medical-history-monday - Tumblr blog

[medical-history-monday]

books i highly recommend regarding disability and/or neurodivergence

crazy like us -- ethan waters (this one is absolutely essential for the way it discusses US imperialism as it relates to sanism, please read it, please please please)

the collected schizophrenias -- esmé weijun wang

nobody's normal -- roy r grinker (recommended critically)

mad in america -- robert whitaker (recommended critically)

the mindfixers -- anne harrington

illness as metaphor and AIDS and its metaphors -- susan sontag

kim ji young, born 1982 -- cho nam joo (this book is marketed as a novel but it includes nonfiction elements discussing the misogyny and sanism connection)

please add your recommendations to the list!

[medical-history-monday]

under medical neoliberalism, there are only two acceptable "causes" for illness/variation/behavior: an immutable, measurable, essential feature of biology- or things which are your fault.

so you end up with most "progressive" medical approaches striving to bioessentialize things like addiction, poverty, sexuality, gender, crime, suffering, anger, etc because they can't move outside of this paradigm. further, any attempt to assert that something is NOT an inherently biological phenomenon is perceived as saying "this is all your fault and is a moral flaw". we have to move past our obsession with using biology to justify our experiences- it will never be a path to liberation and just reinforces the idea that anything that is not "biological fact" is a moral wrong.

[medical-history-monday]

“The patients it currently serves are every bit as poor and needy as the patients who preceded them in centuries past... That's what makes Bellevue so comforting and so disquieting. It stands, for all its troubles, a vital safety net, a place of caring and a place of last resort.”

Oshinsky, David. Bellevue: Three Centuries of Medicine and Mayhem at Americas Most Storied Hospital. 10. New York, NY: Random House Usa Inc, 2016.

[medical-history-monday]

“The return of prosperity following World War II revived the struggling voluntary hospitals, as group insurance plans like Blue Cross, often written into employment contracts, afforded the working classes access to amenities that a place like Bellevue couldn't possibly match, despite the excellence of its medical staff.”

Oshinsky, David. Bellevue: Three Centuries of Medicine and Mayhem at Americas Most Storied Hospital. 8. New York, NY: Random House Usa Inc, 2016.

[medical-history-monday]

“In the 1960s, both Cornell and Columbia departed Bellevue, leaving NYU physicians to provide the medical care. The quality remained high; NYU had long been closest to the hospital because so many of its faculty and house staff were native New Yorkers from the working and middle classes who viscerally grasped Bellevue's importance to the city.”

Oshinsky, David. Bellevue: Three Centuries of Medicine and Mayhem at Americas Most Storied Hospital. 9. New York, NY: Random House Usa Inc, 2016.

[medical-history-monday]

"...hospital officials took the revolutionary step of accepting numerous women and Jewish interns- partly to meet the growing patient load and partly because NYU Medical School, Bellevue's primary feeder, ignored the infamous "Jewish Quota" employed at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Cornell, and most other medical colleges in the region."

Oshinsky, David. Bellevue: Three Centuries of Medicine and Mayhem at Americas Most Storied Hospital. 8. New York, NY: Random House Usa Inc, 2016.

[medical-history-monday]

“A new generation of clinicians and researchers came of age, wedded to the ways of modern science and contemptuous of the fading certainties of the past. Two of the most influential figures- William Welch, the founder of modern pathology in America, and William Halstead, the era's most innovative surgeon- bonded as interns at Bellevue in the bitter struggle to bring antiseptic methods to the profession.”

Oshinsky, David. Bellevue: Three Centuries of Medicine and Mayhem at Americas Most Storied Hospital. 7. New York, NY: Random House Usa Inc, 2016.

[medical-history-monday]

“The doctor volunteered his services for several reasons, including a Christian duty to the poor and the chance to hone his skills on bodies too powerless to resist.”

Oshinsky, David. Bellevue: Three Centuries of Medicine and Mayhem at Americas Most Storied Hospital. 5. New York, NY: Random House Usa Inc, 2016.

[medical-history-monday]

“They come knowing they won't be turned away. Every immigrant group has availed itself of Bellevue's protective umbrella over the centuries; every disaster and epidemic has packed its spartan wards. "It was never the tidiest [place] in the world -- how could it be, when its policy was always to accept those patients who with some justice could be called the dregs of humanity?" the gifted surgeon William A. Nolen observed.“

Oshinsky, David. Bellevue: Three Centuries of Medicine and Mayhem at Americas Most Storied Hospital. 2. New York, NY: Random House Usa Inc, 2016.

[medical-history-monday]

Oshinsky, David. Bellevue: Three Centuries of Medicine and Mayhem at Americas Most Storied Hospital. 4. New York, NY: Random House Usa Inc, 2016.

[medical-history-monday]

Hey since it's disability pride month I'd like my US followers to contact their senators and ask them to support the RISE Act.

The RISE Act would make it so that publically funded colleges would have to accept high school accommodation records as documentation for disabilities. What this means is instead of having to chase down doctors to fill out long forms or get testing that costs thousands of dollars, to confirm a diagnosis we already recieved and wouldn't change in a few short years, many individuals could just show their accommodation documentation from high school and thus qualify for accommodations in college.

It would also provide funding for better university disability centers and better education of professors on disability accommodations, meaning less burden on disabled students to figure out how to contact their centers and to educate their professors on accommodations.

This is really important because difficulty in getting the "proper" documentation and in figuring out what documentation you even need is a massive barrier in getting accommodations in college for disabled people. Lack of accommodations leads to lower graduation rates and gpas, and thus contributes to poverty and an inability to access higher education for disabled individuals.

I'll reblog this post with a link to a resource to help contact your senators so that Tumblr doesn't hide it.

[medical-history-monday]

In the future- would me posting memes about my research on disease prevention in American Revolutionary War POW camps be something y’all are interested in? Yes or no? 

Sound off in the comments or shoot me an ask or message with your response!

[medical-history-monday]

In May 1935 six unemployed individuals staged an eleven day sit in of the NY Emergency Relief Bureau protesting discrimination faced by "handicapped" workers from public relief programs and private employers. They were backed by picketers and would later form the League of Physically Handicapped which would be described as militant. The League and other associations protested against discrimination and New Deal policies that marked disabled applicants as "unemployable." This sit in won a total of 1,500 jobs for disabled New Yorkers and helped set a precedent for future protestors whose work would lead to the passing of the Americans with Disabilities Act 55 years later.

October is National Disability Awareness month in the United States, and while unfortunately focused primarily on the contributions of the disabled community to the economy- it’s still very important to recognize. To learn more about National Disability Awareness month, and the 2021 theme “Powered by Inclusion,” click HERE.

Longmore, Paul K. "Making Disability an Essential Part of American History." OAH Magazine of History 23, no. 3 (2009): 11-15.  http://jstor.org/stable/40505997.

Levers, Annie. DISABILITY rights sit-in at the WPA [1935]. A New NYC Historic & Cultural Markers Program. https://annie-levers-trnd.squarespace.com/new-page-3.

[medical-history-monday]

New Book Quote-Along!

Starting Monday, 16.08.21, I’ll be doing a chapter by chapter quote along of Bellevue: Three Centuries of Medicine and Mayhem at America’s Most Storied Hospital by David Oshinsky! Each week will be a new chapter, and every quote will be cited in the Chicago Manual of Style. At the end I’ll post a review of the book. 

Look forward to seeing you there!