Talk:Popular Health Movement

Please help expand this article

I happened upon this interesting topic and couldn't find much about it on Wikipedia, so I threw together something quickly. It's quite outside the usual areas in which I provide content, but I think it has obvious contemporary relevance and would be well worth developing. Because of the non-specificity of the phrase "popular health movement," it's rather hard to research for a non-specialist who doesn't already have some grasp of what secondary sources might pertain. Here's hoping someone will devote the time. Cynwolfe (talk) 19:28, 2 April 2010 (UTC)

I'm not sure this is a distinguishable movement. Every man his own doctor and the idea that every man who had reached (say) forty should know more about his own health than somebody else has classical roots, and is strongly attested in Jefferson's correspondence.

What you may be seeing is the converse; the attempt by doctors as self-appointed experts to uproot the ancient understanding - appearing in the certification movement, and the criminalization of abortion, which are also in the first half of the nineteenth century. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 16:18, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

Well, it isn't always capitalized, and it can overlap in practice with the Clean living movement. But as a period-specific movement, it turned up in the sources cited, and there was already a little section devoted to it in History of alternative medicine before I posted this. My understanding from the limited amount of research I did in the late 20th/early 21st-centuries scholarship is that there is a body of 19th-century literature, including Foote's Medical Common Sense, regarded as "texts" of the movement. It is a movement also in that the attitudes it embodied influenced policy and practice, and resulted in rolling back previously existing government regulation.

As the last paragraph indicates, the push toward credentializing medicine revives mid-century. The difference is that before this 'popular' movement, there were self-proclaimed experts; afterwards, one had to go through a formal process and certify expertise. This article makes no claims of thoroughness, but I would suspect 'credentializing' not only has to do with physicians seeking to distinguish themselves as experts, but also because advances in the scientific aspects of medicine in the 19th century required more extensive and formal training. (Perhaps this is my personal bias: I would prefer to know that my surgeon is licensed in good standing.) Expertise can't always be reduced to issues of control of knowledge, power and status. Either you know how to fly the plane and you can prove it, or you can't.

My understanding was that abortion wasn't criminalized till after the Civil War, which would not make it first half of the 19th century. A more laissez-faire attitude about abortion was more typical of the early decades of the 19th century, in keeping with general attitudes toward self-regulation and (again) the idea that it wasn't anybody else's business (i.e., "Jacksonian" populism). Cynwolfe (talk) 16:51, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

The article Frances Wright links to this article, including under the "See also" section; those links seem to pre-date the creation of this article, for what it's worth. Cynwolfe (talk) 17:00, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

Depends on the State, and whether "criminalization" equals a murder charge. On rereading Roe v. Wade, I find it was later than I recalled; but statutes of 1821 and 1828 are mentioned. (And the "expert" doctors of the Jacksonian era had neither anaesthetic nor hand-washing.) Septentrionalis PMAnderson 17:30, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

Right — hence the reaction to them as "self-proclaimed" authorities, and the 'movement' based on 'surely I know as much as these jackasses.' But then the later reaction that 'maybe you do need to know more than a lay person picking this up in his spare time,' which led to a demand for some kind of third-party way to confirm expertise. There are lots of books that would sort out the timeline for abortion law. But as far as my submitting content on the subject, I'm not prepared to throw myself into those particular flames. Cynwolfe (talk) 20:29, 23 April 2010 (UTC)