John C. Burnham

Bad Habits: Drinking, Smoking, Taking Drugs, Gambling, Sexual Misbehavior, and Swearing in American History.

The vast majority of Americans have, at one point or another gotten drunk, smoked, dabbled with drugs, gambled, sworn or engaged in adultery. During the 1800s, respectable people struggled to control these behaviors, labeling them bad and the people who indulged in them unrespectable. In the twentieth century, however, these minor vices were transformed into a societal complex of enormous and pervasive influence. Yet the general belief persists that these activities remain merely harmless bad habits, individual transgressions more than social problems. Not so, argues distinguished historian John C. Burnham, in this pioneering study. In Bad Habits, Burnham traces the growth of a veritable minor vice-industrial complex. As it grew, activities that might have been harmless, natural, and sociable fun resulted in fundamental social change. When Burnham set out to explore the influence of these bad habits on American society, he sought to discover why so many good people engaged in activities that many, including they themselves, considered bad. What he found, however, was a coalition of economic and social interests in which the single-minded quest for profit allied with the values of the Victorian saloon underworld and bohemian rebelliousness. This combination radically inverted common American standards of personal conduct. Bad Habits, then, describes, in words and pictures, how more and more Americans learned to value hedonism and self-gratification--to smoke and swear during World War I, to admire cabaret night life, and to reject schoolmarmish standards in the age of Prohibition. Tracing the evolution of each of the bad habits, Burnham tells how liquor control boards encouraged the consumption of alcohol; how alcoholic beverage producers got their workers deferred from the draft during World War II; how convenience stores and accounting firms pursued profits by pushing legalized gambling; how swinging Playboy bankrolled a drug advocacy group; how advertising and television made the Marlboro Man a national hero; how drug paraphernalia was promoted by national advertisers; how a practical joker/drug addict caused a shortage of kitty litter on Long Island; and how the evolution of an entire sex therapy industry helped turn sexual experience into a new kind of commodity. Altogether, a lot of people made a lot of money. But what, the author asks, did these changes cost American society? This illustrated tour de force by one of the most distinctive and important voices in social history reveals John C. Burnham at his provocative and controversial best.

A history of the Rockefeller Institute, 1901-1953 : origins and growth

These excerpts from Corners 1964 history of the Rockefeller Institute primarily address the work of Avery and the membersn of his lab at the Institute.

James Jackson Putnam and psychoanalysis : letters between Putnam and Sigmund Freud, Ernest Jones, William James, Sandor Ferenczi, and Morton Prince, 1877-1917

James Jackson Putnam was an established sixty-three-year-old Boston physician and Harvard professor of neurology when he and William James traveled to Clark University to hear Sigmund Freuds lectures on psychoanalysis. Putnam had become interested in psychoanalytic theory three years earlier in 1906; and, in 1908, his interest had been renewed when he met Freuds first English-speaking follower, twenty-eight-year-old Ernest Jones. It still surprised and even disturbed his friends, however, when Putnam became Freuds first American convert as well as a founder and first president of the American Psychoanalytic Association in 1911, and of the Boston Society for Psychoanalysis in 1914. Of the 172 letters in this volume 163 are published here for the first time. All of the letters present new perspectives on the origins and early development of psychoanalysis in the United States. They provide the first documentary account of the founding of the American psychoanalytic organizations and the battles that surrounded the first public presentations of the psychoanalytic cause in Europe and America. They dramatize the extent to which Freud and Jones used Putnam as a confidant and how important Putnams Yankee fairness, objectivity, and personal integrity were to the movement. It is intriguing to discover how these men, long before formal training centers were established, educated each other by mail and learned by letters how to handle psychoanalytic problems never recognized or encountered before. Theory was debated as well, and the 89 letters between Putnam and Freud indicate how Freuds increasingly disillusioned stoicism clashed with Putnams New England optimism and formed the basis for a significant dialogue on the nature of man, ethics, and the psychoanalytic mission. The letters suggest that Putnam encouraged Freuds interest in the analysis of conscience and of religion that Wilhelm Wundt and Carl Jung had earlier awakened. Nathan G. Hale, Jr., in an introductory essay, provides the background and the explanation for the surprising role Putnam played in what he came to call the cause. Marian C. Putnam, who made the unpublished letters available, has written a warm recollection of her father. Judith Bernays Heller, Freuds niece, has translated the German texts, which are also published in the original German.

How the Idea of Profession Changed the Writing of Medical History

This book is a case study of the way in which the writing of history was affected by a systematic concept. The case focuses on those who wrote medical history, and the specific systematic thinking that caused changes took the form of the idea of profession. The case study is cast as a narrative that reaches back to the late seventeenth century, when a tradition of medical history began to develop. I then proceed to show what happened to that tradition in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries-and particularly the twentieth century.

Approaching Hysteria: Disease and Its Interpretations.

Few diseases have exercised the Western imagination as chronically as hysteria - from the wandering womb of ancient Greek medicine, to the demonically possessed witch of the Renaissance; from the vaporous salon women of Enlightenment Paris, through to the celebrated patients of Sigmund Freud, with their extravagant, erotically charged symptoms. In this book, the author surveys the range of past and present readings of hysteria by intellectual historians; historians of science and medicine; scholars in gender studies, art history, and literature; and psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, and neurologists. In so doing, he explores numerous questions raised by this ever-growing body of literature: why, in recent years, has the history of hysterical disorders carried such resonance for commentators in the sciences and humanities? What can we learn from the textual traditions of hysteria about writing the history of disease in general? What is the broader cultural meaning of the new hysteria studies? In the second half of the book, Micale discusses the many historical cultures of hysteria. He reconstructs the past usages of the hysteria concept as a powerful, descriptive trope in various non-medical domains, including poetry, fiction, theatre, social thought, political criticism, and the arts. His book is an attempt to write the historical phenomenology of disease in an age preoccupied with health, and a prescriptive remedy for writing histories of disease in the future.