Papers by Heather Munro Prescott
Able-Bodied Womanhood: Personal Health and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century Boston
The American Historical Review, 1990
WILLIAM R. PAULSON, Enlightenment, Romanticism and the blind in France, Princeton University Pres... more WILLIAM R. PAULSON, Enlightenment, Romanticism and the blind in France, Princeton University Press, 1987, 8vo, pp. ix, 259, £21.00. William Paulson has produced an odd sandwich of a book. It opens with an off-putting 'Introduction' which takes many words to inform us, yet again, how the approach to discourse analysis developed by Michel Foucault transcended the blindness of the traditional 'history of ideas', but which also, finally, distances this work from the Foucault of Madness and civilization on the grounds that blindness is, after all, something objectively real. This may seem to many readers to make heavy weather of a fairly straightforward matter, particularly as Paulson writes in a prose style laced with the worst Foucaultian affectations. And then the book closes with some rather free-associating chapters, loosely draped around blind characters in French Romantic novels, which inter alia explore, using Freudian literacy criticism, Balzac's and Hugo's theories of infantile sexuality, and so forth. None of this is very auspicious. The "meat" of Paulson's monograph is, however, first rate. It consists of a succession of lucid, powerful, and original analyses (in a mode surprisingly close to the much maligned old-style "history of ideas") of blindness as it figured in Enlightenment natural philosophy, ethics, accounts of human nature, and practical philanthropy. As Paulson rightly stresses, the philosophes were less interested in the blind per se than in blindness as the occasion for thought experiments concerning epistemology and ontology. Starting from Locke's discussion of the "Molyneux problem" (can we truly conceptualize that for which we have words but no direct sense of experience?), Paulson shows how Locke's conundrum was developed in different directions by Condillac and Diderot. For Condillac, the reality was rescued by positing "touch" as the primary agency of sense, of which sight was a kind of sophisticated modification. For Diderot, the thought experiment of sensory deprivation (a blind man, a deaf man, and so forth) led to the radically relativistic perception that there was no terra firma world out there, but that our visions of reality were all prejudices grounded upon particular configurations of subjective sensations. Thus for Diderot the blind man would still be a "seer", though not quite in the literally "socialized" sense current from Homer and the Bible to Milton. Paulson is also highly perceptive upon the moral uses made of blindness in Enlightenment fables and novels. Blindness is a metaphor for superstition and folly; yet he who relieves blindness-the expert oculist-is no less often portrayed as a huckster (especially one exploiting erotic opportunities) or a charlatan than as a true leader of the Aufiklarung. Sight and insight do not always coincide. In a similar way, Paulson plausibly suggests that the new Enlightenment optimism about educating the blind was at best a mixed blessing. For it led to the blind being set apart in segregated institutions, and the stigmatizing label of the "blind personality" being struck upon them. Here the parallel with Foucault's account of madness seems well grounded, and a useful parallel is suggested for Harlan Lane's recent account of the history of deaf-mutes. The history of blindness has been curiously neglected. This volume makes an excellent beginning, while showing how much remains to be done. The medical historian will note how sketchy and sometimes inaccurate is Paulson's account ofophthalmology and eye-surgery; there is much scope for integrating philosophical analysis and medical history here. Roy Porter Wellcome Institute
Historical Roots of Women's Healthcare
History of Adolescent Medicine and Health Care
AAP Textbook of Adolescent Health Care, 2011
Harvard Review of Psychiatry, 2008
Anorexia Nervosa
The Cambridge World History of Food
The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, 2010
Technology's Stories, 2016
Medical History, 1989
Book Reviews phrases on the back cover, it seems to hark back to a stereotype of Catholicism whic... more Book Reviews phrases on the back cover, it seems to hark back to a stereotype of Catholicism which is, to all appearances, far less complex and contradictory than what Camporesi himself demonstrates here.
Chapter 10 Gender and the “New” Puberty
Pink and Blue, 2021
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, 2020
The suffrage and birth control movements are often treated separately in historical scholarship. ... more The suffrage and birth control movements are often treated separately in historical scholarship. This essay brings together new research to demonstrate their close connections. Many suffragists became active in the birth control movement just before and after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. The roots of suffrage arguments were deeply embedded in the same ideas that were foundational to the birth control movement: bodily freedom and notions of what constituted full and participatory citizenship. Beginning in the 1840s, women's rights reformers directly connected the vote to a broad range of economic and political issues, including the concept of self-ownership. Wide-ranging debates about individual autonomy remained present in women's rights rhetoric and were then repeated in the earliest arguments for legalizing birth control. The twentieth-century birth control movement, like the suffrage movement before it (which had largely focused only on achieving the v...
