Description:

The Master of Arts in Medical Humanities & Bioethics Program

Presents

A Montgomery Lecture

With

Jenell Johnson, PhD
Mellon-Morgridge Professor of the Humanities
Associate Professor of Rhetoric, Politics
University of Wisconsin-Madison

”A Man’s Mouth is His Castle”:
Anti-Fluoridation and the Visceral Public

In this talk Professor Johnson examines a grassroots effort to halt fluoridation in a small American town in the early 1950s. Looking closely at the controversy as it played out in town hall meetings and local newspapers over a number of years, she argues that a link between intense emotion and bodily boundaries—what she describes as the formation of “visceral publics”—is critical to understanding opposition to fluoridation in the midcentury United States, a frame that continues to resonate in anti-vaccination discourse today.

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