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Werken van Charles E. Rosenberg

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Geboortedatum
1936-11-11
Geslacht
male
Nationaliteit
USA

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Why did I want to read about cholera epidemics? Misery loves company? I hope not; that seems quite callous in 2021. Medical curiosity? Not my area of expertise. Insomnia? No, thank goodness.

The Cholera Years by Charles E. Rosenberg was described as an analysis of the confluence of the medical, intellectual and social history of the three American cholera epidemics – 1832, 1849 and 1866. The attraction of learning about the interweaving the scientific and societal causes of a devastating disease was something I could not resist. Causes, who doesn't want to learn about the inducements and catalysts of dangerous systems?

Rosenberg chooses to focus his discussion on New York City, thus avoiding necessary repetition of explication from city to city. It was only in the populated cities of the 1830s that cholera as an epidemic struck: Boston, Charleston, Chicago, but New York was the largest and most populated at the time.

Causes – improvement in trade and transportation, industrialization; inadequate attention to humane architecture (tenements) and support services for the poor leading to slums; denial of the necessity of a Board of Health and condemnation of the medical profession's theories and warnings, Puritanical belief in the special dispensation of the pious, the temperate, the clean; lack of knowledge of fermentation and enzyme reaction and of scientific habits of mind. That's just some of it.

This is definitely worth your time, a well and clearly-written presentation which reads like a movie camera zoom into 40-some years of American life.
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khenkins | 5 andere besprekingen | Feb 19, 2021 |
In No Other Gods: On Science and American Social Thought, Charles E. Rosenberg writes, “Contemporary notions of heredity, sexual behavior, and physiology all illustrated the way in which ostensibly scientific ideas played a prominent role in the way late-nineteenth-century Americans and Europeans framed and understood their world and legitimated – by naturalizing – existing social relationships” (pg. xii-xiv). He continues, “Science has lent American social thought a vocabulary and a supply of images; it has served as a source of metaphor and, like figures borrowed from other areas, the similes of science have variously suggested, explained, justified, even helped dictate social categories and values” (pg. 1). Further, “on many levels – not only that of institutional support – society constantly helps shape the scientific enterprise; even the internal texture of scientific ideas is not entirely insulated from such pressures” (pg. 2). According to Rosenberg, “Analogies and arguments drawn from science became, as the nineteenth century progressed, an increasingly plausible idiom in which to formulate – and in that sense to control emotionally – almost every aspect of an inexorably modernizing world” (pg. 7). Rosenberg argues, “One can, I think, mark the beginning of modern academic science in the United States at the moment investigators began to care more for the approval and esteem of their disciplinary colleagues than they did for the general standards of success in the society which surrounded them” (pg. 14). Finally, “Major precedents in the development of federal support for scientific research in the universities and states were created almost through inadvertence, not because of a reasoned commitment to the need for supporting the scientific enterprise, but because of the political power and peculiar ideological status of agriculture in American life” (pg. 19).
Rosenberg uses heredity as a case study. He writes, “The vogue of social hereditarianism was already well under way by the mid-nineteenth century, while the optimism and confident manipulativeness which characterized these ideas in the middle third of the century was far different from the self-conscious pessimism which had come to inform them by the early years of the twentieth” (pg. 25). He continues, “Heredity thus became one of the necessary elements in the endlessly flexible etiological model that served to underwrite the social effectiveness of the late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century physician. Natural endowment, environmental stress, inadequate or improper diet, climate – all interacted to produce health or disease” (pg. 33). In terms of social roles, Rosenberg writes, “During the nineteenth century, economic and social forces at work within Western Europe and the United States began to compromise traditional social roles. Some women at least began to question – and a few to challenge overtly – their constricted place in society. Naturally enough, men hopeful of preserving existing social relationships, and in some cases threatened themselves both as individuals and as members of particular social groups, employed medical and biological arguments to rationalize traditional sex roles as rooted inevitably and irreversibly in anatomy and physiology” (pg. 54-55).
Rosenberg writes, “In mid-nineteenth century [sic] most practicing American scientists served as college teachers; such positions entailed enormous teaching burdens and assorted pastoral duties. Research was never assumed to be a condition of employment” (pg. 136). Further, “Progress and technology were not only integral but justifying elements in the widely accepted vision of America’s higher moral order” (pg. 140). Rosenberg argues that the Adams Act (1906) changed the former while asserting the latter. He writes, “It provided much-needed support for new and centrally important disciplines, for genetics, for biochemistry, and for bacteriology. It permanently strengthened the scientific departments of the land-grant colleges. The Adams Act provided the opportunity for willing men to enter upon the path of abstract research. More than this, however, it demanded a precise definition of agricultural research and – by implication – of the experiment station’s proper task” (pg. 182).
Rosenberg concludes, “Although intellectual history and the history of particular areas of pure and applied learning have a long and often distinguished tradition, the bulk of such scholarship has been undertaken by practitioners of the relevant mystery – physicians concerning themselves with the history of medical ideas or philosophers with the genealogy of canonical philosophical problems. Not surprisingly, they have been often unconcerned with the social and institutional context in which the ideas they study were elaborated, and demands for such research have on occasion been derided as an imposition of the trivial and temporal – the merely circumstantial – into higher and more meaningful realms of thought” (pg. 226).
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DarthDeverell | 1 andere bespreking | Dec 4, 2017 |
If you're a bad psychiatrist, think of this as a tale of the Good Old Days.

In 1881, Charles Guiteau shot President James A. Garfield, believing that he had much to do for the administration and that he wasn't getting the chance to do it. Garfield died later that year -- killed not by Garfield's bullets but by the manifest incompetence of his doctors who refused to clean their hands -- and Guiteau was put on trial.

Guiteau's lawyers offered various arguments for why he should not be executed, but basically it all boiled down to insanity. The jury rejected the defense, and Guiteau hanged. But most people think that Guiteau was genuinely nuts.

The real questions were not those asked at the trial: Just what was wrong with Guiteau, and was it enough for him to earn an insanity reprieve? Rosenberg's book tries to give a 1960s answer: Guiteau was a paranoid schizophrenic and, yes, insane. It gives a detailed account of the trial, and a brief history of Guiteau's life, to demonstrate the point. It also looks at mental illness as it was understood in the 1880s.

The latter is useful. So is the discussion of the trial. The material on mental illnesses is not so good. Quite frankly, we've learned a lot since then, and schizophrenia has been largely redefined -- and I'm not convinced Guiteau fits the criteria. Delusional disorder, yes; schizophrenia... hard to say based on what we know now. In any case, the rest of the discussion of mental illness is, shall we say, crazy.

As history, this is a useful book, and a good way to try to get into Guiteau's head. But it won't teach you much about psychiatry, except that it had a long way to go in the 1880s, and that (due in no small part to the errors of Sigmund Freud) it still had a long way to go in the 1960s. I felt the book much too willing to let Guiteau off the hook -- he was loony, but he knew what he was doing; he should have tried to get help, and he didn't. That's crime enough for me.
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waltzmn | May 4, 2016 |
When I first thumbed through the book, I noticed the 18 page bibliography of primary and secondary sources. Intrigued by the documentation and period reviewed, I started the book almost immediately. It does answer many more questions that it raises. And Rosenberg avoids straying from the history of cholera to the many tangential conflicts arising during the period. However his work does touch on many issues still relevant today, such as the role of religion in politics, the interests of state and local government, the mobilization of the public opinion to enact change, and distrust of physicians.

To quote another reviewer on LT - "Unfortunately, as a weakness, Rosenberg is very repetitive. A lot of information and points are stressed repeatedly throughout the book, and in that way it sort of losses focus a few times. - morbidromantic | Nov 21, 2009."

Utilizing more complete quotes from the newspapers and other sources might have allowed the author to emphasize key points in a more interesting manner, rather than his repetitive style of paraphrasing. Such as the following from "J.L.G." Boston Investigator, August 01, 1849, "They can't clean the cellars, and the lanes-visit the hovels of the poor, the destitute, the widow, and the orphan, especially if they are sick; and more especially if they are vicious, and their sickness is the cholera. But they must do something, and what can they do but pray? This is easy. It neither soils their fine clothes, blisters their soft hands, offends their nostrils by noisome smells, nor shocks their fine sensibilities by witnessing constant instances of misery, sickness, destitution, and death." [p124]

This work could be the basis of a compelling narrative history.
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MichaelC.Oliveira | 5 andere besprekingen | Aug 27, 2012 |

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