title: The dearth of the clinic: lead, air, and agency in twentieth-century America.
abstract: By surveying myriad ways that twentieth-century American experts and nonexperts grappled with the health implications of aerial exposures to lead or substances that may have contained lead, this paper urges medical historians' attention toward environments-workplaces, homes and the outdoors-and their extrabodily ontology. Health histories framed around dust, toxins, fumes, and pollution rather than around particular diseases challenge long-accepted narratives, such as Hibbert Hill's old generalization about a "New Public Health" shift from "the environment to the individual." Greater environmental focus can also advance "bottom-up" health history. Pushing the gaze of twentieth-century medical and public health historians beyond hospitals, "public health" departments, clinically confirmable disease, and "patient" roles, it draws historians' attention to health-related realms in which laypeople often claimed greater knowledge and competence.
authors.affiliation: History Department, Stony Brook University, NY 11794, USA. csellers@notes.cc.sunysb.edu
authors.forename: Christopher
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Sellers
mesh_terms: D004781:Environmental Exposure / Q000266:history*; D007722:Health Knowledge, Attitudes, Practice; D006663:Historiography; D049673:History, 20th Century; D006694:Holistic Health / Q000266:history; D006798:Housing / Q000266:history; D006801:Humans; D007854:Lead / Q000266:history*; D007855:Lead Poisoning / Q000266:history*; D016272:Occupational Health / Q000266:history*; D011634:Public Health / Q000266:history*; D009626:Terminology as Topic; D014481:United States
chemical_list: D007854:Lead