This paper shows the formation of the psychological concept of gender from the testing of a new intersex treatment in the 1950s. By analyzing the initial refusal and final success of the new concept and guidelines in the German speaking medical community, it points to the decisive role of treating intersexuals as "experiments of nature" for the clinical research in psychosexual development. This new technology brought the divergent problematizations of "ambiguous sex" in line thus bridging the gap between scientific and clinical approaches and providing the material basis for turning gender into a scientific and practical entity.
»Gender« - zentraler Begriff der Geschlechterforschung - wurde als psychologisches Konzept im Kontext der medizinischen Normierung intersexueller Menschen in den 1950er Jahren geprägt. Seine Wurzeln reichen jedoch weit in die Geschichte des ärztlichen Umgangs mit Hermaphroditen zurück - und verweisen auf langfristige Wandlungen der Kategorie Geschlecht. Ulrike Klöppel untersucht diese Zusammenhänge anhand der - bislang noch kaum untersuchten - medizinischen Literatur des deutschsprachigen Raums vom 18. Jahrhundert bis in die Gegenwart.__
The peculiarities of drug regulation in the GDR are best described by a historical reconstruction of a concrete field of practice. The article analyses the regulation of psychotropic drugs by focussing on the centralised planning and control of pharmaceutical research and development in the 1960s. Its starting point is the observation that an introduction of certain psychotropic drugs like tranquilizers was initially controversial in the GDR. As a consequence, the key question is how an agreement over their medical and economic benefit was reached eventually. The article shows how in the course of the 1960s a discursive arrangement between the medical profession, pharmaceutical industry and the state apparatus emerged, which was supported by an increased political involvement of leading scientists and the directing staff of enterprises.
ArgumentThe experimental development of a therapeutic serum against diphtheria between 1891 and 1894 was characterized by a scientific competition that pitted Emil Behring from the Institute for Infectious Diseases in Berlin against Émile Roux and Elie Metschnikoff from the Pasteur Institute in Paris. In general, their competition can be regarded as an extension of the fundamental differences that separated the research schools of Robert Koch and Louis Pasteur. However, to characterize the competition for a diphtheria-serum as “national rivalry” fails to account adequately for the mutual adoption of experimental practices by the Berlin and Parisian protagonists, whose contributions to the development of a therapeutic serum were intertwined in complex ways. Nor can it be characterized as “cooperation,” given their fierce public disputes over scientific concepts and the fact that these disputes also shaped the peculiarities of the experimental procedures in Berlin and Paris. A close analysis reveals a complex picture of the dynamic interaction between the conceptual and experimental activities of Behring, Roux, and Metschnikoff – interaction that defined as well as bridged the “French” and “Prussian” experimental systems of diphtheria-serum research.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.