History of Science, Technology, and Medicine Commons^™

Disability: A Dirty Word? How Language Historically Perpetuates Exclusion And Systemic Oppression, Kelly E. Imm

Graduate Masters Theses

In 1990, the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) marked a pivotal moment in the American disability rights movement, which began in the 1960s and sought to secure civil rights for people with disabilities. Despite this monumental achievement, this thesis considers how the language used throughout American history and culture to describe people with disabilities, even within the confines of progressive legislation like the ADA, remains deeply rooted in ableist and oppressive historical attitudes. At the heart of this issue, this thesis demonstrates how the medicalization of disability, which has dominated American culture for centuries, continues to frame …

“To Prepare The Mind For Wonder”: Popular Science And Mass Media In The 1920s, Alexander Olson

Journal of 20th Century Media History

This article examines the creation and development of the Science Service, a 1920s initiative aimed at popularizing science through mass media. Founded by biologist William Ritter and newspaper magnate Edward Scripps, the wire service sought to disseminate accurate scientific information to the American public via newspapers, radio, and other popular media. While Scripps favored a commercially viable, accessible style that used entertainment to hook readers, Ritter envisioned science journalism as a tool for democratic education and intellectual empowerment. These conflicting philosophies created lasting tensions within the organization around how to address challenges such as sensationalism, editorial independence, and public skepticism. …

Matthew Kinnard, Matthew A. Kinnard M.S., Ph.D.

We Are NIH Oral History Project

No abstract provided.

Bell Telephone System’S Preeminent Role In The Growth Of Industrial Design, Ralph O. Meyer, Russell A. Flinchum

Purdue University Press Books

Histories of design pay scant attention to the corded telephone, which played an immeasurable role in early communication. Although the Bell System, with many Nobel Prizes, is justly acknowledged for its technical prowess, it should also be recognized for its early and considerable impact on the developing discipline of industrial design. In 1930, young Henry Dreyfuss, who would later become known as a pioneer of industrial design, was retained by the Bell System as a design consultant and matured in that environment. With substantial input from Bell System engineers, Dreyfuss and his staff produced attractive telephone designs that were manufactured …

Identification And Preclinical Assessment Of Novel Therapeutic Modalities In Environmental Exposure-Induced Lung Disease, Aaron D. Schwab

Theses & Dissertations

Environmental lung diseases are preventable respiratory conditions either caused or made worse by inhaled environmental exposures. Contemporarily, environmental lung diseases are most associated with workplace exposures given specific occupational processes aerosolize inflammatory agents that can be inhaled at high concentrations. Although a considerable amount is known regarding immunoglobulin (Ig)E-mediated responses to environmental exposures, little is known about non-IgE mediated respiratory conditions resulting from lipopolysaccharide (LPS)-enriched organic dust exposure(s). Chronic respiratory diseases such as asthma, hypersensitivity pneumonitis, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and pulmonary fibrosis have all been identified as environmental lung diseases caused or exacerbated by such environmental dusts. Therapeutic …

Atoms For Agency: How Argentina’S Pursuit Of Nuclear Power Plants Represents International Legitimacy And Autonomy, 1951-1978., Jacob R. Gressin

Binghamton University Undergraduate Journal

Since 1949 Argentina has developed nuclear power plants (NPPs), overcoming political instability and financial barriers, to eventually succeed in the activation of Latin America’s first nuclear power plant, Atucha-1, in 1974. However, given the ample means of electrical production though fossil fuels and hydroelectric power, NPPs in Argentina present a paradoxical means of electrical production. This paper analyzes the history of Argentina’s nuclear power program, from 1951-1978, in order to offer a more holistic understanding of why NPPs were developed. I argue that nuclear power in Argentina was motivated not by a desire for electrical generation or to manufacture …

Ada News - 05/05/2025, American Dental Association, Publishing Division

ADA News

Established in 1970 as the official newspaper of the American Dental Association, the ADA News serves practicing dentists and others allied to the dental profession in the U.S. and internationally. It is the No. 1 source of news and information about the many benefits and services the ADA delivers to members daily as well as timely information on scientific, social, political and economic developments affecting dentistry and health care.

