Recipe for citizenship: Professionalization and power in World War I dietetics

This dissertation is an analysis of the professionalization tactics of white, native-born, Protestant, middle-class women who served with the U.S. armed forces as dietitians during World War I. Through the overlapping rubrics of maternalism, citizenship, and professionalism, I examine the ways in which dominant race, class, and gender ideologies inflected their quest for professionalization. I specifically examine the way hospital dietitians infused their expertise with rhetoric of race betterment and national security to acquire distinct status and authority in relation to other female medical/health practitioners. In this study, I locate the ideological origins of Public Law 36, 80 th Congress, establishing the U.S. Women\u27s Medical Specialist Corps, within the cultural sensibilities of American antebellum evangelical health reform movements. Public Law 80-36 (April 16, 1947) authorized Regular Army commissions for dietitians, physical therapists, and occupational therapists. I contend that dietetics, a central force in the rise of the home economics movement, also served as an important portal for women\u27s access to higher education in science and medicine. Finally, I hold that military service was critical to the professionalization of women\u27s labor and claims to citizenship in early twentieth century America. In other words, military service allowed native-born, Protestant, middle- and upper-class, white American women to mobilize, network, and expand the scope of their work, as well as leaven their access to professional resources and political power

Medicating race : heart disease and durable preoccupations with difference

Thesis (Ph. D. in History and Social Study of Science and Technology (HASTS))--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, 2007.Includes bibliographical references (p. 320-350).This dissertation is an examination of intersections of race, pharmaceuticals, and heart disease over the course of the 20th century and today. Each of these parts has had a dynamic history, and when they are invoked together they provide a terrain for arguments about interventions in health and in justice in the present. An enduring aspect of discourses of heart disease over the past century has been articulating connections between characterizations of the modem American way of life and of heart disease. In that process, heart disease research and practice has participated in differentiating Americans, especially by race. This dissertation uses heart disease categories and the drugs prescribed for them as windows into racialized medicine. The chapters are organized in a way that is roughly chronological, beginning with the emergence of cardiology as a specialty just before World War II and the landmark longitudinal Framingham Heart Study that began shortly thereafter. A central chapter tracks the emergence and mobilization of African American hypertension as a disease category since the 1960s.(cont.) Two final chapters attend to current racial invocations of two pharmaceuticals: thiazide and BiDil. Using methods from critical historiography of race, anthropology, and science studies, this thesis provides an account of race in medicine with interdisciplinary relevance. By attending to continuities and discontinuities over the period, this thesis illustrates that race in heart disease research and practice has been a durable preoccupation. Racialized medicine has used epistemologically eclectic notions of race, drawing variously on heterogeneous aspects that are both material and semiotic. This underlying ambiguity is central to the productivity of the recorded category of race. American practices of medicating race have also been mediating it, arbitrating and intervening on new and renewed articulations of inclusion and difference in democratic and racialized American ways of life.by Anne Pollock.Ph.D.in History and Social Study of Science and Technology (HAST