Hamilton Cravens – författare

Americans have benefited from substantial improvements in health since the end of World War II. They live longer and grow taller; they have the safest and cheapest food supply on the planet; they have seen virtually all childhood diseases brought under control. Yet concerns about health remain widespread today. Cancer seems to be everywhere; autoimmune, nervous, and environmental diseases have reached pandemic proportions; medical malpractice suits have proliferated.How can we have received so many benefits while still being as worried as ever about our health and the health care system established to ensure and extend those benefits? The historical perspective provided by the essays in this volume helps answer this question by identifying two points of significant change in health care policy. Beginning in the 1950s there emerged a subtle yet critical reconceptualization as the individual rather than the group came to figure prominently as the central policy-making unit. Then in the late 1960s a palpable sense of limits rendered the individualism of the previous decade into a Malthusian formulation: the greater the access or benefits that any one person received, the less others could get. Besides tracing these patterns in health care development, the essays also show how traditional notions of expertise have been affected by the changes. Contributors are Amy Sue Bix, Hamilton Cravens, Gerald N. Grob, Alan I Marcus, Diane Paul, David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz, and James Harvey Young.

Between the 1920s and the 1950s, the child welfare movement that had originated as a moral reform effort in the Progressive era evolved into the science of child development. In Before Head Start , Hamilton Cravens chronicles this transformation, both on the national level and from the perspective of the field's best-known research center, the University of Iowa's Child Welfare Research Station. Addressing the changing role played by women and the importance of Rockefeller philanthropy, he shows how a women's reform movement became a male-dominated, conservative profession and demonstrates how lay pressure groups can influence the structures and processes of science. Animated by the reformist goals of the child welfare movement, scientists at the Iowa Station challenged the pervasive idea that an individual's development was determined by such group traits as race, class, and gender. Instead, their research suggested that early social intervention could rescue a child from a grim future. Cravens argues that this individualistic perspective, rejected in the 1940s by a scientific community that mirrored society's deterministic notions, anticipated the national social reforms of the post-1950s era, including Head Start.

Hamilton Cravens challenges widespread belief to argue that the impact of evolutionary ideas on American culture and science has been greater since the collapse of Social Darwinism. he portrays a new generation of American scientists whose pioneering work led to the bitterly debated heredity-environment controversy in the 1920s and then, in the '30s, to a "synthetic" theory of the way heredity and environment together have shaped human nature and culture.The resolution of this issue seemed to hold an exhilarating promise. If scientists could explain-and even predict-human behavior, they might help restore social control and stability in an age of domestic ferment and international turmoil.The Triumph of Evolution is the first scholarly history of one of the most significant scientific controversies of the twentieth century.

This text addresses the relationship between what modern-day experts say to each other and to their constituencies and whether what they say and do relates to the larger culture and society. It challenges the social impact model by looking at science and technology as intellectual activities.