The Work of Forgetting
Industrial Physicians, Medical Forms, and Industrial Violence in the Early Twentieth-Century United States
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 19225652 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Nate Holdren (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Volume | 23 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 13-44 |
| Publication date | 2026-05-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Labor Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1547-6715 • E-ISSN: 1558-1454 |
| Publisher | Duke University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1215/15476715-12271346 |
| OpenAlex | W7162632550 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 44 |
This article uses inquiry into the medical subfield of industrial medicine in the early twentieth-century United States to build on recent work in the history of occupational safety and health and the broader history of injury and harm in working-class people’s lives. It focuses especially on Lori Flores’s concept of “amnesic landscapes,” arguing that the concept can do much to advance the integration of the history of occupational hazards into labor history and enrich our understanding of class per se. It attempts to make this case by examining how medical forms helped organize the labor of specialists in industrial medicine. Those forms made it so that industrial physicians’ medical practice became interwoven with what the article calls the work of forgetting, meaning that industrial physicians helped normalize harms to workers specifically by making them relatively palatable to company management. It further suggests that industrial physicians are representatives of more general social patterns: Wherever we find class, we tend to find violence, and wherever we find the violence of class, we also tend to find work that normalizes and depoliticizes that violence. Flores’s concept helps show how that work can be made the object of historical inquiry
Harm · Occupational medicine · Occupational safety and health · Decadence, Literature, and Society · Historical Psychiatry and Medical Practices · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Industrial Relations
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| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |