Thesis ID: CBB160769640

Taking control: Fifty years of diabetes in the American Southwest 1940-1990 (2010)

unapi

As early as 1940, physicians identified the American Southwest as an ideal place to study the natural history of diabetes. In the post World War II decades, the number of people diagnosed with diabetes began to escalate nationwide. Community-based studies conducted in the region generated new scientific data and posed new questions about the causes of the disease and how it is distributed among different populations. These epidemiological questions became the subject of biomedical inquiry and, in turn, the rationale for new public policies to control diabetes and its financial cost. As some of the first longitudinal studies of their kind, diabetes research in the region fundamentally altered the way scientists, clinicians, and policy makers conceived of the disease in the post-insulin era. These studies contributed to new standards of diagnosis, treatment, and education of diabetes both inside and outside the American Southwest. For more than fifty years, communities in the region have been active participants in the search for greater understanding and improved treatment of diabetes. The local community became not only the site for inquiry but also for intervention. Through the archival record, medical journals, and oral histories, I examine how scientists, policy makers, and community leaders gave meaning to the prevalence of diabetes in the region. While the knowledge amassed by researchers established a complex web of causation that entangled culture, environment, genetics, and race under a single umbrella of "risk," others sought ways to translate theory into practical application. Diabetes-related research and public policy in the region exposed historic disparities in health even as they contributed to new knowledge of the disease and of how best to control it.

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Authors & Contributors
Sinding, Christiane
Moore, Martin D.
Best, Henry B. M.
Feudtner, Chris
Fleuriet, K. Jill
Kirsh, Nurit
Journals
American Heritage of Invention and Technology
Canadian Bulletin of Medical History/Bulletin Canadienne d'Histoire de la Medecine
Journal of the History of Biology
Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences
Mexican Studies
Osiris: A Research Journal Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences
Publishers
Harvard University
Manchester University Press
The University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Tonawanda
UCL Press
University of Minnesota Press
Concepts
Diabetes
Medicine
Disease and diseases
Insulin
Medicine and race
Epidemiology
People
Best, Charles Herbert
Fleck, Ludwik
Hill, Austin Bradford
Morabia, Alfredo
Peters, John Punnett
Sanchez, Francisco
Time Periods
20th century
21st century
19th century
Places
United States
Great Britain
India
Mexico
Canada
South Africa
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