Browsing by Author "Dufour, Monique S."
Now showing 1 - 8 of 8
Results Per Page
Sort Options
- Automating Health: The Promises and Perils of Biomedical Technologies for Diabetes ManagementBrantly, Nataliya D. (Virginia Tech, 2023-05-15)Type 1 Diabetes (T1D) is an irreversible chronic autoimmune disease that affects millions in the United States. Individuals with T1D rely on biomedical technologies to manage their disability and to stay alive. The increased use of and reliance on automated technologies creates complex entanglements between human bodies, technologies and external factors including digital infrastructures creating what I term as "biotechnological organism." This U.S.-based study focuses on the most advanced biomedical technology used to manage T1D today, the Artificial Pancreas System (APS), to demonstrate how seemingly liberating automated biomedical technologies can entangle, subjugate, and confine those they aim to free. This study features the analysis of two distinct social groups by focusing on their risk discourses and risk reduction efforts. The first group is a community of regulatory experts represented by the American Diabetes Association (ADA). It provides an important perspective grounded in evidence-based science, established norms, and professional standards of medicine, healthcare, and research. The second group is the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) biological community represented by DIY innovators, patients, caregivers, and advocates. It provides a different but equally important perspective shaped by affective dimensions that reflect a phenomenological experience with biomedical technologies. The combination of these two perspectives along with the improved understanding of this disability, the complexity of entanglements between humans and machines, differing approaches to health automation and knowledge production practices elucidates important social, economic, and political issues. The significance of this work lies in its examination of how the improved understanding of health automation efforts can help inform policy and healthcare decisions.
- A Jane of all Trades: Janet Taylor's Contributions to Victorian NavigationPutnam, Marlee Love (Virginia Tech, 2019-07-11)Janet Taylor made major contributions to Victorian navigational practices. She did so through creating business opportunities for herself as an educator, author, and inventor of nautical instruments.
- Reading for Health: Bibliotherapy and the Medicalized Humanities in the United States, 1930-1965Dufour, Monique S. (Virginia Tech, 2014-10-20)In this dissertation, I tell the story of midcentury attempts to establish, develop, and study bibliotherapy in the US. I follow three groups-hospital librarians, psychologists and psychiatrists, and language arts educators-from the 1930s to the 1960s, when each in its own ways expressed belief in the therapeutic power of reading and set out to enact that belief as a legitimate practice in the evolving contexts of its profession and in the broader culture. These professionals tried to learn what happened within people during and after reading, and they attempted to use what they learned to apply reading toward healthy ends. Today, therapeutic reading has become commonplace to the extent that it seems natural. In this dissertation, I aim to recover and explore the midcentury processes by which therapeutic reading came to seem at once natural, medical, and scientific. I argue that midcentury bibliotherapy functioned in concert with an evolving cultural narrative that I call "reading for health." The reading for health narrative gathers up into a coherent story various and deep beliefs and commonplaces about the power of books over our minds and our bodies. In midcentury bibliotherapy, reading for health was reinvigorated as a story about the marriage of science and culture, a unity narrative that claimed the iconic book-capable of swaying minds and societies alike, and burnished with all that western civilization signified-for the professions that applied reading toward their healthy ends. As I demonstrate, however, these narratives were not confined to discrete professions, but functioned as a part of a larger cultural movement set upon the shifting fault lines of the humanities and science. Each of the groups I follow took an avid interest in what I have called the embodied reader. Rather than viewing reading as an act of a disembodied mind, they understood the practice as a psychosomatic experience in which mind and body could not be disconnected. Moreover, they believed that reading could capitalize on the embodied nature of thought and affect, and engender healthy effects. In this way, the embodied reader was constructed as a new, modern locus of both the literary experience and the therapeutic ethos. By valuing above all else how reading could be used to achieve health, advocates of bibliotherapy fashioned a form of applied humanities, one that defined the meaning and judged the value of books in terms of their utility and efficacy. In so doing, they contributed to the development of a form of the medicalized humanities that now resonates in three contemporary sites: (1.) the study and use of bibliotherapy in clinical psychology; (2.) the dominant and naturalized approach to books known as therapeutic reading; and (3.) the medical humanities.
- Reading in Zion: Book Cultures of Mormon Youth, 1869–1890Balli, Tyler A. (Virginia Tech, 2020-06-26)This thesis examines the feelings of generational anxiety in the Mormon community from 1869 to 1890 and how those feelings intersected with ideas about reading. During this time, older members of the Mormon community in Utah Territory feared how changes in and threats to Mormon society might negatively affect young people's beliefs, abilities, knowledge, and adherence to their parents' religion. Older Mormons recognized a potential ally and enemy in books, newspapers, and other reading materials, which they believed could dramatically shape young people for good or for ill depending on the quality of the material. This thesis argues these older Mormons borrowed many elements from other US literary cultures and repurposed them for distinctly Mormon ends, including achieving theosis (chapter 1), navigating changing dynamics in Mormon families (chapter 2), and building their utopic society, Zion (chapter 3). This research adds to the work of those scholars who have combined the history of Mormonism with book history. It incorporates the voices of everyday Mormons to bring into focus the entire ecosystem of reading for young Mormons by focusing not only on fiction but also on biography, scripture, "Church works," history, and other genres. It examines not only discourse but also institutionalized programs and actions, such as the 1888 MIA Course of Reading (chapter 4), that shaped Mormons' world of reading. Such an examination begins to sharpen our understanding of the relationship of print and religion in America and what reading meant to Mormons.
