The Dearth of the Clinic: Lead, Air, and Agency in Twentieth-Century America

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.