Description
Book SynopsisA groundbreaking history that illuminates the foundations of the multibillion-dollar human growth hormone (HGH) industry. Drawing on medical and public health histories as well as on photography, film, music, prose, and other examples from popular culture, Aimee Medeiros tracks how the stigmatization of short stature in boys and growth hormone technology came together in the twentieth century.
Trade Review“
Heightened Expectations is an excellent treatment of a significant subject, the history of American ideas about height and medical approaches to issues of human growth, from the late 1800s onward. Medeiros’s treatment fits beautifully into the powerful and growing literature on the history of medicine, disability, gender, and the body.” —Amy Sue Bix, author of
Girls Coming to Tech!: A History of American Engineering Education for Women and
Inventing Ourselves Out of Jobs?: America’s Debate over Technical Unemployment, 1929–1981 “
Heightened Expectations offers a lively and engaging discussion of how short stature became a ‘disease’ in need of medical treatment. It convincingly demonstrates that the pathology-making of short stature dates back to the nineteenth century and is intertwined with the rise of modern capitalism.” —Heather Munro Prescott, author of
A Doctor of Their Own: The History of Adolescent Medicine and
The Morning After: A History of Emergency Contraception in the United States""
Heightened Expectations is a good solid piece of work on a topic of much interest. It intersects the new field of disability history and adopts the newer approach, discussing how long-standing issues have been managed rather than simply exposed, allowing fundamental cleavages in the social fabric."" — Alan I Marcus, senior series editor,
neXus
