Medical Genetics at McGill: The History of a Pioneering Research Group.

The McGill Group in Medical Genetics was formed in 1972, supported by the Medical Research Council and successor Canadian Institutes for Health Research until September 2009, making it the longest active biomedical research group in the history of Canada. We document the history of the McGill Group and situate its research within a broader history of medical genetics. Drawing on original oral histories with the Group's members, surviving documents, and archival materials, we explore how the Group's development was structured around epistemological trends in medical genetics, policy choices made by research agencies, and the development of genetics at McGill University and its hospitals.

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.

From naughty goods to Nicole Miller: medicine and the marketing of American contraceptives.

In the rich history of modern pharmaceutical advertising in the United States, few medical objects have been as controversial as contraceptives. Condemned in the 1870s as lascivious devices whose commercial visibility would tarnish female sexual purity, contraceptives have in the late twentieth century been repackaged by pharmaceutical companies as the smart, progressive, and fashion-conscious woman's ally. This article explores evolving perspectives on the place of birth control in public spaces from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. In so doing, it elucidates the changes and continuities in the long and contested history of marketing, medicine, sexuality, and reproductive control.

Listening to the past: history, psychiatry, and anxiety.

This article explores the history of psychiatry and the rise of biological psychiatry and suggests ways in which the study of history can shed light on current psychiatric practice and debate. Focusing on anxiolytics (meprobomate in the 1950s and benzodiazepines in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s) as a case study in the development of psychopharmacology, it shows how social and political factors converged to popularize and later stigmatize outpatient treatments for anxiety. The importance of social context in the creation of new therapeutic paradigms in modern psychiatry suggests the need to take into account a broad range of historical variables to understand how modern psychopharmacology has emerged and how particular treatments for disorders have been developed, diffused, and assessed.