Description
Book SynopsisExamines the medical discourse on abortion in the United States from the 1800s to the 1960s. Demonstrates that abortion was seen as a sign of social pathology indicating undoing of civilization.
Trade Review“In Sign of Pathology, Nathan Stormer provides an original genealogical reading of the U.S. medical profession’s public discourses about abortion in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Anyone who appreciates Foucauldian perspectives should find admirable Stormer’s precisely developed argument that these medical discourses ‘made the chaotic material conditions of abortion’s morbidity rhetorically capacious for biopolitics.’”
—Celeste M. Condit,University of Georgia
“Nathan Stormer has written a stunning book, beautifully illustrating how rhetorical struggles over and through abortion have long been about situating ourselves—and pregnant women—in time and place. Civilization is recursive to the maternal body, with abortion positioned as a sign of collective disorder. It is precisely because abortion is a medicalized national metric that the issue is so intractable. Defined through biopolitics, abortion is perceived as a collective, irreparable wound, and ongoing political struggles reliant on familiar frameworks only deepen this intractability. Stormer’s elegant genealogy, both diagnostic and gently prognostic, has the capacity to shift how we see human reproduction and our place in it.”
—Monica J. Casper,University of Arizona
“If your primary scholarship is in abortion rhetorics or historic American medical rhetorics, then this text is an indispensable and invaluable contribution to your area. Similarly, for those interested in rhetorical genealogy and/or rhetorical historiography, broadly conceived, Signs of Pathology is an exemplar text in the genre.”
—S. Scott Graham Rhetoric & Public Affairs
Table of ContentsContents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Struggling Through Life
Part 1
1. When Abortion Became a Political-Economic Problem
2. Remembering, Forgetting, and the Secrets of Life
Part 2
3. “White Man’s Plague”: Anti-Malthusian Memory Work at the Fin de Siècle
4. “More Wisdom in Living”: Neo-Malthusian Memory Work at Midcentury
5. “The Lesser of Threatened Evils”: Therapeutic Amnesias
Conclusion: Seeking Immunity
Notes
Bibliography
Index
