Health needs to be understood as deeply historical and changing, not as natural and given. Conflicts about how to measure health, prevent its loss, or account for its absence were among the many themes that the historians in the German Association for American Studies debated at their annual meeting. NINA MACKERT (Leipzig) and JÜRGEN MARTSCHUKAT (Erfurt), the conference conveners, further stressed the need to critically engage the hurdles and barriers in healthcare access. Those who seek health should be included in histories of emancipation and the struggle toward citizenship that remain key to US history.
JULIA ENGELSCHALT (Darmstadt) opened the three-day meeting by addressing a widely spread parasite—the hookworm—to delve into the nexus of health, empire, and enslavement in the nineteenth century United States. The hookworm, Engelschalt argued, elicited a large-scale humanitarian intervention by the Rockefeller foundation. Ensuing public health campaigns aimed at eradicating this “model pathogen”. By linking the US South to the Tropics, humanitarians also put the region on par with supposed backwardness using Orientalizing tropes. The second paper dealt with the highly fragmented and distorted versions of enslaved women’s lives that appear in archives. Invoking Jennifer Morgan’s scholarship on the commodification of enslaved women’s wombs, DIANA WAGNER (Stuttgart) excavated parts of this history in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy.1 Wagner established Morrison’s book as a “hysterical text” that addresses the perpetual violence that enslaved women endured. While hysteria has largely been imagined as a condition of over civilization that only afflicted white women, Wagner showed how Morrison opened a way for understanding both individual and collective trauma by way of hysteria in narratives of severance like A Mercy.
The second panel brought together notions of self-optimization, regulation and policing in pursuit of healthy and secure lives. Measuring health by measuring and regulating food and calorie intake presents a widely practiced way for scientists and administrators to police and surveil populations. ANJA-MARIA BASSIMIR (Mainz) discussed how ostensibly objective standards of healthy eating came to be measured by unreliable self-observations in the early twentieth century. In Maine, scored food tables turned people into food intake statistics that informed food, health, and education policies aimed at creating physically and mentally more efficient rural populations. FREDERIKE OFFIZIER (Potsdam) addressed the newly emerging identity of breast-cancer “previvors” that the paradigm shift from health to security birthed. Anticipating and preempting breast cancer resided at the heart of risk management. In the twenty-first century, risk itself became a treatable health problem, with highly visible testimonials leading the way. Genetic tests and preemptive surgery turned inherited probability into certainty and risk aversion into a market commodity only attainable for few wealthy individuals. AXEL JANSEN (Washington DC) took on the role of the Vatican in advocating for adult stem cell research as a supposedly equally promising alternative to embryonic stem cells. Here the promise of future health and protection from illness had to be squared with Catholic moral teachings. By offering up “very small embryonic-like stem cells” (VSELs)—their existence remains in question—the Vatican sought to marry its opposition to fetal tissue research with a forward-looking message that medical innovation was possible. With their sustained campaigns for VSEL research, conservative Catholics and evangelicals stressed that no antagonism between cutting-edge science and faith existed.
KATHRYN OLIVARIUS (Stanford) ended day one with her keynote titled “Stigma, Shame, and Privilege: Disease and Citizenship in Antebellum America”. In her talk, Olivarius dealt with yellow fever, a “paradigmatic disease” of the nineteenth century.2 Yellow Jack, the second tyrant to King Cotton, was wrapped up in stigma and shame. Olivarius argued that yellow fever has been a daily companion in New Orleans. Due to its prevalence and deadliness, yellow fever evoked considerable fear but could also award privilege. Once white planters had “acclimated” which meant surviving yellow fever and gaining socially acknowledged immunity, they could become “immuno-capitalists”. Freed from the risk of losing one’s income to yellow fever, these planters expanded their influence and income based on the labor of enslaved people. Immunity, real or imagined, Olivarius argued, became a central characteristic of New Orleans’ class-structure.
PAUL SKÄBE (Leipzig) opened a pandemic-themed panel with a paper on how influenza impacted Black soldiers during and after WWI. He argued that the “separate but equal” ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson enabled the production of racialized medical knowledge. Maintaining the veneer of equal facilities and conditions, Black soldiers’ camps were actually and unsurprisingly institutionally neglected. While medical staff tried to prove racist assumptions about Black soldiers’ resilience to influenza, the separate but unequal living conditions might have further skewed already flawed presuppositions. Skäbe argued that restricting Black soldiers’ movement, meant as punitive measures, might have worked as an unintended quarantine measure. In the end, Black soldiers’ actual health-status did not influence the medical staff’s “findings“, since assumptions about Black people’s resilience or susceptibility to diseases could both be deployed to bolster the racial hierarchy. In the second paper, ANDREAS ETGES (München) dealt with the lack of presidential preparedness for global pandemics. Starting with President Clinton, Etges showed how both popular fiction and historical scholarship seemed to influence presidents’ decisions regarding pandemic preparedness. Awareness for the vulnerability to a global pandemic rose in the face of localized outbreaks of diseases like brain pox and Ebola, or instances of bioterrorism like the anthrax scare. However, once the immediate threat subsided, presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama tended to diminish safety measures again. Although health policy makers continuously warned of the pandemic flu for instance, presidents’ willingness to act grew and waned with threats’ immediacy.
