Preprint Articles

This essay examines historical case literature on “monstrous births,” revealing how childbearing women both participated in and were excluded from processes of medical knowledge-making. In the nineteenth-century United States, physicians studied newborns with major anatomical differences as “medical specimens of monstrosity,” asserting a singular authority over knowledge of bodies and reproduction. However, this essay shows that in practice medical knowledge-making entailed an interactive, socially embedded process that intimately engaged laywomen’s perceptions, ideas, and understanding. By narrating and interpreting their lived experiences of pregnancy, women participated in determining the causes and meanings of anomalous births—even as hierarchies of gender, race, class, and citizenship conditioned and constrained this participation. Through an imaginative reading of case reports, this essay foregrounds the significance of diverse laywomen’s social, affective, and embodied lives in historical practices of medical meaning-making. At the same time, it offers insight into how predominantly white male medical professionals increasingly sought to establish authority over women’s reproduction.

The lack of investment in noninfectious diseases by international health organizations after World War II is an understudied topic. By examining the global trajectory of hereditary and congenital disorders within and beyond the WHO, the authors provide insight into the reasons for this failure to invest in noncommunicable diseases management. In the 1970s, a network of geneticists, physicians, and WHO officials aimed to address the most frequent hereditary disorders, notably thalassemia, by putting them on the organization’s agenda. However, despite significant epidemiological stakes, community genetics did not expand globally. The paper examines how Global South instantiations have reshaped aspirations for Southern alternatives to medical genetics as it had developed in the Global North. It also emphasizes the importance of analyzing new discursive activities in the field of global health and the characteristics and practical implications of these global aspirations, such as program funding, design, and operation.

The author traces the evolution of Seoul National University Hospital (SNUH) and its predecessors, focusing on their transformation from the 1960s to the 1980s. Starting as an impoverished governmental hospital of a postcolonial country, it grew into a major South Korean biomedical corporation with many faculty members with American training, a new main building with the latest technologies, and a larger independent budget supported by the National Health Insurance (NHI). However, this evolution accompanied multiple issues stemming from overcrowding, which resulted in short and skimpy consultations, a poor environment, staff exploitation, and various minor crimes. Yet the crowds in the hospital assisted young doctors’ training and some faculty members’ research. The author explains this complexity by analyzing the American aid’s legacy alongside the NHI’s roles. This explains the limitations to the U.S. attempt to shape Korea’s medicine amid its state-driven industrialization and health insurance evolution under a military dictatorship, which partly reflected the colonial heritage.

By the mid-nineteenth century, plantation enslavers in Louisiana and Cuba had developed a new form of plantation management. Clock-time discipline, hierarchical divisions of labor, and the scientific authority of numbers, as filtered through accounting technologies like the plantation ledger, helped planters see enslaved people’s health in seemingly precise terms of time, productivity, and race. In this cruelly meticulous system, some elite physicians saw a potential scientific foundation for medicine. Using plantation business records, agricultural trade periodicals, physician correspondence, medical publications, and memoirs , this article examines plantation management of enslaved health; physician appreciation of its quantitative, supposedly rigorous methods; and the intersections of management science and racial science in physician writing, where there were noticeable differences between Louisiana and Cuba. Physicians in both places believed that, under judicious management, Black people’s bodies were naturally inclined to productivity, but in Cuba, there were different degrees of Blackness that needed to be taken into consideration.

As AIDS activists voiced their demands for “drugs into bodies” in the late 1980s, American scientists injected drugs into the body of a highly controversial research animal—the chimpanzee. This paper examines the controversy over the use of chimpanzees in U.S. HIV/AIDS research that led to the decline of chimpanzees as laboratory animals. The author suggests that the AIDS epidemic raised the public profile of laboratory chimpanzee research, heightening its preexisting financial and ethical problems. The scientific and lay debate sparked by chimpanzee AIDS research demonstrates the intersection of ethics and economics in shaping laboratory research practices and disease politics in the late twentieth century. As animal advocates constructed laboratory chimpanzees as close human relatives, innocent of the imagined sins of people with AIDS, researchers working with chimpanzees confronted their ambiguity as an HIV animal model and the long-term costs of maintaining HIV-infected animals. By the late 1990s, an animal that had been a promising AIDS model became a public relations headache and a major expense for biomedical research. The pushback to the use of chimpanzees in AIDS research helps scholars understand how American scientists, activists, and animal advocates have made sense of the enmeshed concerns of human and animal welfare in a time of epidemiological crisis.