Official websites use. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. Email: cbeccalossi lincoln. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4. Displacing the physiological model that had held sway in 19th-century medical thinking, early 20th-century medical scientists working on hormones promoted a new understanding of the body, psychological reactions, and the sexual instinct, arguing that each were fundamentally malleable.
Hormones came to be understood as the chemical messengers that regulated an individual's growth and sexual development, and sexologists interested in this area focused primarily on children and adolescents. This article focuses on Spanish, Italian, Argentinian, and Brazilian sexology shaped by endocrinological research in the interwar period.
First, it shows the key role hormone treatments played in the historical development of sexology in Southern Europe and Latin America. In recent decades, scholars have increasingly paid attention to how the biochemical notion of hormones and the consequent development of synthetic molecules for medical and commercial uses have radically modified traditional definitions of body, sex, and gender.
It would be tempting to interpret the changes brought about by a new chemical understanding of the functioning of the body as a paradigm shift. While endocrinology meant a return to the body and, therefore, to Davidson's anatomical style of reasoning, this occurred within a new conceptual framework.
(mh=9psBD9GWMe6Uf0P2)8.jpg "Teen girls in Genoa")
Endocrinological research has greatly broadened sexual knowledge as well. The burgeoning interwar literature on individuals with intersex variations threw into doubt the rigid division between male and female sexes, and was built around observations of sexual development. Sociologist and historian of health sciences Adele Clarke, analysing the history of reproductive science, shows that hormone research played a pivotal role in scientific thinking about sex differences in the first half of the 20th century.
