The burden of choosing wisely: biopolitics at the beginning of life

Recent transformations in French maternal health care demonstrate how the government of the beginning of life encompasses an individual woman's desires and aspirations for the uses of her own body. Women are increasingly solicited by the French health care system to express their feelings, their wishes, and their distress to a medical professional for whom the solicitation of such narratives has become a professional specificity. This essay focuses on transformations of governmental power in the realm of reproduction articulated within French maternal health care policy, professional midwifery journals, and women's health activist literature. Crucially, the regulation of reproduction in France no longer takes place primarily through sanction or prohibition, but rather through what sociologist Dominique Memmi claims is the solicitation of narratives about one's own desires and hopes for the fate of one's body, a ‘delegated biopolitics’ of reproductive control. This essay suggests that the contemporary government of reproduction entrusts individuals with little more and no less than the imperative to ‘choose wisely.’     

Spaces of Labor Activism, Mexican‐American Women and the Farm Worker Movement in South Texas Since 1966

This paper studies the farm worker unionization experience and the historical development of Mexican‐American women's activism in South Texas to elaborate more precisely the relationship among socio‐spatial practices, political activism and labor's geography. Drawing upon archival documents and interviews, the paper describes how Mexican‐American farm workers used public space for political activity; however, radical unionization efforts also domesticized other spaces for women's activities. The paper chronicles how Mexican‐American women in South Texas transformed the farm worker center from a "domesticated space" into one of empowerment. In short, women in the union made the farm worker center into a space that challenged both the class‐based structure of larger South Texas society and masculinist practices within the larger farm worker movement. The analysis advances the imperative to better understand how workers "make space" to ensure their own survival. The paper advances the study of labor geography by arguing that working class mobilization reconstitutes dynamic social geographies within laboring communities themselves. In arguing this point, the paper illustrates the limitations of activism based solely on the use of public space and argues for more attention to the significance of other socio‐political spaces for labor mobilization.     

Time,place, and the lifeworlds of feminist geographers: the US in the 1970s

The 1970s, the decade in which Susan Hanson took up an academic appointment in American geography, was a period of marked growth in women's representation and political activism in the discipline and of the emergence of feminist research and teaching. Susan's career illustrates the changes in consciousness, resiliency in the face of setbacks, and creativity of the times. Inspired by the women's movement, and exemplifying collegiality, women geographers identified masculine biases in scholarship and professional practices, initiated research and teaching on women and gender, and worked to enter the leadership of the Association of American geographers. Their efforts were the genesis of the feminism in the profession that has since flourished in the United States. It is fitting that Susan Hanson's leadership and contributions in this arena are widely recognized and honored.     

Policing the social boundaries of the American Medical Association, 1847-70

In May 1870 the American Medical Association (AMA) voted to deny the admission of black delegates and their white colleagues to the national meeting in Washington, D.C. Historians of race and medicine have customarily viewed this decision as marking a crucial milestone in the formation of the nexus between racism and the development of the American medical profession in the era after the Civil War (1861-64). This study recasts this narrative by locating the 1870 decision in relation to the antebellum practices of the association and their social consequences for American medicine. It argues that the viability of the AMA as the national voice of the profession was critically dependent on rejecting racial equality. Indeed, at a moment when the question of the abolition of slavery polarized the nation, the AMA was founded in 1847 to create a voluntary professional organization, national in scope, dedicated to raising the standards of medical training and practice. To this end, the AMA elected presidents and selected host cities for annual meetings in the North, South, and West. Seven out of the fourteen meetings and six out of fourteen presidents were from slave and/or border states. These institutional practices together with the representation of blacks as different and enjoying an appropriate status as slaves grounded the national identity of the profession in black subordination. Similarly, the gendered discourses about healing and practices of female exclusion privileged medical authority as male by drawing on and reinforcing patriarchy. In the wake of the war, leaders hoped to restore the national character of the organization by resuming antebellum practices. In response to the new possibilities for blacks in medicine--as represented by the biracial National Medical Society--the AMA took steps to vigorously police the racial boundaries of the national profession. As this study will show, the 1870 decision reflected the logic of the racial politics at the heart of the association's antebellum past and would loom large in its future.     

