HSS 2121 Chapter Notes - Chapter 7: Syphilis, Alice Hamilton, Linda Gordon

• School: University of Ottawa
• Department: Health Sciences
• Course: HSS 2121
• Professor: Louise Edmonds

Document Summary

Sanitized for your protection; medical discourse and the denial of incest in the united. Medical discourses from the 19890 to 1940 when physicians and reformers uncovered and then disassembled evidence that white, middle and upper class american men were sexually abusing their daughters. Children could acquire gonorrhea, but believed that infections were confined primarily to poor and working- class girls who had been sexually assaulted. 1890"s were shocked that gonorrhea infection was so common among girls and feared it was an epidemic. Doctors claimed that infections in fathers and daughters from respectable, white families was vexing: doctors refused to consider the possibility of incest. Ignoring the obvious, health care workers and reformers came up with other reasons for the girls infections. 1940 medical textbooks relied on untested speculation to declare that most cases of gonorrhea from nonsexual contacts with other females or contaminated objects: their mothers, other girls, or toilet seats.