Medical Mappings of Syphilis in the Late Nineteenth Century

Pietrzak-Franger, Monika

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-66367-8_2

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…This intersection between eugenics, degeneration and VD has not only received considerable historiographical attention but has also been heavily scrutinised from a range of disciplinary perspectives. For example, this trifecta's sensational (if often‐oblique) appearance in literary genres like late‐Victorian gothic horror and New Woman fiction has made it a particularly popular subject among literary scholars (Krumm, 1995; May, 1998; Nixon & Servitje, 2018; Pietrzak‐Franger, 2018; Prescott & Giorgio, 2005; Showalter, 1985; Smith, 2004), which in turn has shaped the way that historians write about this important historical moment.…”

Section: Eugenics (In)fertility and ‘Race Suicide’mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As Michael Worboys (2004) observes, it was constructed as a ‘racial poison’, with syphilis undermining the quality of the race and gonorrhoea affecting its quantity. Moreover, with health authorities acutely aware of the porous boundaries between the imperial metropole and colonial periphery, VD also came to embody the supposed degeneration that accompanied sexual encounters and race‐mixing between white colonists and colonised subjects (Howell, 2000; Levine, 2003; Pietrzak‐Franger, 2018). As we shall see, this would continue to trouble health authorities well into the 20th century.…”

Section: Eugenics (In)fertility and ‘Race Suicide’mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Histories of ‘a loathsome disease’: Sexual health in modern Britain

Hanley

2022

History Compass

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From Victorian preoccupations with prostitution and degeneration to our present-day problems with antimicrobial resistance and inequalities in access to care, sexual health has been riddled with gendered, racialised, politicised and class-based meanings. Historians writing from within an increasingly diverse collection of subfields have explored how British attitudes towards, and interventions in, sexual health have changed over the past two centuries. In so doing, they have also addressed a wide range of themes in British social life, politics, gender and sexuality. This article surveys this extensive historiography, highlighting important shifts and reflecting on where historians might fruitfully turn next. Inevitably, there are problematic silences in the scholarship. Historians, overwhelmingly reliant on records compiled by health authorities and the state, have tended to write top-down histories of sexual health. The lived experiences of ordinary people, especially those on the margins of society, remain frustratingly elusive. Moreover, the same sorts of inequalities that historically undermined care and denied patients a voice continue to shape health outcomes.As such, this article not only surveys the historiography but also makes the case for the important role that historians can play in supporting positive changes in attitudes towards sexual health and the delivery of healthcare today.

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Section: Eugenics (In)fertility and ‘Race Suicide’mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Eugenics (In)fertility and ‘Race Suicide’mentioning

confidence: 99%

Histories of ‘a loathsome disease’: Sexual health in modern Britain

Hanley

2022

History Compass

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Postdigital health practices: new directions in medical humanities

Pietrzak-Franger

2023

Med Humanities

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Digitalisation has changed the way we understand and practice health. The recent pandemic has accelerated some of the developments in digital health and brought about modifications in public access to information. Taking this into consideration, this programmatic paper sets the stage for and conceptualises postdigital health practices as a possible field of inquiry within medical humanities. While delineating some central aspects of said practices, I draw attention to their significance in contemporary strategies of knowledge production. Spotlighting online environments as the point of ingress for the analysis of these practices, I propose three possible foci of critical and methodological engagement. By spotlighting the serialisation, multimodality, and transmediality of such environments, I argue, we have a chance to both augment and go beyond the field’s long-standing preoccupation with narrative, attend to various strategies of communicating illness experience, and re-frame them within larger questions of systemic inequalities. On this basis, and taking as examples COVID-19 and Long COVID, I sketch some of the directions that future strands of medical humanities may take and some of the questions we still have to ask for the field to overcome its own biases and blind spots.

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Medical Mappings of Syphilis in the Late Nineteenth Century

Cited by 2 publications

References 7 publications

Histories of ‘a loathsome disease’: Sexual health in modern Britain

Histories of ‘a loathsome disease’: Sexual health in modern Britain

Postdigital health practices: new directions in medical humanities

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