Arleen Marcia Tuchman – författare

This superb account of the development of scientific research in the state of Baden places the growth of big science in 19th century Germany within a broad social and economic context. The book analyses the growth of scientific research and its institutionalization in the state university system. With the focus on the experimental sciences, the book explores the introduction of the research ethic into the university medical curriculum, and the process by which laboratory science came to be an essential pedagogical tool in the education of the future citizens of the state. The social and economic changes that ultimately transformed Germany into a modern industrial state are considered. It was within this setting that laboratory training, once considered inappropriate for university studies, slowly increased in status, and dissatisfaction with the overly theoretical education traditionally offered by the universities began to grow. Thus, much like computers today, the scientific method in the nineteenth century came to represent an instrument for teaching not only specific skills but also a particular way of approaching, analysing, and solving the problems of an industrializing economy. This compelling volume will be of interest to historians of science, medicine, and European studies.

Who gets diabetes and why? An in‑depth examination of diabetes in the context of race, public health, class, and heredity“[An] unsettling but insightful social history.”—Kirkus Reviews“The important lessons of Diabetes: A History of Race and Disease may strengthen organized medicine’s commitment to addressing social determinants of health and equity.”—David Goldberg, Health AffairsWho is considered most at risk for diabetes, and why? In this thorough, engaging book, historian Arleen Tuchman examines and critiques how these questions have been answered by both the public and medical communities for over a century in the United States.Beginning in the late nineteenth century, Tuchman describes how at different times Jews, middle‑class whites, American Indians, African Americans, and Hispanic Americans have been labeled most at risk for developing diabetes, and that such claims have reflected and perpetuated troubling assumptions about race, ethnicity, and class. She describes how diabetes underwent a mid-century transformation in the public’s eye from being a disease of wealth and “civilization” to one of poverty and “primitive” populations.In tracing this cultural history, Tuchman argues that shifting understandings of diabetes reveal just as much about scientific and medical beliefs as they do about the cultural, racial, and economic milieus of their time.