The role of the physician: Eugene Sanger and a standard of care at the Elmira prison camp

The conduct of American military physicians in prisoner of war (POW) camps has been called into question by the abuse scandals at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay. This essay explores the experiences of the first U.S. military physicians to confront POW patients in large numbers-events that occurred during the American Civil War. While POWs received sub-standard care in camps north and south, the war also saw the issuance of the first document to outline the rights of POWs. This ambivalence toward the proper care and treatment of the POW is evident in the career of Dr. Eugene Sanger, the first Union surgeon at the prison camp in Elmira, New York. Sanger demonstrated both concern about the sanitary condition of the camp and pride in the deaths of POWs as furthering the overall war aims. His cruelty attracted some censure, but Sanger never faced disciplinary action. He was honorably discharged and went on to become the Surgeon General of his home state. This article places his actions at Elmira in the context of medical ethics, Army orders, and Northern opinion in 1864, and it will argue that the lack of Federal response to Eugene Sanger's poor record while serving at the prison set a precedent for inferior medical care of POWs by American military physicians.     

The dearth of the clinic: lead,air, and agency in twentieth-century America

By surveying myriad ways that twentieth-century American experts and nonexperts grappled with the health implications of aerial exposures to lead or substances that may have contained lead, this paper urges medical historians' attention toward environments-workplaces, homes and the outdoors-and their extrabodily ontology. Health histories framed around dust, toxins, fumes, and pollution rather than around particular diseases challenge long-accepted narratives, such as Hibbert Hill's old generalization about a "New Public Health" shift from "the environment to the individual." Greater environmental focus can also advance "bottom-up" health history. Pushing the gaze of twentieth-century medical and public health historians beyond hospitals, "public health" departments, clinically confirmable disease, and "patient" roles, it draws historians' attention to health-related realms in which laypeople often claimed greater knowledge and competence.     

Ethics of care,emotional work,and collective action of solidarity: the Patronas in Mexico

In this paper, we examine the mobilization of the Patronas, a group of Mexican women who have fed thousands of Central American migrants over the past two decades. We argue that the Patronas’ work of feeding and caring for migrants goes beyond essentializing these women’s work as just housewives, mothers, and caregivers. Furthermore, we assert that through these care activities, the Patronas exert a feminist ethic of care that is understood as a set of practices based on trust, reciprocity, and solidarity. The Patronas’ praxis of caring for the migrants resonates with people and attracts hundreds of volunteers to join these women’s emotional and nurturing work leading these women and volunteers to participate in a political practice of solidarity. In this paper, we articulate three key findings: (1) the interplay between the Patronas’ emotional work and the ethics of care, (2) the emergence of a collective act of solidarity around the Patronas’ caring work that leads hundreds of volunteers to visit these women and join them, and (3) the kitchen as a place where the collective act of solidarity begins and where the Patronas experience their personal transformation. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this study contributes to further our understanding of the interplay between Latin American women’s participation in social movements, emotional work in these movements, and the ethics of care.     

Female artistic identity in place: the studio

In this paper I examine the role of the studio as a central site of artistic identity construction and maintenance. Using ten case studies drawn from interviews with contemporary women visual artists from Toronto, Canada, I argue that women artists value studio space because it powerfully reinforces their sense of commitment and belonging to a predominantly male‐dominated profession. I consider how women cope with the demands of artistic practice when they are unable to establish a spatially separate workspace by addressing the experiences of artists who are parents. I demonstrate how women artists who are primary care‐givers are rarely adequately protected from the interruptions of daily life and have grown accustomed to working in fragments of time and space. While these women may appear willing to concede space to others, when space is crucial to their artistic practice, they have a remarkably strong influence on the form of their creative environment. I maintain, then, that the studio as a fixed physical space continues to be a very real necessity for women artists in all stages of their careers.     

Neurological caricatures since the 15th century

During the Renaissance, different artists began to draw medical illustrations from various viewpoints. Leonardo da Vinci was among those who sought to portray the emotional as well as the physical qualities of man. Other European artists described caricatural aspects of medical activities. In Northern Europe, Albrecht Durer, Hieronymus Bosch, and Pieter Brueghel were also famous for drawing caricatures. Later English artists, notably William Hogarth, Thomas Rowlandson, James Gillray, and the Cruikshanks, satirized life in general and the medical profession in particular. In Spain, Francisco Goya's works became increasingly macabre and satirical following his own mysterious illness and, in France, Honore Daumier used satire and humor to expose medical quackery. Also physicians such as Charles Bell and Jean-Martin Charcot were talented caricaturists. Their own personal artistic styles reflected their approach and gave a different "image" of neurology. Caricatures were popular portraits of developments in science and medicine and were frequently used whenever scientific language was too difficult to disseminate, in particular in the field of neurology.     

