses in embryology, utilized by Ulrichs, suggested that all individuals, in the earliest stages of fetal development, were hermaphroditic. In making an analogy among the ontogeny of sex anatomy, hermaphroditism, and the development of erotic preferences, Ulrichs sought to naturalize homoeroticism, rendering social and legal prohibitions untenable. His advocacy, however, was counterbalanced by the Prussian forensic expert Johann Ludwig Casper who had made some conceptual maneuvers similar to Ulrichs only couched in the rhetoric of pathology. Ulrichs was equivocal in his use of forensic works such as Casper's, condemning their authors but recognizing similarities with his own gender schema. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the 1940s, osteoporosis was a narrow diagnosis that referred to postmenopausal women with nontraumatic vertebral fractures. During and after the 1980s, it was invested with new meanings. Rather than being an aspect of the normal aging process, bone loss became pathological. New scanning technologies and the development of numerical scales hastened the process of change. The lowering of the numerical threshold for the diagnosis resulted in a recommendation that virtually all elderly persons be screened and undergo treatment. The transformation of this diagnosis into a major health problem provides an illustrative case study of the interrelationships between perceptions of aging, the celebration of youth, gender, the role of the medical care system and the pharmaceutical industry, the commercialization of health care, as well as a variety of social, scientific, and technological currents. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Between the first (1952) and the third (1980) editions of psychiatry’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, depression emerged as a specific disease category with concrete criteria. In this article, I analyze this change over time in psychiatric theory and diagnosis through an examination of medication trials and category formation. Throughout, I pay particular attention to the ways in which psychiatrists and researchers invoked science in their clinical trials and disease theories, as well as the ways in which gender played an important but largely unspoken role in the formation of a category of depression. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Despite the multitude of seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century British medical publications regarding empire and health, Hans Sloane’s A Voyage To the Islands [of] Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers and Jamaica (1707) was the first to incorporate significant numbers of female and African patients among its printed case histories. Comprising some sixty-four pages of the introduction, this unique set of records affords scholars the rare opportunity to examine how patients (of both sexes and races, various ages, and all social levels) residing in a “torrid zone” were diagnosed and treated by an English physician during the 1680s. Sloane had expected to encounter illnesses vastly different from those found in England when he arrived in Jamaica, but after practicing medicine in Jamaica for over a year, he concluded that there existed very little difference in the manifestation of illnesses in different climates. Although some ailments were sex-specific and culture-specific, for the most part Sloane transgressed categories of gender and race by diagnosing and treating all his patients according to the same medical ideology. And although it did not directly challenge accepted medical views, Sloane’s Voyage revealed incongruities in dealing with such categories within the context of early imperial medicine. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The history of codes of ethics in health care has almost exclusively been told as a story of how medical doctors developed their own professional principles of conduct. Yet telling the history of medical ethics solely from the physicians’ perspective neglects not only the numerous allied health care workers who developed their own codes of ethics in tandem with the medical profession, but also the role that gender played in the writing of such professional creeds. By focusing on the predominantly female organization of the American Physiotherapy Association (APA) and its 1935 “Code of Ethics and Discipline,” I demonstrate how these women used their creed to at once curry favor from and challenge the authority of the medical profession. Through their Code, APA therapists engaged in a dynamic dialogue with the male physicians of the American Medical Association (AMA) in the name of professional survival. I conclude that, contrary to historians and philosophers who contend that professional women have historically operated under a gender-specific ethic of care, the physiotherapists avoided rhetoric construed as feminine and instead created a “business-like” creed in which they spoke solely about their relationship with physicians and remained silent on the matter of patient care. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Between 1900 and 1940, at least 100,000 individuals in the southern United States died of pellagra, a dietary deficiency disease. Although half of these pellagra victims were African‐American and more than two‐thirds were women, contemporary observers paid little attention to these gender and racial differences in their analyses of disease. This article reviews the classic epidemiological studies of Joseph Goldberger and Edgar Sydenstricker, who argued that pellagra was deeply rooted in the political economy of cotton monoculture in the South. The methods that Sydenstricker brought to epidemiology from early work on political economy obscured the role of gender inequalities in pellagra, and his focus on economic underdevelopment led him to ignore the prominent role of African‐Americans as pellagra's principal victims. Research methods and traditions, no less than more overt ideologies, played a role in maintaining the subordinate social position of women and African‐Americans in the southern United States. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]