History (4,904 posts)

Abstract

This study examines how media can influence and shape collective memory through cultural objects such as magazines. Examination of Jet and Ebony magazines’ coverage of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, as well as, changes in the narrative over time, reveal potential mechanisms that might have influenced African Americas’ collective memory surrounding this event. Data for this study come from news articles about The Tuskegee Syphilis Study in Jet and Ebony magazines from 1972–2016 (N = 49). Content analysis was used to analyze and discover themes in each of the 49 news stories. Findings show that the journalistic coverage of The Tuskegee Syphilis study by these magazines centered around themes of exploitation of uneducated victims, racism and blame, genocide, medical mistrust and deliberate injection with syphilis, reflecting past and current beliefs of African Americans’ remembrance of the study.

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Otto von Bismarck (1815–1898) addressing the Reichstag circa 1880.

In Matters of the Heart: History, Medicine, Emotion (Bound Alberti, 2010), I posited that the heart of culture and the heart of science became disconnected in the nineteenth century; that the heart which had for centuries been the centre of life, emotions and personhood lost out to the brain as the organ par excellence of selfhood. This process was not clear-cut or definitive. There had been interest in craniocentric versions of the self in the ancient world, and there is continued emphasis in the emotional heart in the present day, as Josh Hordern’s article explores through such examples as the organ scandal at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital in Liverpool. So, what is it about the heart, that peculiar, emotive and sensorially charged organ, that continues to be associated with some essence of the self? After all, in medical terms, it is a mere pump.

Except that the heart-as-pump is…

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Dorothy Kahn