Dr. Janet E. Helms: Envisioning and creating a more humane psychological science, theory, and practice.

Dr. Janet E. Helms's use of psychological science to engage the field of psychology in radical progressive debates about race and identity is unprecedented. Her scholarship transformed prevailing paradigms in identity development theory and cognitive ability testing in psychology, to name a few. However, mainstream psychology often ignores, dismisses, and minimizes the importance of Dr. Helms's scientific contributions. Despite the numerous systemic barriers she encounters as a Black woman in psychology, Dr. Helms has persisted and made immeasurable contributions to the field and society. The intellectual gifts she has provided have shaped psychology for decades and will undoubtedly continue to do so for centuries to come. This article aims to provide an overview of Dr. Helms's lifetime contributions to psychology and the social sciences. To achieve this goal, we provide a brief narrative of Dr. Helms's life as a prelude to describing her foundational contributions to psychological science and practice in four domains, including (a) racial identity theories, (b) racially conscious and culturally responsive praxis, (c) womanist identity, and (d) racial biases in cognitive ability tests and measurement. The article concludes with a summary of Dr. Helms's legacy as an exceptional psychologist who offers the quintessential blueprint for envisioning and creating a more humane psychological science, theory, and practice anchored in liberation for all. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Thirty years of mirena: A story of innovation and change in women's healthcare.

Since its introduction in 1990, the levonorgestrel-releasing intrauterine system (LNG-IUS) has played a key role in shaping the healthcare landscape of women. Here we explore the development of the first LNG-IUS (Mirena®) and the early clinical trials that demonstrated its potential. We highlight the contraceptive and therapeutic benefits of Mirena®, and discuss how clinical practice has been changed since the introduction of LNG-IUS and other long-acting reversible contraceptive methods. The history of Mirena® is rich in innovation and has also paved the way to the development of smaller intrauterine systems with lower hormone doses. Along with Mirena®, these newer LNG-IUS contribute to improving contraceptive choices for women, allowing them to select the option that is right for them and that meets their needs no matter their age, parity or circumstances.

Building Community and Transforming Knowledge: Histories of Women's Health Practitioners and Community-Based Health Services in 20th-Century Alberta, Canada.

As new government health policy was created and implemented in the late 1910s and the late 1960s, women patients and health practitioners recognized gaps in the new health services and worked together to create better programs. This article brings the histories of the district nursing program (1919-43) and local birth control centres (1970-79) together to recognize women's health provision (as trained nurses or lay practitioners) as community-based and collaborative endeavours in the province of Alberta. The district nursing and birth control centre programs operated under different health policies, were influenced by different feminisms, and were situated in different Indigenous-settler relations. But the two programs, occurring half a century apart, provided space for health workers and their patients to implement change at a community level. Health practitioners in the early and late twentieth century took women's experiential knowledge seriously, and, therefore, these communities formed a new field of women's health expertise.

Gisela Januszewska (née Rosenfeld), an Austro-Hungarian 'Woman Doctor for Women' in Banjaluka, 1899-1912.

The focus of this article is on the biography and medical activity of Gisela Januszewska (née Rosenfeld) in Austro-Hungarian (AH) occupied Bosnia and Herzegovina (BH) between 1899 and 1912. Rosenfeld, later Januszewska and then Kuhn(ová) by marriage, was the fifth of a total of nine official female physicians who were employed by the AH administration to improve the health and hygienic conditions among Bosnian and Bosnian Muslim women. In 1893, Gisela Kuhn moved from Brno, Moravia to Switzerland to pursue her medical studies; she was awarded her Doctorate in Medicine (MD) from the University of Zurich in 1898. In the same year, she took up her first position as a local health insurance doctor for women and children in Remscheid but was prohibited from practising in the German Empire. In 1899, she successfully applied to the AH authorities for the newly established position of a female health officer in Banjaluka and began working there in July 1899. She lost her civil service status upon marrying her colleague, Dr Wladislaw Januszewski, in 1900 but carried out her previously officially assigned tasks as a private physician. In 1903, she was employed as a 'woman doctor for women' at the newly established municipal outpatient clinic in Banjaluka. Upon her husband's retirement in 1912, the couple left BH and settled in Graz, Styria. After, World War I Januszewska ran a general medical practice in Graz until 1935 and worked as a health insurance-gynaecologist until 1933. She received several AH and Austrian awards and medals for her merits as a physician and a volunteer for humanitarian organisations. Upon Austria's annexation to Nazi Germany 1938, however, she was classified a Jew and was deported to Theresienstadt concentration camp (Terezín, Bohemia), where she died in 1943. CONCLUSION: Gisela Januszewska, née Rosenfeld (1867-1943) viewed her medical practice as a social medicine mission which she put into practice as a 'woman doctor for woman' in Banjaluka, BH (1899-1912) and Graz, Austria (1919-1935).

Gender medicine: its historical roots.

Gender medicine as a subject began with Bernadine Healy's 1991 article 'The Yentl Syndrome' which showed that women had worse outcomes following heart attacks since their symptoms are different from men. Since then gender-specific clinical research protocols have been progressively included so that evidence for guidelines can be better informed such that women are then less disadvantaged and care become more personalised. This paper traces back the historical roots of gender bias in medicine in Western culture, which is reflected in the pictorial arts and writings of each historical period, beginning with Hippocrates. It describes the changes that have led to attempts at improving the place of women, and the treatments of disease, on an equal footing with men, precipitated by Healy's paper.

