Article ID: CBB000774450

The Dearth of the Clinic: Lead, Air, and Agency in Twentieth-Century America (2003)

unapi

By surveying myriad ways that twentieth-century American experts and nonexperts grappled with the health implications of aerial exposures to lead or substances that may have contained lead, this paper urges medical historians' attention toward environments---workplaces, homes and the outdoors---and their extrabodily ontology. Health histories framed around dust, toxins, fumes, and pollution rather than around particular diseases challenge long-accepted narratives, such as Hibbert Hill's old generalization about a "New Public Health" shift from "the environment to the individual." Greater environmental focus can also advance "bottom-up" health history. Pushing the gaze of twentieth-century medical and public health historians beyond hospitals, "public health" departments, clinically confirmable disease, and "patient" roles, it draws historians' attention to health-related realms in which laypeople often claimed greater knowledge and competence.

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Authors & Contributors
Sellers, Christopher C.
Melling, Joseph
Markowitz, Gerald E.
Mix, Michael C.
Bradley D. Snow
Rocio Gomez
Concepts
Public health
Environmental health; environmental medicine
Lead poisoning
Environmental pollution
Environmentalism
Medicine
Time Periods
20th century
19th century
21st century
20th century, late
18th century
Places
United States
Great Britain
Idaho (U.S.)
Zacatecas (State)
Weimar Republic (1919-1933)
Scotland
Institutions
Rockefeller Foundation
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