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137 6 ITINERANT MANIPULATORS AND PUBLIC BENEFACTORS: ARTIFICIAL LIMB PATENTS, MEDIC AL PROFESSIONALISM AND THE MORAL ECONOMY IN ANTEBELLUM AMERIC A Caroline Lieffers ‘The legal right is, of course, not disputed; the moral right is by no means so clear.’ So wrote Robert Arthur, a professor at the Philadelphia College of Dental Surgery, in 1853.1 Arthur was referring to the practice of patenting, which was at the centre of contentious debates to define ethics and etiquette in a variety of health professions in nineteenth-century America. The legal right was in
, the medical profession (internationally) faced a dilemma between the desire to reduce or eliminate suffering and the need to carry out painful surgery. 52 This was a particularly prescient issue when it came to treating children and adolescents – those who society deemed to be most vulnerable and endangered. From the late nineteenth century, it was considered
, an example of the way in which the medicalisation of sex (in this case through new medical technology) has influenced or facilitated new sexual subjectivities. If it was not for advanced surgical techniques and endocrinology, they imply, there could have been no transsexuality and transgender.3 Although Joanne Meyerowitz’s influential book on the subject has charted individual and sporadic instances of surgery and experimental sex modifications in Europe and (even more rarely) in the US from the early twentieth century, she effectively begins her story with the
The archive has assumed a new significance in the history of sex, and this book visits a series of such archives, including the Kinsey Institute’s erotic art; gay masturbatory journals in the New York Public Library; the private archive of an amateur pornographer; and one man’s lifetime photographic dossier on Baltimore hustlers. The subject topics covered are wide-ranging: the art history of homoeroticism; casual sex before hooking-up; transgender; New York queer sex; masturbation; pornography; sex in the city. The duality indicated by the book’s title reflects its themes. It is an experiment in writing an American sexual history that refuses the confines of identity sexuality studies, spanning the spectrum of queer, trans, and the allegedly ‘normal’. What unites this project is a fascination with sex at the margins, refusing the classificatory frameworks of heterosexuality and homosexuality, and demonstrating gender and sexual indecision and flexibility. And the book is also an exploration of the role of the archive in such histories. The sex discussed is located both in the margins of the archives, what has been termed the counterarchive, but also, importantly, in the pockets of recorded desire located in the most traditional and respectable repositories. The sexual histories in this book are those where pornography and sexual research are indistinguishable; where personal obsession becomes tomorrow’s archive. The market is potentially extensive: those interested in American studies, sexuality studies, contemporary history, the history of sex, psychology, anthropology, sociology, gender studies, queer studies, trans studies, pornography studies, visual studies, museum studies, and media studies.
The book explores the relationship between violence against women on one hand, and the rights to health and reproductive health on the other. It argues that violation of the right to health is a consequence of violence, and that (state) health policies might be a cause of – or create the conditions for – violence against women. It significantly contributes to feminist and international human rights legal scholarship by conceptualising a new ground-breaking idea, violence against women’s health (VAWH), using the Hippocratic paradigm as the backbone of the analysis. The two dimensions of violence at the core of the book – the horizontal, ‘interpersonal’ dimension and the vertical ‘state policies’ dimension – are investigated through around 70 decisions of domestic, regional and international judicial or quasi-judicial bodies (the anamnesis). The concept of VAWH, drawn from the anamnesis, enriches the traditional concept of violence against women with a human rights-based approach to autonomy and a reflection on the pervasiveness of patterns of discrimination (diagnosis). VAWH as theorised in the book allows the reconceptualisation of states’ obligations in an innovative way, by identifying for both dimensions obligations of result, due diligence obligations, and obligations to progressively take steps (treatment). The book eventually asks whether it is not international law itself that is the ultimate cause of VAWH (prognosis).
Victorian medical men could suffer numerous setbacks on their individual paths to professionalisation, and Thomas Elkanah Hoyle's career offers a telling exemplar. This book addresses a range of the financial, professional, and personal challenges that faced and sometimes defeated the aspiring medical men of England and Wales. Spanning the decades 1780-1890, from the publication of the first medical directory to the second Medical Registration Act, it considers their careers in England and Wales, and in the Indian Medical Service. The book questions the existing picture of broad and rising medical prosperity across the nineteenth century to consider the men who did not keep up with professionalising trends. Financial difficulty was widespread in medical practice, and while there are only a few who underwent bankruptcy or insolvency identified among medical suicides, the fear of financial failure could prove a powerful motive for self-destruction. The book unpicks the life stories of men such as Henry Edwards, who could not sustain a professional persona of disinterested expertise. In doing so it uncovers the trials of the medical marketplace and the pressures of medical masculinity. The book also considers charges against practitioners that entailed their neglect, incompetence or questionable practice which occasioned a threat to patients' lives. The occurrence and reporting of violent crime by medical men, specifically serious sexual assault and murder is also discussed. A tiny proportion of medical practitioners also experienced life as a patient in an asylum.
decisions to withhold or withdraw treatment (even when agreed with parents) could subject them to possible criminal liability for murder or manslaughter. The fundamental principle governing withholding life saving treatment from young children was settled in Re B in 1981. An infant girl, Alexandra, was born suffering from Down’s syndrome and an intestinal obstruction. In a normal child, simple surgery would have been carried out swiftly with minimal risk to the baby. Without surgery, the baby would die within a few days. Her parents refused to authorise the operation
weeks, ‘she pursued her domestic Business’. 5 According to Copping, though, the operation was brutal. He described O’Neill’s terrified response to the prospect of doing the surgery: ‘The Man was frightened, and went to sleep; but, when he got up, gave her a large Draught of Sack, and, I suppose, took one himself.’ 6 Only then did he cut open the stomach. From a hole as big as Mr McKinna’s hat, O’Neill removed a second bone, pulling it back and forth to loosen it. He noticed something black inside the stomach, but was unable
where further development and staff training took place. An ambulance platoon was also assigned for duty at NORMASH.25 NORMASH was planned with fourteen physicians in every contingent. Because there was a shortage of surgeons in Norway, however, NORMASH was not able to recruit the required number.26 Some surgeons visited US MASHs to learn from their experiences from one year in the combat zone.27 Peter Lexow served as a physician in the first contingent. He maintained that war surgery was learned at first hand, and with feedback from the evacuation hospital such as
from 1903, and had experience of working in Emanuel Klein’s laboratory at Barts and setting up his own small laboratory. He had also observed Lister in Edinburgh, and his partnership with Butlin became known as the ‘Aseptic Firm’. 22 Lockwood taught extra classes in bacteriology and wrote the textbook Aseptic Surgery in 1896; Thomas Schlich refers to Lockwood as the ‘British champion of asepsis’, and Michael Worboys has characterised him as the ‘leading theorist of the new aseptic surgery in Britain’. 23 In his textbook, Lockwood argued that an operation was