Diabetes and "defective" genes in the twentieth-century United States.

In the decades following the discovery of insulin, eugenicists grew concerned that more diabetics would survive into their reproductive years and contribute "defective" genes to the gene pool. Insulin thus came to be seen as both a blessing for the individual and a problem for the future of humankind. Nevertheless, diabetics in the United States were neither prevented nor discouraged from reproducing. I argue that this stemmed from the widespread belief that diabetes was a disease primarily of middle-class whites, who possessed positive traits that outweighed their particular genetic defect. Historians of eugenics have demonstrated convincingly that race and class stereotypes made some populations more vulnerable to coercive eugenic practices. The case of diabetes demonstrates that race and class stereotypes could also confer protection. In the end, possession of a defective gene mattered less than the perception of one's contribution to society.

'The true assistant to the obstetrician': state regulation and the legal protection of midwives in nineteenth-century Prussia.

In recent years, historians of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European midwifery have drawn attention to the great differences between midwives' experiences in England and the United States, where obstetricians succeeded by and large in displacing female practitioners, and midwives' experiences on the continent, where their fate was far more varied. While some countries witnessed the decline of midwives, in many others they were licensed and integrated into a government-sanctioned medical hierarchy. Scholars have disagreed, however, on how to evaluate the government's role in regulating midwives. Some have been critical, portraying midwives as victims of an alliance between the State and elite physicians who sought to place all other practitioners under their control. Others have cast midwives as beneficiaries of the State's protectionist policies, emphasizing their success in withstanding physicians' attempts to eliminate them entirely. Whilst these different interpretative models may reflect some regional variations, this article suggests that, in many cases, midwives both lost and won simultaneously: as State employees they lost much of their independence, but in exchange they gained protection not only from elite physicians, but also from unlicensed practitioners, who posed every bit as much of a threat.