Frontier Healthscapes: Competing Narratives Of Disease, Environment, And Wellbeing In Early Minnesota, Aidan Reynolds

Geography Honors Projects

Across settler societies, health narratives were shaped by evolving tensions between lay and expert knowledge, frameworks of disease causation, and perceptions of the environment as both a source of health and a threat. In the decades following Euro-American settlement (1860-1900), Minnesota became a focal point for these debates, with its landscape fostering complex and competing narratives on health, wellbeing, and disease. This paper explores how public health discourse developed in Minnesota through the perspectives of institutions, the public, and economic interests. Combining environmental history with critical discourse analysis of archival materials, this study examines shifts within the Minnesota State Board …

The Rise And Fall Of The Contagious Diseases Acts: An Examination Of The Legislative Influences, Medical Discourse And Repeal Arguments, Elizabeth Henderson

All Theses

The Contagious Diseases Acts (CDA) were the most important legislative intervention concerning sexuality in the nineteenth century. The CDA was a public health measure passed to address the spread of venereal disease amongst the British Army and Navy, and targeted Britain's most vulnerable women – sex workers – because they were blamed for being the presumed cause and primary mode of spreading venereal disease. This resulted in the legalization of what critics of the CDA would call surgical assault, or instrumental rape, of working-class women suspected of being sex workers. Historians who study sexuality and sex work in Britain have …

Those Magnificent Men In Their Fighting Machines: An Investigation Into The Lives Of Wwi Tankmen, Lucas C. Campbell

Master's Theses

This thesis will look at the immense backlog of war diaries, journals, personal letters, government documentation, and oral histories left behind by British tank crewmen of the First World War. The purpose of this investigation is mainly to uncover the reasons that individuals were chosen for transferal into the Royal Tank Regiment, where they were transferred from, what their training consisted of before their deployment, and their combat history once they were sent into the battlefields on the Western Front. The goal of this project is to gauge the reaction to the emergence of this crucially important technology on a …

“Re-Storying” Anne Shirley And The Adhd Child: A Crip Genealogy Of Anne Of Green Gables, Darian Aleyna Wilson

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis explores the contested nature of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), focusing on its cultural and historical constructions. While ADHD has been included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders since 1980, its legitimacy remains a subject of debate across medical, disability studies, and historical scholarship. Using Eli Clare’s critique of diagnosis as a tool rather than a fact, this project examines how ADHD is both pathologized and re-storied within societal and medical discourses. It highlights the tension between medical classifications and lived experiences of those diagnosed with ADHD, particularly in the context of girlhood.

The central …

The Weaponization Of Medicine In Arkansas Prison Farms, 1960s-1970s, Grace E. Marr

History Undergraduate Honors Theses

The Arkansas State Penitentiary provides a case study for medical care in prisons during a transformational period. Isolation and state non-involvement in Arkansas allowed the creation of an independent culture in which harrowing abuses flourished. Medical providers could be prisoners themselves, operating the hospital and blood bank creating a complicated hierarchy. By examining medical provisions at the Cummins and Tucker Prison Farms during the 1960s to 1970s, this thesis reveals a system where the lines between treatment and torture and medical practitioner and imprisoned were blurred.

Pedro Aceves Mfa Thesis, Pedro M. Aceves

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

My Work is about looking at Cruising through a queer decolonial lens. Using multiple mediums such as photo, glass, Augmented reality, and film, I explore these queer histories and aesthetics through not just an anthropological approach but also an artistic epistemological approach weaving together narratives of prehispanic and modern queer Latinidad.

