Minding the Machine
Minding the Machine

Author: Stephen P. Rice

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2004-08-30

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 0520926579

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In this innovative book, Stephen P. Rice offers a new understanding of class formation in America during the several decades before the Civil War. This was the period in the nation's early industrial development when travel by steamboat became commonplace, when the railroad altered concepts of space and time, and when Americans experienced the beginnings of factory production. These disorienting changes raised a host of questions about what machinery would accomplish. Would it promote equality or widen the distance between rich and poor? Among the most contentious questions were those focusing on the social consequences of mechanization: while machine enthusiasts touted the extent to which machines would free workers from toil, others pointed out that people needed to tend machines, and that that work was fundamentally degrading and exploitative. Minding the Machine shows how members of a new middle class laid claim to their social authority and minimized the potential for class conflict by playing out class relations on less contested social and technical terrains. As they did so, they defined relations between shopowners—and the overseers, foremen, or managers they employed—and wage workers as analogous to relations between head and hand, between mind and body, and between human and machine. Rice presents fascinating discussions of the mechanics' institute movement, the manual labor school movement, popular physiology reformers, and efforts to solve the seemingly intractable problem of steam boiler explosions. His eloquent narrative demonstrates that class is as much about the comprehension of social relations as it is about the making of social relations, and that class formation needs to be understood not only as a social struggle but as a conceptual struggle.

A Traffic of Dead Bodies
A Traffic of Dead Bodies

Author: Michael Sappol

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2018-06-05

Total Pages: 445

ISBN-13: 0691186146

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A Traffic of Dead Bodies enters the sphere of bodysnatching medical students, dissection-room pranks, and anatomical fantasy. It shows how nineteenth-century American physicians used anatomy to develop a vital professional identity, while claiming authority over the living and the dead. It also introduces the middle-class women and men, working people, unorthodox healers, cultural radicals, entrepreneurs, and health reformers who resisted and exploited anatomy to articulate their own social identities and visions. The nineteenth century saw the rise of the American medical profession: a proliferation of practitioners, journals, organizations, sects, and schools. Anatomy lay at the heart of the medical curriculum, allowing American medicine to invest itself with the authority of European science. Anatomists crossed the boundary between life and death, cut into the body, reduced it to its parts, framed it with moral commentary, and represented it theatrically, visually, and textually. Only initiates of the dissecting room could claim the privileged healing status that came with direct knowledge of the body. But anatomy depended on confiscation of the dead--mainly the plundered bodies of African Americans, immigrants, Native Americans, and the poor. As black markets in cadavers flourished, so did a cultural obsession with anatomy, an obsession that gave rise to clashes over the legal, social, and moral status of the dead. Ministers praised or denounced anatomy from the pulpit; rioters sacked medical schools; and legislatures passed or repealed laws permitting medical schools to take the bodies of the destitute. Dissection narratives and representations of the anatomical body circulated in new places: schools, dime museums, popular lectures, minstrel shows, and sensationalist novels. Michael Sappol resurrects this world of graverobbers and anatomical healers, discerning new ligatures among race and gender relations, funerary practices, the formation of the middle-class, and medical professionalization. In the process, he offers an engrossing and surprisingly rich cultural history of nineteenth-century America.

Children and Youth in Sickness and in Health
Children and Youth in Sickness and in Health

Author: Janet Golden

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2004-04-30

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 0313053006

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Six original essays reflect the growing scholarly interest in the history of childhood and youth, particularly issues affecting child health and welfare. These important new essays show how changing patterns of health and disease have responded to and shaped notions of childhood and adolescence as life stages. Until the early 20th century, life-threatening illnesses were a sinister presence in the lives of children of all social classes. Today, many diseases and threats to child health have been eliminated or alleviated. Yet critical problems remain. New threats such as AIDS and violence take a steady toll. Child health remains an active concern for all families. Despite the development of health care policies, social welfare policies, and effective medication, the home remains—as it was in the Colonial period—the most critical site of care. Parents are still central to the preservation of children's health. This work imposes a holistic view of this experience for children and families. By examining the child's perspective of illness, the authors make an important contribution to the understanding of illness as part of the developmental process of growing up.