This article attempts to outline a history of the critique of medicalization that developed in the 1960s in the work of Thomas Szasz, R. D. Laing, Michael Foucault, and others that was applied in their work to medical and psychiatric theory and practice, the penal system, and public health systems. This article follows the development of Foucault's own work on "governmentality" that emphasized the individualization and internalization of the themes of medicalization and the application of these ideas by his disciples to contemporary medical developments. Finally, the author explores recent historiography in the history of medicine and public health that supports this thesis of individualization that both undermines and reconfigures the older notion of medicalization.
Demographic, cultural, and oral-history approaches to the study of falling fertility in nineteenth-and twentieth-century France, Canada, Britain, Holland, Norway, and Finland confirm the importance of the persistent usage of “traditional” methods of birth control—such as coitus interruptus, abortion, and forms of periodic abstinence—throughout the period when fertility fell, though fertility fell in each case at a different point in time. These studies also use qualitative evidence that provides insight into the reasons for contraceptive preference, thereby combining the history of changing sexualities with the analysis of demographic change.
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