After participants had heard from emerging researchers in three Young Scholars Forums, RICHARD BACHMANN (Ann Arbor) connected questions of health with labor conditions in the post-WWII United States. He detailed autoworkers’ efforts to establish mental health as a labor issue. Situating auto plants as sites of knowledge creation, Bachmann excavated how researchers came to pay attention to workers’ boredom and self-alienation due to the repetitive tasks they had to perform. “Blue-color blues” had previously been understood to emanate from workers themselves, some of whom appeared to be ill suited for the monotonous work. Resisting this notion, workers made mental health into a key demand that unions picked up at the end of the twentieth century. Moving away from well-organized and protected autoworkers, DEBARCHANA BARUAH (Tübingen) addressed the health and labor conditions of less visible and outright disposable laborers: migrant workers. Baruah argued that migrant workers’ precarious status in the US remains based on their productivity and invisibility. The threat of deportability constantly hangs over these laborers. Companies invest in migrant illegality to uphold their vulnerability and ensure the flow of new workers. A “systematic invisibilization” of physical and mental illness structures this migrant labor market. Sick workers are replaced by healthy ones, or they go home to convalesce. Migrants who can no longer work, either due to sustained disability or old age, also return to their native countries. These factors effectively amount to a displacement of care work to the private realm in their countries of origin.
In the penultimate panel, MADELINE ZEHNDER (Berlin) focused on Civil War soldiers’ reading habits. Since they had much time at their hands, soldiers’ demand for anything readable skyrocketed. While previous scholarship has focused on periodicals, Zehnder read pocketbooks as important cultural devices in portable form. Reformers feared that small books and dime novels would easily replace the bible in a soldier’s pockets. Disseminated via the American Tract Society, pocketbooks of a decidedly Christian orientation should stem the tide of “miserable light literature”. The pocketbooks’ morally instructive purpose was however thwarted by soldiers who made their own decision about what a healthy reader’s diet should contain. JULIA NITZ (Halle) lingered in the Civil War era, focusing on white women’s diaries and conduct books as health discourses. In these writings, health became a matter of behavior. Proper conduct would assure health, while misconduct would result in a sickening nation. Remaining healthy meant eschewing help and treatment, signs of indecency. In these writings, Southern white women delineated what being healthy entailed—being elegant, majestic, graceful, firm, strong, active, elevated, vigorous, happy, mentally strong, self-disciplined, and faithful—which did not necessarily conform to attributes associated with Southern womanhood—delicate, fair skinned, light haired, feeble, fleeting, frail, weak, tender, nervous, slothful, unhappy, dull, and morose.
A panel on health and emancipation rounded out the meeting. CARMEN BIRKLE (Marburg) detailed the lives of two Black female doctors—Rebecca Crumpler and Rebecca Cole. Both defied the gendered and racialized assumptions about women’s capacity to study and practice medicine at the end of the nineteenth century. They left heroic medicine behind in favor of a “gentler, more careful approach” delivering medical care where it was needed. Cole for instance treated patients and doled out advice as a “sanitary visitor” in tenement houses in New York. These women remained committed to treating both disease and combating racialized prejudices about health and hygiene in Black communities. JOHNATHAN BELL (London) highlighted the fraught relationship between actively seeking visibility in HIV/Aids activism and incentives to hide one’s infection from healthcare providers. Bell maintained that a dual process structured the state’s response to the disease. Whereas activists pressed for recognition of HIV/Aids from state healthcare providers, private health insurance had to be kept in the dark about a potential infection. Many emancipatory movements had banked on performing visibility, yet the privatized character of healthcare in the US warranted an adaptation of this strategy. Insurers or employers paying for insurance wanted to make those infected with the virus visible to actuate risk while patients sought to remain hidden. Private providers thus privileged the healthy and public providers only cared for certain ill people with little regard for those with late-stage Aids. ANJA WERNER (Erfurt) showed how Black deaf activists worked to desegregate education for deaf Americans and, in doing so, paved the way for the landmark decision in Brown v. Board. Werner also stressed how research on deaf history remains in its infancy and how researchers need to be wary of the distinct ways deaf culture and hearing/speaking culture diverge. Written language, for instance, presents another form of spoken language and it is therefore a foreign language for many native signers. Recently established centers for Black deaf studies and the renewed attention to Black American Sign Language (ASL) foreground the centrality of Black deaf Americans’ agency in US history and remain crucial in fighting audism—discrimination based on a person’s hearing status.
While the COVID pandemic’s urgency slowly subsides, histories of health and its absence remain relevant today. Olivarius winning the prestigious Dan David prize can be viewed as one example. Recent histories of the clinic’s contribution to creating gender, women’s reproductive rights, humanitarian intervention and disaster relief, psychiatry’s power over queer lives, and the disease-nutrition nexus also chart worthwhile ways to engage and expand existing scholarship.3 The field will benefit from renewed commitment to approaches that de-center the nation state and take transnational health care advocacy work into focus. Attention to the intertwined relationship between health, coloniality, the environment, and disability hold the potential of reinvigorating research that seeks to tie health to the struggle over citizenship.