'Respect the life of the countryside': the Country Code, government and the conduct of visitors to the countryside in post-war England and Wales

Geographers examining the spaces of government and governance, and in particular those drawing upon the writings of Michel Foucault on government and governmentality, have tended to overlook the importance of different media, technical devices and practices of self-government to specific rationalities and programmes of government. In this paper I argue that the materialities and immaterialities of many mundane media technologies, the way they articulate and translate particular programmes of government, and the way they instil practices of self-government in citizens, are important but frequently overlooked dimensions of the geographies of government. I focus on the codes of countryside conduct – The Country Code/Countryside Code – that have been published in England and Wales since 1951. I examine how the National Parks Commission, and subsequently the Countryside Commission and Countryside Agency, identified the potential strengths and limitations of using the Country Code booklet to govern the conduct of visitors to the countryside. The paper shows how the material form of the booklet and methods of distributing and promoting it were seen to matter, and examines how civil servants attempted to extend the 'reach' of the Code and articulate its message through a diverse range of media which entailed different kinds of performative encounters in different spaces.     

In their own hands: domestic medicine and ‘the cure of all kinds of tertian and quartan fevers’ in late-colonial Lima

This paper examines the ways in which the men and women of Lima sought to cure or ward off ‘tertian and quartan fevers’, by all accounts one of the city's most ubiquitous illnesses during the last decades of Spanish colonial rule. The paper's particular emphasis therein rests on practices of self-medication and household medicine: it traces how Lima's inhabitants were able to practice elementary medicine and to concoct remedies ‘for the cure of tertian and quartan fevers’ by themselves, and how they consulted various genres of popular print to circulate health advice–the yearly almanac and a range of ‘enlightened’ home medical guides–and notebooks of medical recipes to safeguard their own health in the face of that ailment. The paper argues that these practices of vernacular medical healing, and the ‘ways of knowing’ that informed and sustained them, were shared both across different sectors of colonial society and with societies across the Atlantic. The study of vernacular, domestic medical practices in the face of a quotidian, commonplace ailment thus not only provides a rare window into sickness episodes, medical learning and skilfulness, in late-colonial Lima households, it also contributes to an on-going reworking of the historiography of Spanish American science and medicine by thinking beyond, and fragmenting a ‘dichotomous view of knowledge’–of polarizations of professional versus lay, popular versus elite, Iberian versus Northern European, or, indeed, ‘indigenous’ versus ‘Western’     

We Know Not God's Designs in Permitting a Separation: Women Religious,the Consolidation Controversies,and the Nineteenth-Century American Catholic Church*

This article bridges the fields of Catholic history, Women's history, and American religious history to propose a new perspective for studying the development of the American Catholic Church, termed by me as the consolidation controversies. Previous historians have focused on the development of the local parishes and the dioceses, focusing on the power conflicts between the lay trustees and the local bishops that accompanied this institutional growth. However, an often-forgotten aspect of Catholic history is the simultaneous rise of religious congregations and orders. As these communities developed, their leaders clashed with the local bishops over questions of property and authority over members of the communities. Often at the centre of these power struggles were the women religious. Rather than allowing themselves to be manipulated, women religioudemonstrated their own autonomy, navigating larger institutional politics. Should these women fail, they faced losing their place in the diocese as well as their position and vocation as women religious.     

Healthy vocations: field nursing and the religious overtones of public health

This article argues that the Office of Indian Affairs (OIA) field nursing program of the 1930s, which continued much of the same assimilation-style health care practices begun generations earlier by missionaries and field matrons, perpetuated the nineteenth-century link between religion and health care. Following in the footsteps of their female predecessors, field nurses targeted native women for health education, emphasizing personal hygiene and individual responsibility at the expense of socioeconomic causes of illness. Native women nonetheless appear to have maintained agency and power in negotiating health and health care. Peaking during the era of OIA Commissioner John Collier's Indian New Deal, the history of field nursing problematizes this period, particularly with regard to women's experiences. The article is significant for its exploration of field nursing as a contested site of cultural negotiation, revealing issues of power and difference in the lives of American women.     

民国时期公共知识分子的法理修养——以罗隆基的政论为例

广义的法理修养可以理解为有关公共生活之规则、秩序、公意、共识、正义、理性等方面的思想理论修养。民国时期的公共知识分子普遍具有留学欧美的经历。虽然他们熟悉欧美近现代法理的原则、教义、结论,但他们对欧美法理的内在逻辑没有反思,缺乏同情的理解。他们在中国现代思想文化史上的地位,主要是由他们的伦理修养奠定的。贫困的法理修养与丰裕的伦理修养,可以概括民国时期公共知识分子的两个维度。罗隆基的政论可以说明民国时期公共知识分子的这种特征。     

