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Four useful analytic categories from science and technology studies
Science and technology studies (STS) is an interdisciplinary collection of analytic approaches. In his analysis of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Philip Doty pulls out four concepts from STS that he believes are particularly useful
February 2016 / 2 min.
Haverty v. Bass: protecting the public health in 1876
In 1873 a Bangor police officer and a physician forcibly pulled Martin Haverty’s child “out of the arms of the mother” in order “to remove it to the city hospital” for quarantine due to suspected smallpox infection.
February 2016 / 2 min.
Salus populi suprema lex: law and public health
It is unquestionable, that the legislature can confer police powers upon public officers, for the protection of the public health. The maxim salus populi suprema lex is the law of all courts and countries. The individual right sinks in the necessity to provide for the public good.
February 2016 / 2 min.
Doctor-patient privilege and the common law
Despite being part of the original Hippocratic oath, doctor-patient confidentiality is a relatively new addition to Anglo-American law.
December 2015 / 2 min.
Cows vs. railroads: the near-death experience of President Grant
A rather incredible 1869 train accident involved President Grant, his family, and the Secretary of the Treasury – and a cow.
July 2015 / 2 min.
The National Anti-Monopoly League
There are times when certain conflicts of the 1880s and 1890s seem eerily similar to debates today – we are, it seems, both separated and united with our equivalents of a century and a quarter ago.
April 2015 / 2 min.
Preserving Jeffersonian ideals through government regulation
In the contentious years of Gilded Age America – 1870-1900 – the general consensus has been than the United States, laissez-faire capitalism and “liberty of contract.” Reality, unsurprisingly, was more complex.
November 2014 / 5 min.
New-Fashioned Quarantine (from 1916)
One traditional method Hill discusses is quarantine – but Hill gives it a rational spin, characteristic of early twentieth century optimism and trust in science and expertise.
October 2014 / 3 min.
David Seipp on Themes of the Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric of Privacy
In his late 1970s work, The Right to Privacy in American History, David J. Seipp argues that the “unity of the privacy phenomenon” in the nineteenth century came not from a singleness of motive, but rather from “a unity of language” (Seipp 116).
October 2014 / 4 min.
Sex and Eugenics Sterilization
In looking through Johanna Schoen’s 2005 book, Choice & Coercion: Birth Control, Sterilization, and Abortion in Public Health and Welfare, it appears that, although eugenics-based sterilization procedures in the early-to-mid twentieth century appear to have targeted women more than men, men were also sterilized through these programs.
October 2014 / 4 min.