Conference Overview:
Panel 1: Health, Empires, and Enslavement
Chair: Helen Gibson (Erfurt)
Julia Engelschalt (Darmstadt): Hooked on Health: Rockefeller Philanthropy, Hookworm Parasitosis, and the Tropicalization of the American South
Diana Wagner (Stuttgart): Women’s Reproductive Health in New World Slavery: History and “Hysteria“ in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy
Panel 2: Health and Science
Chair: Charlotte Lerg (München)
Anja-Maria Bassimir (Mainz): Scoring Health in Maine: Nutrition Extension and the Measuring of Health Between the Wars
Frederike Offizier (Potsdam): From Health to Security: Breast Cancer, Genetic Testing, and the Previvor Narrative
Axel Jansen (Washington, DC): Conservative Religion and American Biomedicine: Vatican Endorsement of Adult Stem Cell Research, 2008–2013
Keynote
Chair: Nina Mackert (Leipzig)
Kathryn Olivarius (Stanford): Stigma, Shame, and Privilege: Disease and Citizenship in Antebellum America
Panel 3: Pandemics
Chair: Anja-Maria Bassimir (Mainz)
Paul Skäbe (Leipzig): Pandemic Laboratories: The Production of Medical Knowledge in US Military Camps during the Great Influenza, 1918–1920
Andreas Etges (München): Read Books or Groundhog Day: Pandemic Preparedness and Presidential Crisis Management from Clinton to Trump
Young Scholars Forum 1
Chair: Sebastian Jobs (Berlin)
Constantin Berlin (Frankfurt am Main): Embracing the Black Struggle: The Socialist Workers Party and its Support for Black Power
Ylva Kreye (Mainz): Well-Being For All: Isaac M. Rubinow and the Migrant Knowledge Origins of Early Twentieth Century American Health Insurance
Layla Koch (Heidelberg): The Gospel of Health. Dr Hooker Dewey and the Rev. Pentecost’s No Breakfast Plan
Young Scholars Forum 2
Chair: Felix Krämer (Erfurt)
Peter Hintz (Leipzig): Reconsidering the “Me Decade”: 1970s Caring Masculinity as Cultural History
Alexandra Schenke (München): Bringing the Hero Back: “Pro-Hero” Campaigns of the Reagan White House Television Office
Lara Rössig (München): Fashion Foodnotes: Understanding the Sociocultural Implications of the Food- Fashion Nexus
Young Scholars Forum 3
Chair: Silvan Niedermeier (Erfurt)
Julian Windhövel (Erfurt): “The Only Laboring Class We Have”: Planter Class and Freedmen’s Bureau during Early Reconstruction in Louisiana, 1864–1868
Maren Lutz (München): Black American Soundtracks of the Vietnam War (1960s and 1970s)
Kira Hentschel (München): Rosie’s Spark: Rosie the Riveter – Her Influence Beyond the World War II Homefront
Panel 4: Health and Labor conditions
Chair: Silke Hackenesch (Cologne)
Richard Bachmann (Ann Arbor): The Discontented Automation Worker: Social Scientists, the Auto Assembly Line, and the Rise of Workplace-Oriented Mental Health Research in the Postwar US
Debarchana Baruah (Tübingen): Undocumented Illnesses: Migrant Health and Labor in the US
Panel 5: Health and Civil War
Chair: Olaf Stieglitz (Leipzig)
Madeline Zehnder (Berlin): The Soldier’s Book as “Hygienic Appliance”
Julia Nitz (Halle): “The deathlike feeling...the disease known by the vulgar name of ‘bore’”: Health Discourse in White Southern Women’s Civil War Diaries
Panel 6: Health and Emancipation
Chair: Steve Estes (Sonoma)
Jonathan Bell (London): The Legal Closet: Visibility and Invisibility in Legal Activism around HIV-AIDS Discrimination in the 1980s
Carmen Birkle (Marburg): Nineteenth-Century African American Physicians and the Health of the Nation
Anja Werner (Erfurt): Black Americans at the Intersection of Health, Disability, and Diversity
Notes:
1 Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery, Philadelphia 2004 and Jennifer L. Morgan, Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic, Durham 2020.
2 Mikaëla M. Adams, Review of Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom by Kathryn Olivarius, in: American Historical Review 129, no. 1 (2024), S. 289–90, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhad520.
3 Sandra Eder, How the Clinic Made Gender. The Medical History of a Transformative Idea, Chicago, 2022; R. E. Fulton, The Abortionist of Howard Street. Medicine and Crime in Nineteenth-Century New York, Ithaca, 2024; Julia Irwin, Catastrophic Diplomacy: US Foreign Disaster Assistance in the American Century, Chapel Hill, 2023; Regina Kunzel, In the Shadow of Diagnosis. Psychiatric Power and Queer Life, Chicago, 2024; and Christian Warren, Starved for Light. The Long Shadow of Rickets and Vitamin D Deficiency, Chicago, 2024.