Preprint Articles

This paper offers the term “eugenic maternalism” to conceptualize how eugenic thought and practice was disseminated through Progressive Era materialist reform work. Focusing on the Better Babies Contests hosted by the New York City Babies’ Welfare Association from 1913 to 1916, I argue that the BWA Better Babies Contest provides an opportunity to broaden our understanding of the ways eugenic logic permeated maternalist discussions of child welfare. The contests incentivized mothers and children to participate in educational programming at local community centers, enlisting families in the project of assimilation. Within these spaces, eugenics operated as a reciprocal process of environmental reform, negotiated between reformers and immigrant women. Both participants and organizers acted within a eugenic framework in which their ability to control the environment would determine their future hereditary potential and capacity for citizenship.

Based on 180 censored letters and two pamphlets written by psychiatric patients committed to Jydske Asyl (Asylum of Jutland) in Risskov, Denmark, between 1895 and 1920, the authors give an account of how the patients experienced their stay at the newly established mental hospital in Risskov. In the first part of the article, the authors outline central themes. The letters and pamphlets describe how a large part of the treatment at the mental hospitals involved a significant amount of coercion in various forms. In the second part of the article, they outline the mental hospital’s historical context to understand the institutional context in which the patients wrote their descriptions of everyday life. The authors focus on the ideas behind the treatments the patients experienced, which involved the ideals the psychiatrists formulated when Jydske Asyl was constructed and the reality of everyday life at the mental hospital.

In 1950, the First World Congress of Psychiatry took place in Paris. Gathering more than two thousand people, the event became a stage where many issues were negotiated for the psychiatric discipline in particular but also for the way of doing science of which the international conference was one of the most widespread practices. Between two wars—World War II and the Cold War—defining the international community was complex. Recently awarded a Nobel Prize for Medicine, psychiatry as a discipline negotiated its boundaries between biological and/or social determinants. This boundary work was framed by a narrative that underlined the novelty of the process—the first congress—and the materiality of a congress that also legitimized itself through a particular place, the Sorbonne in Paris.

Today, many patients and health care providers feel they lack sufficient discretionary time to maintain personal health and offer high-quality care. While this problem seems strictly modern, the Roman-era physician Galen of Pergamon also recognized that time scarcity has adverse health effects and proposed strategies to mitigate them. This article critically examines Galen’s approach and its relevance today. The study demonstrates that Galen understood time scarcity to affect individuals across divisions of class and civic status and that he believed the time-scarce could, by adopting certain strategies, achieve a kind of good health. Nevertheless, Galen is clear that optimal health demands leisure. Read in the modern day, Galen’s arguments highlight how time scarcity can deepen financial and identity-based health inequities while simultaneously transcending typical demographic categories. Though Galen’s solutions focus on individual choices, his argument’s implications should also encourage modern readers to pursue collective, structural change.

In April 1965, the Turkish Parliament passed the law legalizing birth control, including the pills and the use of intrauterine devices. This article examines the beginnings and expansion of family planning in Turkey in the 1960s by tracing the encounters of American experts, Turkish physicians along with bureaucrats, and thousands of urban slum dwelling and rural women and men. Different from the previous historical accounts framing family planning as an insular and state-driven modernization project, it provides a transnational history of family planning in Turkey by unearthing intimate links between the discourses of development and histories of family, sexuality, and reproduction. By using Population Council documents, Turkish official papers, Parliament minutes, visual materials, and national and feminist press accounts, this article demonstrates that family planning practices with new technologies of contraceptives constituted often-neglected but indispensable components of infrastructure in the formation of technologies of governance in Turkey in Cold War context.

In the 1950s, the idea of sex change increasingly assumed the mainstay of public interest. As psychiatrists and psychologists developed new understandings of gender, the role of surgeons is often overlooked in the early history of sex reassignment. This article explores the work of one such doctor, Elmer Belt, a urologist based in Los Angeles. Between 1953 and 1962, Belt operated on twenty-nine male-to-female patients in the face of ethical and material obstacles. Working closely with Harry Benjamin, Belt developed a surgical technique that transplanted the testes inside the abdomen rather than involving full castration. He became involved in the famous case of Agnes Torres, on which other high-profile scientists based their invention of such seminal concepts as “passing” and “gender identity.” Belt’s utilization of Agnes as exemplary evidence to support his technique illustrates how and why testicular retention remained a heated topic in the development of transsexual science.