A female genealogy of humanitarian action: compassion as a practice in the work of Josephine Butler, Florence Nightingale and Sarah Monod.

Taking the Second Conference of the International Abolitionist Federation as a starting point, this article reconstructs a female genealogy of humanitarian action by shedding light on the transnational connections established by Josephine Butler, Florence Nightingale and Sarah Monod between the abolitionist cause against the state regulation of prostitution and the nursing movement. By using gender and emotion histories as the main methodologies, their letters, journals and drawings are analysed in order to question their alleged natural compassion towards the unfortunate by examining this emotion as a practice performed according to gender, class, religious and ethnic differences. As an expression of maternal imperialism, this essentialist vision provided them with an agency while taking care of victims. However, Butler, Nightingale and Monod's care did not only work in complicity with late-nineteenth century British and French Empires, as it frequently came into conflict with the decisions taken by male authorities, such as those represented by politicians, military officials and physicians. By carefully looking at the conformation of their subjectivities through their written and visual documents, their compassion ultimately appears more as a tactic, for asserting their very different stances concerning Western women's role in society, than as an authentically experienced emotion.

'A disastrous blow': psychiatric risk, social indicators and medical authority in abortion reform in post-war Britain.

The Second World War lent impetus to the creation of new models and explanatory frameworks of risk, encouraging a closer reading of the relationship between individual psychiatric disorder and social disarray. This article interrogates how conceptions of psychiatric risk were animated in debates around abortion reform to forge new connections between social conditions and psychiatric vulnerability in post-war Britain. Drawing upon the arguments that played out between medical practitioners, I suggest that abortion reform, culminating in the 1967 Abortion Act, was both a response to and a stimulus for new ideas about the interaction between social aetiologies and medical pathologies; indeed, it became a site in which the medical and social domains were recognised as mutually constitutive. Positioned in a landscape in which medical professionals were seeking to assert their authority and to defend their areas of practice, abortion reform offered new opportunities for medical professionals to intervene in the social sphere under the guise of risk to women's mental health. The debate in medical journals around the status of issues that were seen to bridge the social and the medical were entangled with increasing anxiety about patient agency and responsibility. These concerns were further underscored as conversations about psychiatric risk extended towards considerations of the potential impact on women's existing families, bringing domestic conditions and the perceived psychosocial importance of family life into relief within medical journals. This article, then, argues that conceptions of psychiatric risk, as refracted through the creation of new synapses connecting the social and the medical domains, were critical to medical debates over abortion reform in post-war Britain.

Our Doctors, Ourselves: Barbara Seaman and Popular Health Feminism in the 1970s.

This essay examines the career of feminist journalist Barbara Seaman and her contribution to the circulation of health feminist ideas in the 1970s. Seaman, author of the influential exposé The Doctors' Case Against the Pill (1969), became a noted critic of women's health care and of gynecologists in particular. In her next book, Free and Female (1972), and in newspaper articles, interviews, and television appearances, she implored women to "liberate" themselves from their gynecologists and empower themselves in the arena of health care. Seaman's media engagement contributed to the development of a "popular health feminism" that took the ideas of the women's health movement public for mainstream audiences to consume and engage with.

Husbands' Hearts and Women's Health: Gender, Age, and Heart Disease in Twentieth-Century America.

The medical community and broader public have historically focused on heart disease as a concern for men, even though it has been the leading cause of death in women for decades. Through an analysis of medical publications, women's health literature, and mainstream media, this article traces the interactions of gender and age on perceptions of heart disease during the twentieth century. I argue that attention to middle-age mortality rates accentuated men's susceptibility to heart disease over women's, even as these differences diminished at older ages, when the majority of deaths occurred. Age and gender biases combined to frame heart disease as a man's disease on one hand, while the women's health movement marginalized older women's health on the other. It was not until the following decades that older women began to attract clinical concern and greater public attention, which ultimately expanded narrow frameworks of both heart disease and women's health.

The History of Estrogen Therapy.

INTRODUCTION: Menopausal hormone therapy (MHT) has proven an effective treatment for the amelioration of symptoms of menopause. The idea that a substance was the missing factor in a woman's body after menopause dates to the 1800s, when cow ovarian tissue was injected into German women in a successful attempt to reverse the sexual symptoms of menopause. The early 1900s saw the rise of commercialized menopause "treatments" that ranged in substance and even theoretical efficacy. The role of estrogen was first accurately described in Guinea pigs in 1917 by Dr. Papanicolaou. AIM: To tell the detailed history of how estrogen was discovered and the controversy surrounding MHT. METHODS: A literature search was conducted using PubMed to identify relevant studies and historical documents regarding the history of estrogen therapy. RESULTS: The history of estrogen supplementation and its controversies are interesting stories and relevant to today's ongoing investigation into hormone replacement. CONCLUSION: The controversy of MHT remained until the first randomized trials examining MHT in the early 1990s that suggested MHT is cardioprotective in postmenopausal women, although this conclusion was contradicted in subsequent trials. In the present day, MHT is approved only for short-term use for the symptomatic treatment of menopause. Kohn GE, Rodriguez KM, Hotaling J, et al. The History of Estrogen Therapy. Sex Med Rev 2019;7:416-421.