Introduction

From the stress of burnout to the gratification of camaraderie, medicine is suffused with emotions that educators, administrators, and reformers have sought to shape. Yet historians of medicine have only begun to analyze how emotions have structured health care work. This introductory essay frames a special issue on health care practitioners’ emotions in the twentieth-century United Kingdom and United States. We argue that the massive bureaucratic and scientific changes in medicine after the Second World War helped to reshape affective aspects of care. The articles in this issue emphasize the intersubjectivity of feelings in healthcare settings and the mutually constitutive relationship between patients’ and providers’ emotions. Bridging the history of medicine with the history of emotion demonstrates how emotions are instilled rather than innate, social as well as personal, and, above all else, change over time. The articles reckon with the power dynamics of healthcare. They address the policies and practices that institutions, organizations, and governments have implemented to shape, govern, or manage the affective experiences and well-being of healthcare workers. And they point to important new directions in the history of medicine

Bureaucracy · Feeling · Health care · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Public relations · Sociology · Historical Psychiatry and Medical Practices · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · History of Emotions Research · Law · Psychology · Social Psychology

• Advancing the safe motherhood initiative

  Open Access•Kanayo Umeh, SE Adaji et al.•PLOS Global Public Health•2025

  Incluir item

• Beyond Imperturbability

  Courtney E Thompson•Bulletin of the history of medicine•2022

  Incluir item

• Caring for America

  Beatrix Hoffman•Labor Studies in Working-Class…•2014

  Incluir item

• A small cemetery’

  Open Access•Agnes Arnold-Forster•Medical Humanities•2019

  Incluir item

• Sympathy and Science

  Virginia G Drachman, Regina Morantz‐sanchez et al.•Journal of American History•1986

  Incluir item

• Disabling practitioners

  Mary‐jo Delvecchio Good, Mary-Jo Delvecchio Good et al.•American Journal of Orthopsychiatry•1989

  Incluir item

• Managing Emotions in Medical School

  Allen C Smith, Sherryl Kleinman•Social Psychology Quarterly•1989

  Incluir item

• Experiment Perilous

  H Warren Dunham, Richard C Fox et al.•American Sociological Review•1960

  Incluir item