Listing of Sessions and Abstracts of Papers - History of Science ...

Waller, John
E-mail Address: jwaller1@hotmail.com
Protecting the Lineage: Doctors, Disease and Nineteenth-Century Marital Advice
Belief in the heritability of chronic maladies such as scrofula, gout, consumption and insanity
achieved the status of a core paradigmatic assumption among doctors of the early nineteenth century.
These supposedly hereditary diseases were commonly described as highly resistant to therapeutic intervention
and likely to entail on subsequent generations lives of suffering and stigmatization. Reflecting
on this, most medical writers who wrote on the theme of inherited malady concurred in reproving the
marriage of anyone carrying hereditary taints. Those who eschewed medical advice and had children
with the consumptive, insane or scrofulous were also roundly condemned by doctors for irresponsibility
and callous egoism. In scores of advice manuals, the necessity for marital decisions to be grounded in
physiology as much as economics and aesthetics was repeatedly extolled. And by the middle decades of
the century, debate as to the propriety of avoiding marriages with the hereditarily ill had emerged as a
powerful medical discourse. Not least because these medical injunctions have been almost entirely
overlooked by historians, the aims of this paper are to trace how medical ideas of hereditary disease
were disseminated into the public sphere and how, once there, they impacted upon reproductive thought
and behavior. Concentrating on medical advice manuals written for a wide audience, I will also consider
the strategic underpinnings of the increasing stress placed by nineteenth-century doctors on the subject
of heredity disease; the receptivity of the public to medical hereditarianism; and, finally, the broader
implications this discourse had for the later emergence of organized eugenics movements in both Britain
and America.
Watkins, Elizabeth
E-mail Address: ewatkins@andrew.cmu.edu
Science Confronts Aging: The Case of Hormone Replacement Therapy
This paper explores the role of scientists in the successful marketing of hormone replacement therapy
to older women and their physicians. In the mid to late 1970s, the fate of estrogen replacement therapy
was very much in question, because scientific studies had demonstrated that estrogen use increased the
risk of endometrial cancer. In the 1980s, however, laboratory, clinical, and epidemiological data helped
to revive the popularity of hormone replacement for postmenopausal women, by demonstrating that this
drug therapy could prevent, or at least forestall, the development of osteoporosis. Pharmaceutical manufacturers
used scientific studies to recapture the market for hormone replacement, by advertising the
drugs' alleged long-term health benefits. The expanded recommendation for prescribing hormone
therapy to prevent osteoporosis in older women was based on scientific studies that convinced both
government advisors and practicing physicians of the validity of estrogen's protection against bone loss.
These investigations - some carefully conceived and carried out, others sloppily designed and executed -
were highly valued and influential in shifting the pendulum of approval toward long-term use of hormone
therapy. In the late 20th century, doctors increasingly relied on laboratory scientists to help them
make diagnoses (witness the profusion of laboratory tests) and determine treatments (thanks to the
multitude of new drugs flowing from academic and industrial labs). In this paper, I argue that the prescription
and use of hormone replacement drugs were influenced by the increasingly authoritative voices
of laboratory and epidemiological researchers, even though their results were not only contradictory, but
also difficult to interpret.
Weikart, Richard
E-mail Address: rweikart@toto.csustan.edu