The Body Politic in Pain.

In his 2015 book Pain: A Political History, Keith Wailoo demonstrates how a medicalized condition became central to defining party politics in the United States from World War II down to the present. Drawing on sources ranging from postwar Congressional hearings concerning the veteran welfare state to debates surrounding Rush Limbaugh's OxyContin addiction, Wailoo offers a fresh analysis of both U.S. political history and medical history, showing how today's highly polarized party system emerged in part from debates surrounding the existence and worth of pain, as well as its management.

Spines of Steel: A Case of Surgical Enthusiasm in Cold War America.

Just as the prevalence of scoliosis began to decline precipitously after World War II, American orthopedic surgeon Dr. Paul R. Harrington devised a new, invasive surgical system whereby implantable prosthetic metal rods and hooks were used to straighten curved backs. By the 1970s, "Harrington rods" had become the gold standard of surgical scoliosis care in the United States, replacing more conventional methods of exercise, bracing, and casting. This article situates the success of Harrington rods within a much larger and historically longer debate about why, when compared to those in other nations, American surgeons appear to be "more aggressive" and "knife-happy." Using Harrington's papers and correspondence, I argue that patients played a vital role in the rise of spinal surgery. As such, this article examines not only how surgical enthusiasm has been historically measured, defined, and morally evaluated, but also how scoliosis became classified as a debility in need of surgical management.

Half a Man: The Symbolism and Science of Paraplegic Impotence in World War II America.

At the conclusion of the Second World War, more than 600,000 men returned to the United States with long-term disabilities, profoundly destabilizing the definitions, representations, and experiences of male sexuality in America. By examining an oft-neglected 1950 film, The Men, along with medical, personal, and popular accounts of impotence in paralyzed World War II veterans, this essay excavates the contours of that change and its attendant anxieties. While previous scholarship on film and sexuality in the postwar period has focused on women's experiences, we broaden the analytical lens to provide a fuller picture of the various meanings of male sexuality, especially disabled heterosexuality. In postwar America, the paralyzed veteran created a temporary fissure in conventional discussions of the gendered body, a moment when the "normality" and performative features of the male body could not be assumed but rather had to be actively defined. To many veterans, and to the medical men who treated them, sexual reproduction--not function-became the ultimate signifier of remasculinization.

On the borderland of medical and disability history: a survey of the fields.

This essay explores the multiple sites where disability appears in the history of medicine and suggests ways in which medical historians can self-consciously incorporate a disability perspective into their own work. Just as medical historians have much to learn from disability historians, disability historians could benefit from looking more closely at the history of medicine. While disability cannot (and should not) be reduced to disease, the fact remains that some forms of disability are brought about by disease processes, and some require daily regimes of home health care, therapy, and pain management. How the disabled have interacted with health care institutions, caretakers, and the medical establishment is too significant to be written out of its history.

A dangerous curve: the role of history in America's scoliosis screening programs.

In 2004, the US Preventive Services Task Force called for an end to scoliosis screening in US public schools. However, screening endures, although most nations have ended their screening programs. Why? Explanations range from America's unique fee-for-service health care system and its encouragement of high-cost medical specialism to the nation's captivation with new surgeries and technologies. I highlight another, more historical, reason: the persistence of the belief that spinal curvature is a sign of a progressive disease or disability. Despite improved health and the mid-20th-century discovery of antibiotics and vaccines that all but eradicated the diseases historically associated with scoliosis (e.g., polio and tuberculosis), the health fears associated with spinal curvature never fully dissipated. Scoliosis is still seen as a "dangerous curve," although the exact nature of the health risk remains unclear.

Shooting disabled soldiers: medicine and photography in World War I America.

This article challenges conventional theories about the role of medical photography in the early twentieth century. Some scholars argue that the camera intensified the Foucauldian medical gaze, reducing patients to mere pathologies. Others maintain that with the rise of the new modern hospital and its state-of-the-art technologies, the patient fell from view entirely, with apertures pointing toward streamlined operating rooms rather than the human subjects who would go under the knife. The Army Surgeon General's World War I rehabilitation journal, Carry On: A Magazine on the Reconstruction of Disabled Soldiers and Sailors, problematizes these assumptions. Hoping to persuade a skeptical public that the Army's new programs in medical rehabilitation for disabled soldiers provided the best means of veteran welfare, the editorial officials at Carry On photographed patients fully clothed, wounds hidden, engaged in everyday activities in order to give the impression that the medical sciences of the day could cure permanent disabilities. In the end, Carry On shows us that medical doctors could, and did, use photography to conceal as well as reveal the reality faced by injured soldiers. In doing so, they (like other Progressive reformers at the time) hoped to persuade the public that rehabilitation had the power to make the wounds of war disappear.

The business of ethics: gender, medicine, and the professional codification of the American Physiotherapy Association, 1918-1935.

The history of codes of ethics in health care has almost exclusively been told as a story of how medical doctors developed their own professional principles of conduct. Yet telling the history of medical ethics solely from the physicians' perspective neglects not only the numerous allied health care workers who developed their own codes of ethics in tandem with the medical profession, but also the role that gender played in the writing of such professional creeds. By focusing on the predominantly female organization of the American Physiotherapy Association (APA) and its 1935 "Code of Ethics and Discipline," I demonstrate how these women used their creed to at once curry favor from and challenge the authority of the medical profession. Through their Code, APA therapists engaged in a dynamic dialogue with the male physicians of the American Medical Association (AMA) in the name of professional survival. I conclude that, contrary to historians and philosophers who contend that professional women have historically operated under a gender-specific ethic of care, the physiotherapists avoided rhetoric construed as feminine and instead created a "business-like" creed in which they spoke solely about their relationship with physicians and remained silent on the matter of patient care.