Osiris
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Historical Article
Erecting Sex: Hermaphrodites and the Medieval Science of Surgery.
This essay focuses on "hermaphrodites" and the emerging profession of surgery in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Europe. During this period, surgeons made novel claims about their authority to regulate sexual difference by surgically ''correcting" errant sexual anatomies. ⋯ I argue that a close examination of medieval surgical texts complicates orthodox narratives in the broader history of sex and sexuality: medieval theorists approached sex in sophisticated and varied manners that belie any simple opposition of modern and premodern paradigms. In addition, because surgical treatments of hermaphrodites in the Middle Ages prefigure in many ways the treatment of atypical sex (a condition now called, controversially, intersex or disorders/differences of sex development) in the modern world, I suggest that the writings of medieval surgeons have the potential to provide new perspectives on our current debates about surgery and sexual difference.
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Historical Article
War neurosis, adjustment problems in veterans, and an ill nation: The disciplinary project of American psychiatry during and after World War II.
After World War II, the confidence of American psychiatrists was at an all-time high as a result of their successful participation in the war. When the incidence of mental breakdown in the American armed forces rose to unprecedented heights, new and effective psychotherapeutic methods were developed to treat the traumatic effects of the extraordinary stresses of warfare. ⋯ They first focused on aiding the reintegration of returning veterans. Later, they addressed the poor mental health of the American population as a whole, which they considered to be the consequence of faulty child-rearing methods.
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Historical Article
Pathways to human experimentation, 1933-1945: Germany, Japan, and the United States.
The history of human experimentation in the twelve years between Hitler's rise to power and the end of the Second World War is notorious in the annals of the twentieth century. The horrific experiments conducted at Dachau, Auschwitz, Ravensbrueck, Birkenau, and other National Socialist concentration camps reflected an extreme indifference to human life and human suffering. ⋯ Karl Brandt et al.), scholars have rightly focused attention on the nightmarish researches conducted by a small group of investigators on concentration camp inmates. Less well known are alternative pathways that brought investigators to undertake human experimentation in other laboratories, settings, and nations.
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Historical Article
Exploring the city of Rubble: botanical fieldwork in bombed cities in Germany after World War II.
In recent decades, the flora and fuana of cities have become the objects of the inter-disciplinary research field of urban ecology and related policies of urban nature conservation. Although the term "urban ecology" is quite recent, it is argued in this paper that the formation of urban nature as an object of ecological knowledge has a much longer history. For example, in Germany, after World War II, the large rubble areas that existed in all bombed cities soon became important research fields for botanists studying plant migration and vegetation development in the context of the city. ⋯ As will be shown, botanists studying the rubble areas created various representations (e.g., lists, statistical tabulations, maps) of urban space that contributed to the transformation of the cultural and political meaning of urban wastelands. At the same time, it will be argued, urban wastelands were practically appropriated as scientific workplaces in which these representations were locally crafted. What later became the science and politics of urban ecology is to a large extent the outcome of this mutual shaping of knowledge and urban space in the post-Second World War period.