Infertility: tracing the history of a transformative term

Table of Contents:

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Chapter 1: From Barren to Sterile: The Evolution of a Mixed Metaphor

Chapter 2: Vital Forces Conserved: Narrating Energy Conservation and Human Reproduction at the Turn-of-the-Century

Chapter 3: Improving Upon Nature: The Rise of Reproductive Endocrinology and Chemical Theories of Fertility

Chapter 4: Psychogenic Infertility: The Unconscious Defense Against Motherhood

Chapter 5: Fertility in Clinical Time: The Integration of Scientific Specialties as Infertility Studies

Conclusion

Notes

References

Index

This book explores the arguments, appeals, and narratives that have defined the meaning of infertility in the modern history of the United States and Europe.

Throughout the last century, the inability of women to conceive children has been explained by discrepant views: that women are individually culpable for their own reproductive health problems, or that they require the intervention of medical experts to correct abnormalities. Using doctor-patient correspondence, oral histories, and contemporaneous popular and scientific news coverage, Robin Jensen parses the often thin rhetorical divide between moralization and medicalization, revealing how dominating explanations for infertility have emerged from seemingly competing narratives. Her longitudinal account illustrates the ways in which old arguments and appeals do not disappear in the light of new information, but instead reemerge at subsequent, often seemingly disconnected moments to combine and contend with new assertions.

Tracing the transformation of language surrounding infertility from “barrenness” to “(in)fertility,” this rhetorical analysis both explicates how language was and is used to establish the concept of infertility and shows the implications these rhetorical constructions continue to have for individuals and the societies in which they live.

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