Preprint Articles

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.

This special issue traces the material “stuff”—the instruments and other material objects—that constitutes the uneven tapestries of power, authority, and knowledge making around human reproduction. To reevaluate our definition of what counts as a reproductive object, this collection recasts familiar objects, introduces new ones, and juxtaposes mundane things side-by-side with high-tech instruments. It also brings together various methodological approaches to highlight the myriad and multifaceted ways objects are enmeshed in sociomaterial webs. The resulting view of reproductive health care is thus contingent, fluid, and, fundamentally, material.

As an immediate target of post-Unification legislation, Italian midwives were subject to national efforts to standardize educational and professional practices. As a material emblem of these initiatives, the midwife’s bag signified both a recognizable marker of midwives’ new professional status and a mechanism for the increased surveillance directed toward them. Drawing on the material feminism of scholars like Donna Haraway and Karen Barad, the author considers three objects contained within the midwife’s bag—syringes, stethoscopes, and birth registers—and the associated technologies of asepsis, auscultation, and statistical enumeration. In physical birthing rooms and on the pages of midwifery’s new professional journals, the embodied practices associated with, rationale for, and impacts of novel obstetrical objects were negotiated. These technologies were part of the ongoing production of particular kinds of birthing and fetal bodies, ones that were both known and increasingly defined by technologically derived data and measurement.

Many people now take knowledge of the fetal heartbeat for granted. Despite this, it wasn’t until 1818, following the invention of the stethoscope and popularization of the technique of auscultation, that the fetal heartbeat was first discovered. Listening to the fetal heartbeat enabled practitioners to confirm the existence of pregnancy, gain information on the internal positions of the fetus and the placenta, and determine the life or death of the fetus in utero. Additionally, signs from the stethoscope provided guidance for practitioners when dealing with long or difficult labors. This article examines the work and writings of the early key players in this story, emphasizing the impact of enthusiastic stethoscope advocacy on Irish obstetric practitioners’ uptake of the instrument and how the changes in practice that stemmed from these changes went on to impact practitioners in Scotland.

Developed in the United States in the late 1950s and 1960s, the electronic fetal monitor (EFM) was increasingly used in obstetric practice throughout North America by the 1970s. In identifying and delineating the “normal” fetal heart rate, EFM played a central role in defining obstetric risk and, in the eyes of many practitioners, quickly became an essential tool of “modern” and safe hospitalized birth. Focusing on one specific settler-colonial context, this article explores the relationship between obstetric technologies including the EFM and the childbirth “choices” available to mothers giving birth in late twentieth-century Canada. As smaller hospitals, health centers, and nursing stations, particularly in rural, remote, and northern areas, lacked access to what were framed as essential technologies, obstetric services were withdrawn from many communities, a shift that continues to disproportionately affect Indigenous mothers who are routinely evacuated out to give birth in provincial hospitals.

In this article, the author relies on oral histories from vayattatis who worked in southwestern India over the course of the twentieth century and on archival research to examine the techniques and technologies that have been and continue to be a part of both pre- and postpartum care in southern India. The author tracks the wider social contexts and histories of this figure and examines how they came to learn, develop, and adapt their techniques of care for women and children through the generations. The author also examines how they constructed their corpus of authoritative knowledge as a necessary antidote to what they perceived as both the inaccessibility and technicism of biomedicine. The article also presents the vayattatis’ own critique of technoscientific modernities and the toll they took on women’s bodies. The article also examines how the vayattatis used unique local techniques including massage to facilitate postpartum healing and recovery.