While the necessity of normalizing surgery on intersexed individuals is a topic of ongoing debate in the 21st century, the origins of surgery as a therapeutic practice for ambiguous or unusual genitalia lie in the 19th century. The first report of corrective surgery published in the United States appeared in the American Journal of the Medical Sciences in 1852, but surgery did not immediately replace more traditional social prescriptions designed to fit hermaphrodites into a dimorphic model of human sex. Only after homosexuality became a matter of discussion in American medical journals did the frequency of normalizing surgeries increase. This paper explores the connection between physicians' increased interest in preventing "abnormal" sexual behavior and their insistence that interventionist surgeries were the most appropriate means of treating cases of hermaphroditism.
Anton de Bary is best known for his elucidation of the life cycle of Phytopthora infestans, the causal organism of late blight of potato and the crop losses that caused famine in nineteenth-century Europe. But while practitioner histories often claim this accomplishment as a founding moment of modern plant pathology, closer examination of de Bary's experiments and his published work suggest that his primary motiviation for pursing this research was based in developmental biology, not agriculture. De Bary shied away from making any recommendations for agricultural practice, and instead focused nearly exclusively on spontaneous generation and fungal development - both concepts promoted through prize questions posted by the Académie des Sciences in the 1850s and 1860s. De Bary's submission to the Académie's 1859 Alhumbert prize question illustrates his own contributions to debates about spontaneous generation and demonstrates the practical applications of seemingly philosophical questions - such as the origin of life.
Madison. She holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Texas at Austin, and has been teaching courses in engineering communication for fifteen years. She has done consulting work in professional engineering writing for private firms (such as HNTB, Inc. and Affiliated Engineers, Inc.) and has taught technical communication as part of the UW-Madison College of Engineering study abroad program in both Toulouse, France, and Hangzhou, China. For the past several years her program has been collaborating with colleagues throughout the College of Engineering to design online modules to improve engineering writing across the curriculum. Christina Matta, Technical Communication Program, UW-Madison Dr. Christina Matta teaches in the Technical Communication Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she teaches introductory and upper-level technical writing classes along with courses in technical presentations and preparing grant proposals. She holds a Ph.D. in History of Science, Technology, and Medicine from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and worked with the Wisconsin Program for Scientific Teaching for six years before joining the Technical Communication Program.
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