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Learning to Live with the Virus
Isis ( IF 0.6 ) Pub Date : 2020-12-02 , DOI: 10.1086/712237
Robert Aronowitz

I . The Gospel of Germs, Nancy Tomes’s history of how new ideas about germs and disease diffused through late nineteenthand early twentieth-century American society, was widely and favorably reviewed when it appeared in 1998, winning book prizes from both the American Association for the History of Medicine and the History of Science Society. Reviewers noted Tomes’s contributions to a tired germ-theory historiography, highlighting her thoughtful treatment of gender, class, and race; her focus on consumers, consumption, and the marketplace; and her case studies of the progressive gains made by organized labor’s mobilizations of germ fears and African-Americans’ grassroots antituberculosis campaigns. These moves and others blurred the boundary between history of medicine and general (American) history, widening history of medicine’s audience and creating an exemplar for others. More substantively, some reviewers praised Tomes’s refusal to caricature the gospel of germs as mere middle-class germ phobia, instead suggesting that domestic practices plausibly contributed to the epidemiological transition, the dramatic decline in mortality from infectious disease. Others applauded the way The Gospel of Germs righted the historiographic distortion that saw the ascendency of germ theory as the original sin of later biomedical reductionism (disease = germs; end of story) and as simply a new and better means to stigmatize the already disadvantaged (the poor carry germs, in addition to their othermoral failings), although Tomes’s prodigious research was full of examples of reductionist and stigmatizing ideas and practices. A few critics observed minor limitations, such as the predominance of Northeast U.S. sources, or the questions Tomes inevitably did not raise—for example, whether marketplace and consumer actions had helped undermine public health by offloading governmental responsibility.

中文翻译:

学习与病毒共存

一世 。细菌的福音,南希·托姆斯 (Nancy Tomes) 关于细菌和疾病的新观念如何在 19 世纪末 20 世纪初的美国社会中传播的历史,在 1998 年出版时受到广泛和好评,赢得了美国历史协会的图书奖。医学和科学史学会。评论家们注意到 Tomes 对枯燥的细菌理论史学的贡献,突出了她对性别、阶级和种族的深思熟虑的处理;她关注消费者、消费和市场;以及她对有组织的劳工动员对细菌的恐惧和非裔美国人的基层抗结核运动所取得的进步成果的案例研究。这些举措和其他举措模糊了医学史和一般(美国)历史之间的界限,拓宽医学受众的历史并为他人树立榜样。更实质的是,一些评论家称赞 Tomes 拒绝将细菌的福音漫画化为仅仅是中产阶级的细菌恐惧症,而是暗示家庭做法似乎有助于流行病学转变,即传染病死亡率的急剧下降。其他人称赞《细菌福音》纠正了史学歪曲的方式,将细菌理论的优势视为后来生物医学还原论(疾病 = 细菌;故事结束)的原罪,并且只是对已经处于不利地位的人进行污名化的一种新的更好的手段(穷人携带病菌,除了他们的其他道德缺陷),尽管 Tomes 的惊人研究充满了还原论和污名化思想和实践的例子。
更新日期:2020-12-02
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