Although many facets of Lev Vygotsky’s life have drawn considerable attention from historians of science, perhaps the most popular feature of his personal narrative was that his work was actively chastised by the Stalinist government. Almost all contemporary references to Vygotsky’s personal history emphasize that from 1936 to 1956, it was forbidden to either discuss or disseminate any of Vygotsky’s works within the Soviet Union. Although this ‘Vygotsky ban’ is both widely acknowledged and frequently cited by a variety of scholars, (...) the exact nature of this alleged Communist party censure has received far less historical attention. Through focusing on the logistics of Soviet ‘bans,’ this article attempts to shed light on this historical mystery and augment the growing body of revisionist literature that serves to deconstruct the mythologized persona of Lev Vygotsky. (shrink)

ArgumentIn August of 1977, Australian pathologist David W. Buntine delivered a presentation at the Annual Meeting of the Royal College of Pathologists of Australia in Melbourne, Victoria. In this presentation, he used the diagnostic category of “Eskimoma,” to describe a unique set of salivary gland tumors he had observed over the past five years within Winnipeg’s Health Sciences Center. Only found amongst Inuit patients, these tumors were said to have unique histological, clinical, and epidemiological features and were unlike any other (...) disease category that had ever been encountered before. To understand where this nosological category came from, and its long-term impact, this paper traces the historical trajectory of the “Eskimoma.” In addition to discussing the methods and infrastructures that were essential to making the idea of Inuit cancer “visible,” to the pathologist, the epidemiologist, and to society at large, this paper discusses how Inuit tissue samples obtained, stored, and analyzed in Winnipeg, Manitoba, came to be codified into a new, racially based disease category – one that has guided Canadian and international understandings of circumpolar cancer trends and shaped northern healthcare service delivery for the past sixty years. (shrink)

In 2009 Alexandra Rutherford presented readers with a much-needed post-revisionist interpretation of the the behaviorist movement by elucidating the ways in which social context affected popular acceptance of, and resistance to, the central tenants of B.F. Skinner’s psychological theories. By outlining the ways in which American culture both facilitated and hindered behaviorism success, Rutherford's "Beyond the Box: B.F. Skinnner's technology of behavior from laboratory to life, 1950s-1970s" provides an alternative to strictly intellectual histories of behaviorism by examining how technological approaches (...) to behaviour were employed within a multitude of public forums, and emphasizing the importance of changing American attitudes towards technology, consumer culture and ethics. (shrink)