A Doctor of Their Own

This well-researched account of the rise of adolescent medicine offers an excellent model of how professional specialty history ought to be written. A Doctor of Their Own is centered on the interaction of adolescent patients and the professionals who aspired to care for them, set against the background of changing societal attitudes regarding adolescence. Central to Heather Prescott's argument is that adolescents themselves shaped the rise of adolescent medicine as much as did medical professionals. To be sure, the twentieth century began with a discourse dominated by adults. G. Stanley Hall articulated adolescent rebellion as a kind of evolutionary regression released by the storm of puberty--yet his success in promoting compulsory schooling to contain this behavior ironically contributed to the rise of an adolescent subculture that further challenged adult authority. Hall's successors came to accept adolescent rebellion as a normal stage of development. As authority shifted from the parent to the peer group, however, adolescents faced a new kind of pressure to be "normal" in the increasingly conformist culture of the 1940s and 1950s. The door was thus opened for the intervention of medical expertise in mediating the ensuing conflict

Adolescent medicine · Argument (complex analysis) · Conformist · Family medicine · Intervention (counseling) · Peer pressure · Political science · Psychiatry · Set (abstract data type) · Sociology · Specialty · Child and Adolescent Health · Gender Studies · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · Law · Medicine · Psychology · Social Psychology