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"Medicalization History"
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Historical Dynamism of Childbirth in Japan
This article explores the changing institutional and technological frameworks of childbirth practices in Japan, highlighting the historical dynamism and the normative dimensions of women’s experiences. This article shows how childbirth in Japan was subject to a very powerful and farreaching process of medicalization going back to the mid-nineteenth century. In present-day Japan, the drive towards high-tech medicalization remains strong, but there is also an emphasis on the need to be “natural” and “healthy” and to avoid unnecessary medical interventions in the body. These two seemingly contradictory sets of demands are an important feature of contemporary Japanese society. Their coexistence is only possible due to the continuing hold of a system of moral responsibility that emphasizes the duty of mothers to do whatever is necessary in terms of medical care to protect the safety and the well-being of their babies.
Journal Article
Medicalizing Reproduction: The Pill and Home Pregnancy Tests
This article explores one chapter in the history of medicalization through a focused study of oral contraceptives and home pregnancy tests. Each commercially successful in developed nations and both decades old (the Food and Drug Administration approved oral contraceptives in 1960 and home pregnancy tests in 1977), these reproductive technologies created the first pharmaceutical mega-market comprised of young, healthy, sexually active, heterosexual women. Examining the discrete, but interconnected, histories of both products, this article explores how the Pill's popularity and profitability medicalized and feminized contraception, encouraging pharmaceutical companies to invest in the development of patented variants of hormonal contraception and creating a means by which the under-used Pap smear could be introduced to a population that had previously resisted it. Home pregnancy tests, too, had unintended consequences. Designed to shield the detection of a pregnancy from a \"medical gaze,\" the test's widespread use encouraged women to become medical patients at an earlier stage of their pregnancy.
Journal Article
The cultural representation of \natural childbirth\: the outlook on the pregnant body in the mid-twentieth century
The scope of this study is to discuss teaching strategies directed towards women to institutionalize the representation of normal birth based on the work \"Natural Childbirth: A Guide for Future Parents\", published in 1955. The research begins with a historical and cultural analysis of the 1955, 1957, 1960 and 1964 editions of this book. It is aided by materials published, in the same period, which share the same meanings and representations concerning issues surrounding childbirth in the Brazilian context. It is a period marked by retrospectives and the emergence of methods for preparing women for the childbirth process. The results of our analysis, in the light of Roger Chartier's theoretical framework, especially applying the notion of representation of Michel Foucault, indicate that the apparatuses used in the work's registers sought to propose a disciplinary model for childbirth: institutionalization, medical insertion and industrialization of normal childbirth in the Brazilian context of the mid-twentieth century.
Journal Article
Surveilling the Mind and Body: Medicalising and De-medicalising Homosexuality in 1970s New Zealand
‘Medicalisation’ of same sex relations is a phenomenon that reached its peak in the 1950s and 1960s. The rise of gay liberation produced a divisive political contest with the psychiatric profession and adherents of the orthodox ‘medical model’ in the United States and – to a lesser extent – in the United Kingdom. This socio-historical process occurred throughout the English-speaking world, but much less is known about its dynamics in smaller countries such as New Zealand where the historiography on this issue is very sparse. The methodology situates New Zealand within a transnational framework to explore the circulation of medical theories and the critical responses they were met with. The article is anchored around three key local moments in the 1970s to consider the changing terrain on which ideas about homosexuality and psychiatry were constantly rearranged during this decade. This power struggle took a number of twists and turns, and the drive toward medicalisation alternated with a new impetus to de-medicalise same-sex sexuality.
Journal Article
\An Army of Reformed Drunkards and Clergymen\: The Medicalization of Habitual Drunkenness, 1857–1910
Historians have recognized that men with drinking problems were not simply the passive subjects of medical reform and urban social control in Gilded Age and Progressive Era America but also actively shaped the partial medicalization of habitual drunkenness. The role played by evangelical religion in constituting their agency and in the historical process of medicalization has not been adequately explored, however. A post-Civil War evangelical reform culture supported institutions that treated inebriates along voluntary, religious lines and lionized former drunkards who publicly promoted a spiritual cure for habitual drunkenness. This article documents the historical development and characteristic practices of this reform culture, the voluntarist treatment institutions associated with it, and the hostile reaction that developed among medical reformers who sought to treat intemperance as a disease called inebriety. Those physicians' attempts to promote therapeutic coercion for inebriates as medical orthodoxy and to deprive voluntarist institutions of public recognition failed, as did their efforts to characterize reformed drunkards who endorsed voluntary cures as suffering from delusions arising from their disease. Instead, evangelical traditions continued to empower reformed drunkards to publicize their own views on their malady which laid the groundwork for continued public interest in alcoholics' personal narratives in the twentieth century. Meanwhile, institutions that accommodated inebriates' voluntarist preferences proliferated after 1890, marginalizing the medical inebriety movement and its coercive therapeutics.
