Science, gender, and the emergence of depression in American psychiatry, 1952-1980

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.     

The impact of gender,ethnic and cultural studies on colonial Latin American research

Mujer y cultura en la colonia hispanoamericana. Edited by MABEL MORAÑA. Pittsburgh: Biblioteca de América, 1996. Pp. 330.

Las colonias del Nuevo Mundo: Cultura y sociedad. Edited by CARMEN PIRILLI. Tucumán: Universidad Nacional de Tucumán, 1995. Pp. 190.

Amor y violencia sexual: Valores indígenas en la sociedad colonial. By WARD STAVIG. Lima: IEP/University of South Florida, 1996. Pp. 94.     

The business of ethics: gender, medicine, and the professional codification of the American Physiotherapy Association, 1918-1935

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.