Carsten Timmermann and Elizabeth Toon (eds), Cancer Patients, Cancer Pathways: Historical and Sociological Perspectives

2014

Liberty Walther Barnes Conceiving Masculinity: Male Infertility, Medicine, and Identity

2015

Aging men, masculinities and modern medicine: An introduction

2013

This new focus on men as a research category has coincided with rapidly increasing aging populations in Western nations, with attendant concerns about the consequences for already-strained health and social service systems. World Health Day in 20 12, for example, focused on the theme of aging and health, aiming no less than for a 'need to reinvent aging' (WHO 2012) . Since the late 1990s, the 'aging male' in particular has become the focus of an expanding constellation of professional and health promotion concerns. As the mission statement of the International Society for the Study of the Aging Male put it, 'healthy aging and survival of men will have an impact on both family and society. T…

“The risk of age”? Early detection test, prostate cancer and practices of self

2010

Abstract Drawing on Rose and Novas’s concept of “biological citizenship” and Michel Foucault's "practices of self", this paper reflects on how men become agents of their own therapeutic regimens, and yet internalise messages of risk and practices of self within early detection of prostate cancer discourses in the late 20th century. In doing so, it traces the ways in which concepts of age, gender and risk converge at the problematic site of prostate cancer and preventative health strategies, both of the state and the medical profession. Analysing how insecurities have simultaneously resulted in over-promoting and over-diagnosing risk, thereby blurring the lines between normal and pathologica…

“This Racial Menace”?: Public Health, Venereal Disease and Maori in New Zealand, 1930–1947

2007

In 1939, Whakatane, on the remote east coast of the North Island of New Zealand, came to the attention of the New Zealand Department of Health as an area where syphilis was “suspected [to be] widespread”.1 This isolated part of the country was largely inhabited by Maori communities, and the revelation that venereal disease (VD) was so prevalent caught the Department by surprise, especially as a nationwide public health campaign against venereal disease had been in progress since 1917.2 In response, a comprehensive venereal disease campaign targeting Maori alone was developed––the earliest example of such a focus by the Department. This reaction highlighted what Dr Thomas Ritchie, Director o…

2006

The first world wide symposium on the topic of gender-specific medicine provided the latest research on differences in sex and/or gender in medicine and medical care. The presentations ranged beyond the topic of reproduction to encompass the entire human organism. This report critically reviews three issues that emerged during the Conference: gender mainstreaming, the concept of sex/gender differences and the issue of men's health. It suggests that the interdisciplinary concept of gender-specific medicine has to be mirrored by the integration of social and cultural studies into medical research and practice.

Susanne Hoffmann, Gesunder Alltag im 20. Jahrhundert? Geschlechterspezifische Diskurse und gesundheitsrelevante Verhaltensstile im deutschsprachigen …

2011

Neither Body nor Brain: Comparing Preventive Attitudes to Prostate Cancer and Alzheimer’s Disease

2013

This article compares health promotion attitudes towards prostate cancer and Alzheimer’s disease. Our aim is to demonstrate that these two apparently distinct conditions of the aging body – one affecting the male reproductive system, the other primarily the brain – are addressed in similar fashion in recent public health activities because of a growing emphasis on a ‘cardiovascular logic’. We suggest that this is a form of reductionism, and argue that it leaves us with a dangerous paradox: while re-transcending, at least partially, the conceptual separation of body and brain, it clouds much-needed discussion and research, such as contingent issues of socio-economic and socio-cultural disea…

Tales of healthy men: Male reproductive bodies in biomedicine from ‘Lebensborn’ to sperm banks

2012

Using the example of ‘sperm tales’, borne out of the biomedical technologies that went hand in hand with the establishment of the ‘science of man’ (andrology), the article engages with the epistemic evolution of interrelated biomedical theories and concepts of what constitutes a ‘healthy’ reproductive male body. The article asks: how has the normative ideal male body been either perpetuated or interrogated through these tales of male reproduction at the interface between scientific and medical technologies? And how were changes to the normalization of male bodies central to clinical practices and cultural understandings of health and illness? With many aspects of the medical history of male…

A `little world of your own': stigma, gender and narratives of venereal disease contact tracing

2008

As in other countries, in order to protect the public from venereal disease (syphilis and gonorrhoea), contact tracing in New Zealand has been a public health strategy since the mid-20th century. So far, scholars have predominantly focused on the aspect of control of the cases traced. Based on a rare interview with a female contact tracer, together with a range of archival material, this article aims to expand the scholarship by focusing on the tracer instead of the patient. Using Erving Goffman's original concept of `courtesy stigma', the article will show that his idea can be nuanced to take into account contact tracers and the ways in which this stigma can be refracted through gender. Wo…