Keirns, Carla Christine (Author)
Asthma is often represented as a new epidemic disease rooted in modern social conditions. Utilizing historical and sociological methods, dissertation explores the origins and many meanings of asthma, recasting the modern problem of asthma as both an ancient and a changing illness. `Asthma,' as a descriptive term for shortness of breath, first appeared in _ The Iliad_ of Homer. Its status as a modern disease, however, dates to the autopsy series of the Paris hospitals in the 1810s, where bronchial asthma, cardiac asthma, renal asthma, and other forms of shortness of breath were redefined as pathological entities. Despite a series of putative mechanisms---based on many of the most important changes in medical theory and practice, such as nerves, germs, immunity, psychoanalysis, and genetics---asthma remained fundamentally a clinical category most useful in diagnosis and treatment of the individual patient. The history of asthma follows a single disease as it is transformed in the changing medical landscape of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As an unsolved problem, asthma was available to be reinterpreted under new medical visions, and treated with a variety of available remedies from morphine to tobacco in the nineteenth century to steroids and beta-agoinst inhalers in the twentieth. Because no single test made a diagnosis of asthma, a combination of clinical and laboratory measures have been used to make the diagnosis, leaving open substantial space for argument between members of different medical specialties, whose differences in tools and ideas have often translated into different visions of the disease and fundamental disputes about preferred treatments. Ultimately, the story of asthma touches on relationships between technology and medicine, reciprocal relations between diseases and their treatments, and the place of broad social trends in shaping the experience of wheezing and shortness of breath.
...MoreDescription Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 65/11 (2005): 4326. UMI pub. no. 3152064.
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