《国际博物馆协会博物馆职业道德准则》的法律意义

一个行业的职业道德准则对该行业秩序的发展及其法制的完善都具有重要意义。《国际博物馆协会博物馆职业道德准则》作为博物馆行业的最低道德标准和兼采各国经验总结而成的国际性道德准则,对博物馆行业国际秩序的发展发挥着重要影响,对于一国文物、博物馆法制的完善也有积极意义。当前我国尚未真正建立起切实有效的博物馆行业自律系统,现行法制也不能完全满足博物馆事业发展的需要。以《国际博物馆协会博物馆职业道德准则》为参照,完善博物馆行业治理体系,是我国博物馆事业发展的必要选择。     

Privatisation: An attempt that failed

Throughout the twentieth century doctors in most western countries strongly resisted government attempts to intervene in private medical markets. The support for privatisation that has developed during the current economic recession is welcomed therefore by the medical profession. In several countries campaigns have been staged for a full or partial return to market forces in the health care field. This article traces the course of one such push in Canada where doctors and other advocates of privatisation demanded a larger role for the private sector in the funding and management of Medicare, the national health insurance system. The policy outcome is contrary to the general privatising tendency in many countries: after a period of intense controversy the federal government passed legislation to preserve and strengthen the public aspects of the scheme. The normally powerful medical profession lost its campaign for an infusion of private funds into the health system and for the retention of the right of doctors to set their own fees. Consumer and other non‐producer groups, which have not traditionally played a central role in health policy, mobilised in defense of Medicare and were able to achieve most of their aims.     

Revisiting black medical school extinctions in the Flexner era

Abraham Flexner's 1910 exposé on medical education recommended that only two of the seven extant medical schools for blacks be preserved and that they should train their students to "serve their people humbly" as "sanitarians." Addressing charges of racism, this article traces the roots of the recommendation that blacks serve a limited professional role to the schools themselves and presents evidence that, in endorsing the continuance of Howard's and Meharry's medical programs, Flexner exhibited greater leniency than he had toward comparable schools for white students. Whether his recommendations to eliminate the other five schools were key factors in their extinction is addressed here by examining 1901-30 enrollment patterns. Those patterns suggest that actions of the American Medical Association and state licensing boards, combined with the broader problem of limited premedical educational opportunities for blacks, were more consequential than was the Flexner report both for the extinction of the schools and for the curtailed production of black doctors.     

Capitalism,Christianity, America: Rethinking the Issues

Abstract

Appreciative of the points made by all four commentators, William Connolly seeks to clarify some issues and modify a few positions taken in his book Capitalism and Christianity, American Style (2008). Philip Goodchild's account of "resonance" is superb, but I hesitate over his tendency to argue that the demise of capitalism is inevitable. Catherine Keller deepens the theological issues pursued in my book, as she shows additional ways to open "theopoetic" connections between those who pursue deep, multidimensional pluralism. David Howarth makes important links between my position and that of Ernesto Laclau, and he joins me in resisting those who eschew engagement with the state as they fight off the neoliberal/evangelical machine. I use the occasion of this dialogue to explore further the relations between conceptions of immanence and those of transcendence. Kathy Ferguson admirably shows how the experience of grief by evangelical women opens a possible door to engagements of agonistic respect. In each engagement I try to follow some of the suggestions and to add a couple of my own.     

‘Unlike Vancouver … here there’s nothing’: imagined geographies of idealized health care for LGBTQ women

This article explores imagined geographies of health care among Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) women in Halifax and Vancouver. In expressing the possibilities and limitations of accessing care, participants frame their own experiences through spatialized narratives of how LGBTQ people are thought to be treated elsewhere. Participants’ explicit connections and distinctions between Halifax and Vancouver gave insight into how their perceived difficulties in one health care context are sometimes framed by imagining more ease in accessing care in the other. We explore here the implications of these imagined, idealized spaces, which may set up false expectations that things are always better elsewhere. We reveal imagined geographies and senses of place as highly relevant features in LGBTQ women’s accounts of experiences with and access to health care and expand conventional arguments about physical access to care.     

The care of women's health and beauty: an experience shared by medieval Jewish and Christian women

In this article I intend to elucidate the extent to which medieval western Jewish and Christian women shared customs, knowledge and practices regarding health care, a sphere which has been historically considered as part of women's daily domestic tasks. My study aims to identify female agency in medical care, as well as women's interaction across religious lines, by analysing elusive sources, such as medical literature on women's health care, and by collating the information they provide with data obtained from other textual and visual records. By searching specific evidence of the dialogues that must have occurred between Christian and Jewish women in transmitting their knowledge and experiences, I put forward the idea (developed from earlier work by Montserrat Cabré i Pairet) that medical texts with no clear attribution can be used as sources to reconstruct women's authoritative knowledge.