Decisions to limit life based on social or cultural biases contain dangerous eugenic possibilities.
Medicine and the Body
The Other Half Has Never Been Told: AIDS and African-American History
AIDS in black America is not only the result of poverty and inequality, but also reinforces racial inequities by constraining black opportunity.
Bestiality in a Time of Smallpox
At the turn of the 19th century, opponents of Edward Jenner’s method for preventing smallpox likened vaccination to bestiality.
Clitoridectomies: Female Genital Mutilation c.1860-2014
Doctors in Britain removed the clitoris on women explicitly to eradicate elements of female libido.
Blood Ties: Queer Blood, Donations, and Citizenship
Can queer blood be less American than straight blood?
Sexual Curiosities? Aphrodisiacs in early modern England
Aphrodisiacs were widely understood to be a central component in the fight against infertility.
"What a Woman Is": Breast Cancer, Sexuality and the Unreconstructed Self
Some nineteenth-century British physicians looked towards physical embodiments of femaleness for explanations for breast cancer.
Recent Posts
Come to My Cottage: Queer Pleasures and Female Fandom in the Silent Hollywood Era
A Love Letter to Bolts Nightclub
Criminally Queer: The Bolton 7
The Massage Establishments Scandal: Coding and De-coding Sex Work at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
Left Out: Boys, Sex, and the Challenge of “Gross Indecency” Records in Irish History