The Morning After
The Morning After, 2019
Heather Munro Prescott - Children's Health in Historical Perspective (review) - Journal of Social History 40:4
The Pill at Fifty: Scientific Commemoration and the Politics of American Memory
Technology and Culture, 2013
This article uses coverage of the fiftieth anniversary of the Pill as an example of what Richard ... more This article uses coverage of the fiftieth anniversary of the Pill as an example of what Richard Hirsh describes as the “real world” role of historians of technology. It explores how the presentation of historical topics on the world wide web has complicated how the history of technology is conveyed to the public. The article shows that that the Pill is especially suited to demonstrating the public role of historians of technology because, as the most popular form of reversible birth control, it has touched the lives of millions of Americans. Thus, an exploration of how the Pill’s fiftieth anniversary was covered illustrates how historians can use their expertise to provide a nuanced interpretation of a controversial topic in the history of technology.
The Disability Pendulum: The First Decade of the Americans with Disabilities Act
Social History of Medicine, 2006
... This work benefitted from the research assistance of Christopher Geidner and Matthew Kear. An ... more ... This work benefitted from the research assistance of Christopher Geidner and Matthew Kear. An earlier version of chapter 5 was coauthored with Professor Adam Milani and appeared at 53 Alabama Law Review 1075 (2002). Research xi Page 13. ...
BOOK REVIEW: Alice Domurant Dreger. HERMAPHRODITES AND THE MEDICAL INVENTION OF SEX. and Regina Morantz-Sanchez. CONDUCT UNBECOMING A WOMAN: MEDICINE ON TRIAL IN TURN-OF-THE-CENTURY BROOKLYN
NWSA Journal, 2000
Using the Student Body: College and University Students as Research Subjects in the United States during the Twentieth Century
Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 2002
Fortunately, Wan's case is rare: thousands of students volunteer for human experiments every... more Fortunately, Wan's case is rare: thousands of students volunteer for human experiments every year without suffering permanent injury. Indeed, had Wan survived the procedure, her story would have attracted little if any notice. The use of students as research subjects [End Page 3] ...
Children's Health in Historical Perspective. Cheryl Krasnick Warsh and Veronica Strong-Boag, eds. (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2005. xi plus 554 pp. $39.95)
Journal of Social History, 2007
Our authors left a few loose ends. Safley overstates the singularity of Augsburg’s concern for Na... more Our authors left a few loose ends. Safley overstates the singularity of Augsburg’s concern for Nahrung (Terpstra’s Bologna refects a similar concern as do orphanages elsewhere: Lyon, Amsterdam, Seville and Turin, for example). Terpstra suggests Florence and Bologna served as a model to other European cities through the network of social welfare bureaucracies they created, but does not elaborate. A large comparative issue to be probed further is the matter of mortality: early modern orphanages have incurred the charge that they conveniently snuffed out an unwanted demographic surplus. Both authors argue that their institutions, with the exception of some especially devastating episodes, did not deviate greatly from general levels of child mortality, while attempting to rescue many children who arrived at their door in a desperately debilitated condition. More remains to be done, but these two profoundly researched works contribute significantly to an understanding of that broader picture of orphanages and foundling homes in early modern Europe that Brian Pullan adumbrated in one of his seminal essays of synthesis.
Asceticism in Contemporary Culture
The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 1996
Wolters Kluwer Health may email you for journal alerts and information, but is committed to maint... more Wolters Kluwer Health may email you for journal alerts and information, but is committed to maintaining your privacy and will not share your personal information without your express consent. For more information, please refer to our Privacy Policy. ... An abstract is unavailable. This article is ...
Journal of American College Health, 2011
This article examines how the field of college health has evolved over time to address the needs ... more This article examines how the field of college health has evolved over time to address the needs of an increasingly diverse student population. The central argument is that college and university health programs developed in conjunction with shifting standards of medical care and public health practices in the United States. The author reviews the role of college health programs as public health agencies for campus communities, and describes contemporary public health challenges facing college campuses. She shows how the history of college health is intertwined with the history of diversity in higher education. In particular, the author outlines how the growth of health services made higher education accessible to women, racial minorities, veterans, and persons with disabilities.
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Papers by Heather Munro Prescott