Browsing by Subject "History of medicine"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    The Detroit Medical Center: Race and Renewal in the Motor City
    (2019-05) Nickrand, Jessica
    In 1956, the City of Detroit began plans for the Detroit Medical Center [DMC]—the largest urban renewal project in the nation. This hospital campus, motivated by leadership at four inner-city hospitals, sought to use public funding to raze the surrounding “blighted” neighborhood to attract private patients, thus providing a new industry for a city in economic decline. This strategy was ultimately unsuccessful and instead further contributed to both the city’s economic decline and the continued poor health of Detroit’s residents. This dissertation argues that the development of the DMC, which largely used federal funding for its completion, was built for the city planners and officials hoped for rather than for the city that existed. In doing so, planners and officials ignored pleas from activists and demographic trends, pouring money into a project that did not serve the community that utilized this institution. This, in turn, further taxed the city’s municipal hospital, Detroit Receiving, as the city continued to experience economic decline and the population of poor and indigent patients grew. Even as the violence of the Detroit Riots in 1967 highlighted both the extreme unease of Detroit’s black community and the central importance of adequate medical provision for Detroit’s most vulnerable populations, the city was ultimately unable, or unwilling, to prioritize the needs of its residents. This stigma associated with medical provision for Detroit’s indigent population even resulted in the continued failure of the individual hospitals of the DMC to merge into one integrated medical center, which external marketing consultants had deemed essential for the success of the DMC. Ultimately, the development of the DMC contributed to Detroit's economic decline. Rather than investing in its immediate community, DMC planners continued to make choices and spend money in attempts to court suburbanites and private patients. This resulted in continued financial strain on the city when these investments were not recuperated because most of the center’s patients and clientele always remained near the hospitals of the DMC–an area of concentrated poverty. By not investing in its community through the largely publicly-funded DMC, the city of Detroit did not ensure adequate health provision for its neediest residents. This contribution to the creation of a perpetually unhealthy, and poor, populace. A community must be healthy to work, to become educated, to be engaged consumers; the city of Detroit was not interested in making its residents healthier, and this is demonstrated by its actions during the development of the DMC. Because of this, the DMC never fulfilled its potential, and caused the city even further financial stress. In the end, this development is a symbol of what could have been but never was. As a study of the ways in which a struggling city attempted to use medical care as an engine of economic recovery, this dissertation provides a case study for historians interested in health and medicine in American urban cities and encourages planners and contemporary urbanists to consider the consequences of not providing adequate health provision to a city’s most vulnerable residents.
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    Harnessing the modern miracle: physicists, physicians, and the making of American radium therapy
    (2013-12) Slaughter, Aimee Chantel Esther
    At the beginning of the twentieth century, the newly-discovered element radium was at the center of a storm of public fascination and was touted as a cure for all manner of ailments by patent medicine sellers. By the early 1930s, radium was the foundation of a standard cancer therapy in hospitals. How this transformation occurred, and the physicians and physicists who led that development, are the subject of this dissertation. Early adopters of radium therapy appropriated knowledge, material, and practices from physics as they integrated radium into their practices. Starting in the mid-1910s, even as the long-term dangers of radium were becoming apparent, radium therapy moved into the hospital, in large part because of new equipment adapted from the physics laboratory, and radium therapists invited physicists into the hospital as key collaborators in standardized radium therapy.
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    Society, state, and infant welfare: negotiating medical interventions in colonial Tanzania, 1920--1950
    (2010-07) Masebo, Oswald
    This dissertation is a historical analysis of colonial state infant welfare initiatives from preventive programs of the 1920s and early 1930s to policies that integrated preventive and curative medicine in the late 1930s and 1940s in colonial Tanzania. It argues that the development of these medical interventions was a negotiated process between colonial government officials, peasants, local chiefs, welfare workers, African dressers, and medical missions. In the 1920s the British colonial government initiated the welfare programs to reduce high infant mortality rates. Government officials explained poor infant survival in terms of maternal ignorance and focused on advising mothers on proper infant care, feeding, and hygiene. The government trained African welfare workers who performed the actual work of advising mothers in the communities. Peasants, however, challenged the early preventive programs as narrowly conceived both because they ignored local medical knowledge and indigenous practices and because they excluded western curative medicine that would help them tackle infant diseases such as malaria. Using their local chiefs, peasants demanded that the colonial government incorporate curative medicine in its welfare policies. Their bargaining strategies to achieve these demands included boycotting government-run welfare centers and refusing to pay taxes. The government eventually incorporated curative medicine in its welfare programs in the late 1930s, and it trained African dressers in preventive and curative medicine. The evidence for this dissertation comes from oral interviews, written archival documents, ethnographic accounts, and missionary and explorers' writings. This evidence has allowed me to explore the complex problem of infant welfare, a topic that has not received adequate attention from historians writing about Africa.