Angelic Wasting: The Impacts Of The Enlightenment, Evangelicalism, And The Industrial Revolution On Romanticization Of Tuberculosis In England, 1800-1850, Sara M. Sudano

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis aims to elucidate the intersections between the portrayal of tuberculosis in the Romantic era and the Enlightenment, evangelism, and the Industrial Revolution. This study aims to do so by locating and analyzing depictions in the primary source representations of the disease, then considering the effects of the three factors mentioned above on its representation. The Enlightenment, evangelism, and the Industrial Revolution interacted in a variety of ways, and the influence of all three factors was found within the representations of tuberculosis, albeit in often indirect ways. In the novels of Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell and Charlotte Brontë, tuberculosis was …

For All Mankind? Reading Race In Early American Science Fiction, 1836-1888, Ryan C. Snopek

Madison Historical Review

Beginning in the early nineteenth century, a new type of literature envisioned what the United States would look like in the far future. Now known as science fiction, three of these works - Mary Griffith’s “Three Hundred Years Hence,” George Tucker’s A Century Hence, and Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward - are exemplary in how they reflect social concerns of their time, particularly in the construction of notions of race in America. Through the idea of science as a universal and rational ideal, these authors imagined a progressive, white future for the United States, in which science and progress are increasingly …

'No Nose Club': The Quackish Consumption Of Pox Care In Long Eighteenth-Century England., Sasha Jones

Madison Historical Review

(World History) This article explores the rise of non-institutional syphilis care in eighteenth-century England and the growing popularity of the barbershop as a centre of pox care among middle-class men. It argues that middle-class pox sufferers sought out the barbershop as a primary location of health care because of the invasive treatments offered by physicians at institutional centers of pox care – including those offered in private offices. The social stigma that was associated with syphilis also encouraged middle-class men to seek pox treatment at the barbershop, since its location in bustling downtown entertainment districts and its reputation as a …

Awards For Outstanding Papers Written In 2024

The Thetean: A Student Journal for Scholarly Historical Writing

No abstract provided.

Failure For Avon, Failure For Labour A Waterworks Project And The Shortcomings Of Left-Wing Groups In Pre-Wwi Aberdeen, Garrett Mast

The Thetean: A Student Journal for Scholarly Historical Writing

On September 16th, 1909, the Aberdeen Daily Journal ran a single article that encompassed one and a half pages of the ten- page printing. This article did not discuss any national or international news, but rather a town council meeting for the city of Aberdeen in northern Scotland. This meeting was anything but standard procedure, lasting six and a half hours, a record for the council with at least 27 of the 34 councillors participating in the debate. The debate discussed the rather mundane question of from which river the council should seek approval for pumping new drinking water.1 “The …

A Historical And Legal Analysis Of The Life Of Ellett Robinson, Abigail Hilbig

The Thetean: A Student Journal for Scholarly Historical Writing

To look deeply into the lives of individuals is to begin to understand the intricacies of American life. Ellett Robinson was an African American woman, born at the inception of the twentieth century. Like the century she lived through, Ellett’s life was defined by sociocultural concepts that began long before she came to be. Perceptions of race and the family were being transformed throughout the 1800s and 1900s. Born into this tumultuous time, Ellett was destined to experience the prejudice that existed against African Americans in the South. With slaves having been freed just thirty- six years before Ellett’s birth, …

La Junta Development Of U.S. Opinion And Interaction With Chile, 1970–1981, Carson Cambell

The Thetean: A Student Journal for Scholarly Historical Writing

It was hot outside in the late afternoon of the seventeenth of September when Charles Horman stepped out of his car. Horman was exhausted from a long day of many futile attempts to contact the United States ambassador in Santiago, Chile. Many hours were spent in the endeavor to secure emergency travels back to the U.S., but thus far there was no success to be found. Carrying such important information regarding the successful coup of the Chilean General, Augusto Pinochet, Horman knew he needed to reach the safety of his home country.11 The American journalist entered his house, and mere …