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oapen-20.500.12657-494292021-06-08T01:02:29Z Chapter 19 ‘A Tragedy as Old as History’ Davis, Gayle Artificial insemination, Doctors, Infertility, Pathologization, Religion bic Book Industry Communication::M Medicine::MF Pre-clinical medicine: basic sciences::MFK Human reproduction, growth & development::MFKC Reproductive medicine::MFKC1 Infertility & fertilization This chapter will explore how the infertile patient was characterized, perceived, and treated by the medical profession in 1950s England and Scotland. Such was the concern that this subject engendered in postwar Britain that a Departmental Committee was appointed in 1958 (known as the Feversham Committee) to investigate infertility and its treatment through artificial insemination. The written and oral evidence submitted by medical witnesses to that Committee offers rich insights into medical thinking and practice, and into the complex sociomedical politics and ethical anxieties which surrounded the topic. The testimony of legal and religious witnesses will also be explored to a more limited extent in order to offer some context to medical understandings and treatments of infertility. It will be considered how women’s bodies, personalities, and even agency in proactively seeking motherhood through artificial insemination were heavily pathologized in medical and religious discourses, but also how the men involved – husbands, sperm donors and even doctors – did not escape this tendency to pathologize. 2021-06-07T13:01:28Z 2021-06-07T13:01:28Z 2017 chapter 9781137520791 https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/49429 eng application/pdf Attribution 4.0 International Bookshelf_NBK525072.pdf Springer Nature The Palgrave Handbook of Infertility in History 10.1057/978-1-137-52080-7_19 10.1057/978-1-137-52080-7_19 6c6992af-b843-4f46-859c-f6e9998e40d5 a6fa0162-6d4c-400e-a8da-d07d2a366483 d859fbd3-d884-4090-a0ec-baf821c9abfd 9781137520791 Wellcome 24 London Wellcome Trust Wellcome open access
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This chapter will explore how the infertile patient was characterized, perceived, and treated by the medical profession in 1950s England and Scotland. Such was the concern that this subject engendered in postwar Britain that a Departmental Committee was appointed in 1958 (known as the Feversham Committee) to investigate infertility and its treatment through artificial insemination. The written and oral evidence submitted by medical witnesses to that Committee offers rich insights into medical thinking and practice, and into the complex sociomedical politics and ethical anxieties which surrounded the topic. The testimony of legal and religious witnesses will also be explored to a more limited extent in order to offer some context to medical understandings and treatments of infertility. It will be considered how women’s bodies, personalities, and even agency in proactively seeking motherhood through artificial insemination were heavily pathologized in medical and religious discourses, but also how the men involved – husbands, sperm donors and even doctors – did not escape this tendency to pathologize.
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