Quantifying Sexual Constitution: Abraham Myerson's Endocrine Study of Male Homosexuality, 1938-1942

Using the new medical science of endocrinology, scientific sex researchers in the 1920s and 1930s began studying sex hormone excretion as a means to search for the biological basis of human sexuality. One of these researchers was Abraham Myerson, a leading psychiatrist and researcher from Boston who conducted a series of innovative endocrine experiments between 1938 and 1942 in an effort to establish a relationship between sex hormone excretion patterns and homosexuality in men. While prevailing cultural models of heteronormativity identified male homosexuality as an abnormal case of biological femininity in men, Myerson’s framework and experimental research transcended this limiting duality of sexual biology. Adopting the theory of bisexuality, he argued that all men possessed a natural variability of masculine and feminine traits in their biological, social, and sexual characteristics, and that the disparity among these traits could be quantified and understood using sex hormones. In reconstructing Myerson’s research methods and data analysis, this paper uncovers how he established a distinctive diagnostic method and classification system for male homosexuality and illuminates how he conceptualized and categorized male sexuality as quantifiable and independent of personality.

Historical Origins of the Personal Belief Exemption to Vaccination Mandates: The View from California

A number of states, starting with California, have recently removed all non-medical exemptions from their laws requiring vaccinations for schoolchildren. California was also one of the earliest states to include a broad non-medical, or personal, belief exemption in its modern immunization law, which it did with a 1961 law mandating polio vaccination for school enrollment, Assembly Bill 1940 (AB 1940). This paper examines the history of AB 1940’s exemption clause as a case study for shedding light on the little-examined history of the personal belief exemption to vaccination in the United States. This history shows that secular belief exemptions date back further than scholars have allowed. It demonstrates that such exemptions resulted from political negotiation critical to ensuring compulsory vaccination’s political success. It challenges a historiography in which antivaccination groups and their allies led late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century opposition to vaccination mandates while religious groups drove mid-twentieth century opposition. It also complicates the historiographic idea of a return to compulsion in the late 1960s, instead dating this return a decade earlier, to a time when belief exemptions in polio vaccination mandates helped reconcile the goal of a widely vaccinated population with the sacrosanct idea of health as a personal responsibility.

Underground and Over the Sea: More Community Prophylactics in Europe, 1100-1600

Public health historians have repeatedly shown that the theory, policy, and practice of group prophylactics far predate their alleged birth in industrial modernity, and regularly draw on Galenic principles. While the revision overall has been successful, its main focus on European cities entails a major risk, since city dwellers were a minority even in Europe’s most urbanised regions. At the same time, cities continue to be perceived and presented as typically European, which stymies transregional and comparative studies based at least in part on non- or extra-urban groups. Thus, any plan to both offer an accurate picture of public health’s deeper past and fundamentally challenge a narrative of civilizational progress wedded to Euro-American modernity (“stagism”) would benefit from looking beyond cities and their unique health challenges. The present article begins to do so by focusing on two ubiquitous groups, often operating outside cities and facing specific risks: miners and shipmates. Evidence for these communities’ preventative interventions and the extent to which they drew on humoral theory is rich yet uneven for Europe between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. Methodological questions raised by this unevenness can be addressed by connecting different scales of evidence, as this article demonstrates. Furthermore, neither mining nor maritime trade was typically European, thus building a broader base for transregional studies and comparisons.