- Save the Babies: Progressive Women and the Fight for Child Welfare in the United States, 1912-1929Brabble, Jessica Marie (Virginia Tech, 2021-06-24)This project examines two organizations--the Better Babies Bureau and the Children's Bureau--created by Progessive women in the early twentieth century to combat high infant mortality rates, improve prenatal and postnatal care, and better child welfare. The Better Babies Bureau, founded in 1913 by journalists from the Woman's Home Companion magazine, and the Children's Bureau, founded as a federal agency in 1912, used similar campaigns to raise awareness of these child welfare problems in the early 1900s; where they differed, however, is in their ultimate goals. The Children's Bureau sought to improve long-term medical care and infant mortality rates for women regardless of race or socioeconomic status; I analyze how they worked directly with midwives and health officials to provide better care for mothers and children. The Better Babies Bureau, in comparison, catered specifically to white women through prize-based contests and eugenics rhetoric. Through their better baby contests, they promoted the idea that disabilities and defects should be eliminated in children in order to create a better future. By the late 1910s, these two organizations were utilizing nationwide campaigns to appeal to mothers through either consumerism or health conferences. I argue that although the Better Babies Bureau made a greater cultural impact, the Children's Bureau made a longer lasting—and farther reaching—impact on infant mortality rates by making healthcare more accessible for both rural and urban women.
- Standardization, Segregation, and Professionalization in Virginia Public Schools, 1898-1917Stewart, Emily Marie (Virginia Tech, 2020-06-15)This thesis focuses on three groups of people: Virginia superintendents, leaders of Virginia Normal and Industrial Institute and Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, and teachers of Virginia public schools. On their own terms, each of these groups represents a different facet of state level policies of standardization and segregation. The annual and biennial reports published by the office of the Virginia superintendent of public instruction during the early twentieth century constitute the basis of analysis for this thesis. The first chapter of this thesis analyzes introductory letters from the superintendent of public instruction. Within these letters, the superintendent wrote often about public school facility renovations and improvements. The second chapter uncovers how leaders of black institutions of higher education represented their institutions to the superintendent by documenting the success of their graduates and the disciplinary atmosphere of their campuses. Chapter three explores standardization and professionalization measures that the superintendents recommended for Virginia teachers. This thesis adds to our understanding of education in the early twentieth century by looking at every day, bureaucratic decisions in relation to concepts of standardization and race in Virginia. In all, this thesis uncovers three standards of education that developed during the early twentieth century. Putting these three chapters together reveals a complex story about standardization and segregation, a story that, I argue, uncovers how race and power were embedded within everyday decisions and actions at the state level.
- "That mountain is like a drug store": Knowledge and Medicine in Southern Appalachia, 1900-1933Boggs, Eleanor Louise (Virginia Tech, 2018-07-22)This thesis argues that although historians treat the relationship between professional medicine and folk medicine in Southern Appalachia as a competition and place Appalachian folk medicine as a victim of professionalization, the two forms of medicine are best understood as systems of knowledge. Through interviews, medical journals and administrative records, medical school records, and other archival sources, I trace how gender, race, and class shaped knowledge in Appalachian folk medicine and professional medicine during Prohibition and the early twentieth century. Despite the characterization of folk medicine as a victim to professionalization, I find that people in Southern Appalachia actively understood and engaged with shifting ideas of health and constant concerns over the high costs of medicine and limited accessibility to doctors throughout the twentieth century.
- The Women of Waterford, Virginia: Gender, Unionism, Quakerism and Identity in the American Civil WarWild, Emily Frances (Virginia Tech, 2019-07-03)Over the course of the Civil War the small community of Waterford, Virginia maintained Unionist sentiments regardless of being a part of the Confederate States of America. These sentiments were rooted in loyalty to the United States, their ostracization from southern culture, and their Quaker faith. In particular, the women of this community became exceptionally vocal with their displeasure with the Confederacy. In the last year of the Civil War they made the deliberate choice to publicly assert their Unionist convictions with their newspaper The Waterford News. The experience of this community, particularly that of its female residents, was influenced by the variety of identities that they held. The women of Waterford were Quakers, female, southern, unionist and editors/producers of a newspaper. The community of Waterford, Virginia was placed in the margins of Southern society because of the cultural differences rooted in their Quaker faith. The Civil War created a chaotic historical moment where those on the margins of society experienced it differently than those around them. By examining their identities as newspaper producers, as citizens of different groups, and within their interpersonal relationships the reality of how war is lived is brought to light. All of these factors reveal how war is lived, and how lives are manipulated to fit within times of chaos. Motivation matters.