Journal Article
Accessed through sex: the medicalization of male sexuality at two different moments
The scope of this article is to reflect upon the medicalization of male sexuality based on the counterpoint between two distinct historical processes. The first of these is the major trend towards intervention in male sexuality which occurred in the early twentieth century in Brazil as a result of syphilis and the broader campaign against venereal disease. The second concerns the medicalization of sexuality through the focus on erectile dysfunction and the creation of a new pharmacology of sex which has become inevitable with the transition to the twenty-first century. This contrast enables us to see some important differences. The study highlights the new emphasis on the notion of sexual health based on individual improvement and use of medications. It also demonstrates that the promotion of male interest in sexual performance serves as a gateway to approach the treatment of male health.
Journal Article
The \Cleveland Crisis\ 1987: medicalization and scandalization of child protection
In 1987, in Cleveland County, United Kingdom, the pediatricians Marietta Higgs and Geoffrey Wyatt diagnosed 121 cases of child sexual abuse by using a hitherto little known diagnostic method. In large parts, this diagnosis proved wrong. This caused an ideological and political motivated media scandal, which framed British child care institutions as well as the relation of the public towards these institutions in the long-term. Historically, the intensity of this scandal can be traced to changes in the understanding of child care within the British system of child care. Using the method of historical discourse analysis, this paper will depict ideological structures of argumentation and locate them in ongoing processes of sociocultural change.
Journal Article
How to distinguish medicalization from over-medicalization?
Is medicalization always harmful? When does medicine overstep its proper boundaries? The aim of this article is to outline the pragmatic criteria for distinguishing between medicalization and over-medicalization. The consequences of considering a phenomenon to be a medical problem may take radically different forms depending on whether the problem in question is correctly or incorrectly perceived as a medical issue. Neither indiscriminate acceptance of medicalization of subsequent areas of human existence, nor criticizing new medicalization cases just because they are medicalization can be justified. The article: (i) identifies various consequences of both well-founded medicalization and over-medicalization; (ii) demonstrates that the issue of defining appropriate limits of medicine cannot be solved by creating an optimum model of health; (iii) proposes four guiding questions to help distinguish medicalization from over-medicalization. The article should foster a normative analysis of the phenomenon of medicalization and contribute to the bioethical reflection on the boundaries of medicine.
Journal Article
The biopsychosocial model: Its use and abuse
The biopsychosocial model (BPSM) is increasingly influential in medical research and practice. Several philosophers and scholars of health have criticized the BPSM for lacking meaningful scientific content. This article extends those critiques by showing how the BPSM’s epistemic weaknesses have led to certain problems in medical discourse. Despite its lack of content, many researchers have mistaken the BPSM for a scientific model with explanatory power. This misapprehension has placed researchers in an implicit bind. There is an expectation that applications of the BPSM will deliver insights about disease; yet the model offers no tools for producing valid (or probabilistically true) knowledge claims. I argue that many researchers have, unwittingly, responded to this predicament by developing certain patterns of specious argumentation I call “wayward BPSM discourse.” The arguments of wayward discourse share a common form: They appear to deliver insights about disease gleaned through applications of the BPSM; on closer inspection, however, we find that the putative conclusions presented are actually assertions resting on question-begging arguments, appeals to authority, and conceptual errors. Through several case studies of BPSM articles and literatures, this article describes wayward discourse and its effects. Wayward discourse has introduced into medicine forms of conceptual instability that threaten to undermine various lines of research. It has also created a potentially potent vector of medicalization. Fixing these problems will likely require reimposing conceptual rigor on BPSM discourse.
Journal Article