Gender and Cortisone: Clinical Practice and Transatlantic Exchange in the Medical Management of Intersex in the 1950s

summary:

This article complicates the history of the standardization of intersex case management developed at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s by focusing on clinical practices and logics and the transatlantic circulation of knowledge. Using patient records and published studies, I follow the exchanges between pediatric endocrinologists Lawson Wilkins (Pediatric Endocrinology Clinic, Baltimore) and Andrea Prader (University Children’s Hospital, Zürich) on cortisone treatment for children with congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH), on psychosexuality and gender role, on choosing and changing the sex of intersex children, and on genital surgery. I argue that a focus on the transatlantic exchanges between these two clinics illuminates a more complex genealogy of modern intersex case management. It also provides insight into how physicians understood their clinical practice and sheds light on the messiness and pragmatic contingencies of what only in retrospect appears to have been a consistent treatment regime.