ArgumentThe article retraces the shifting conceptualizations of psychological trauma in experimental psychopathological research in the middle decades of the twentieth century in the United States. Among researchers studying so-called experimental neuroses in animal laboratories, trauma was an often-invoked category used to denote the clash of conflicting forces believed to lead to neurotic suffering. Experimental psychologists, however, soon grew skeptical of the traumatogenic model and ultimately came to reject neurosis as a disease entity. Both theoretical differences and practical circumstances, such as (...) the technical challenge of stabilizing neurotic symptoms in rats, led to this demise. Yet, despite their reservations, experimental psychologists continued to employ traumatic stimuli to produce psychopathological syndromes. In the 1960s, a new understanding of trauma evolved, which emphasized the loss of control experienced by traumatized animal subjects. These shifting ideas about trauma, I argue, reflect both varying experimental cultures, epistemic norms as well as changing societal concerns. (shrink)

In the early 1990s, Microcebus murinus, a small primate endemic to Madagascar, emerged as a potential animal model for the study of aging and Alzheimer’s disease. This paper traces the use of the lesser mouse lemur in research on aging and associated neurodegenerative diseases, focusing on a basic material precondition that made this possible, namely, the conversion of a wild animal into an experimental organism that lives, breeds, and survives in the laboratory. It argues that the “old” mouse lemur model (...) can be considered as an eco-zootechnical acquisition. This is shown by examining how, since the early 1970s, French mouse lemur researchers have articulated colony productivity and viability with the influence of environmental factors on the demographics and physiology of the species. The appearance and maintenance of a growing number of old mouse lemurs in French research facilities are related to three developments: the application of the ecological notion of “social stress” to the understanding and management of the behavior of the captive population; the experimental demonstration that a variety of seasonal physiological changes in the species were influenced by the photoperiod; and the related attempt to accelerate aging in mouse lemurs through the manipulation of annual light conditions. (shrink)

Die Entstehung von Herz- und Kreislaufkrankheiten durch Stress, das heißt psychosoziale Belastungen, war in den 1960er und 1970er Jahren ein bestimmendes Element des internationalen medizinischen Diskurses. In diesem Artikel wird eine ostdeutsche Variante des Stressdiskurses thematisiert, die von Rudolf Baumann und seinen Mitarbeitern am Institut für kortiko-viszerale Pathologie und Therapie in Berlin-Buch entwickelt wurde. Die Gruppe versuchte, ebenso einen dezidiert materialistischen Zugang zum Problem psychosozial bedingter Krankheiten zu entwickeln wie Therapie- und Präventionskonzepte, die sich in das sozialistische Gesundheitssystem einfügten. Zugleich (...) griff sie beständig auf westliche Begriffe und Praktiken zurück. Durch eine internationale Kontextualisierung des Projekts werden Übereinstimmungen und Unterschiede der östlichen und westlichen Wahrnehmung belastender Auswirkungen der Industriegesellschaft herausgearbeitet. Ferner wird gezeigt, dass das Stresskonzept ein anspruchsvolles Programm sozialer Prävention und Therapie implizierte, dessen Realisierung in beiden politischen Systemen enge Grenzen gesetzt waren. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungDie Entstehung von Herz- und Kreislaufkrankheiten durch Stress, das heißt psychosoziale Belastungen, war in den 1960er und 1970er Jahren ein bestimmendes Element des internationalen medizinischen Diskurses. In diesem Artikel wird eine ostdeutsche Variante des Stressdiskurses thematisiert, die von Rudolf Baumann und seinen Mitarbeitern am Institut für kortiko-viszerale Pathologie und Therapie in Berlin-Buch entwickelt wurde. Die Gruppe versuchte, ebenso einen dezidiert materialistischen Zugang zum Problem psychosozial bedingter Krankheiten zu entwickeln wie Therapie- und Präventionskonzepte, die sich in das sozialistische Gesundheitssystem einfügten. Zugleich (...) griff sie beständig auf westliche Begriffe und Praktiken zurück. Durch eine internationale Kontextualisierung des Projekts werden Übereinstimmungen und Unterschiede der östlichen und westlichen Wahrnehmung belastender Auswirkungen der Industriegesellschaft herausgearbeitet. Ferner wird gezeigt, dass das Stresskonzept ein anspruchsvolles Programm sozialer Prävention und Therapie implizierte, dessen Realisierung in beiden politischen Systemen enge Grenzen gesetzt waren. (shrink)

ArgumentThis article adopts a historical perspective to examine the development of Laboratory Animal Science and Medicine, an auxiliary field which formed to facilitate the work of the biomedical sciences by systematically improving laboratory animal production, provision, and maintenance in the post Second World War period. We investigate how Laboratory Animal Science and Medicine co-developed at the local level (responding to national needs and concerns) yet was simultaneously transnational in orientation (responding to the scientific need that knowledge, practices, objects and animals (...) circulate freely). Adapting the work of Tsing (2004), we argue that national differences provided the creative “friction” that helped drive the formation of Laboratory Animal Science and Medicine as a transnational endeavor. Our analysis engages with the themes of this special issue by focusing on the development of Laboratory Animal Science and Medicine in Norway, which both informed wider transnational developments and was formed by them. We show that Laboratory Animal Science and Medicine can only be properly understood from a spatial perspective; whilst it developed and was structured through national “centers,” its orientation was transnational necessitating international networks through which knowledge, practice, technologies, and animals circulated. (shrink)

ArgumentWe examine the criteria used to validate the use of nonhuman organisms in North-American alcohol addiction research from the 1950s to the present day. We argue that this field, where the similarities between behaviors in humans and non-humans are particularly difficult to assess, has addressed questions of model validity by transforming the situatedness of non-human organisms into an experimental tool. We demonstrate that model validity does not hinge on the standardization of one type of organism in isolation, as often the (...) case with genetic model organisms. Rather, organisms are viewed as necessarily situated: they cannot be understood as a model for human behavior in isolation from their environmental conditions. Hence the environment itself is standardized as part of the modeling process; and model validity is assessed with reference to the environmental conditions under which organisms are studied. (shrink)