This panel explores how U.S. public health initiatives and medical practice drew on interconnected ideas about race, productivity, and disability. Our four case studies examine the labor regimes of state lunatic asylums, hookworm eradication efforts, New Deal disability policy, and anti-hypertension campaigns, revealing how medical, political, and cultural authorities promised to transform bodies—individual and the national. By tracing medicalized attention to bodies across the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the panel brings into focus intertwined, yet contested, histories of medical authority and racial and disability hierarchies.

John Mckiernan-González opens the panel by exploring the centrality of labor to the organization and operation of the Texas State Lunatic Asylum in Austin. Asylum superintendents celebrated work as a therapeutic measure, even as the coerced labor of patients deemed incapable of work maintained the institutions. The persistence of patient work, shifts in diagnoses, and the erasure of ethnic Mexican patients from official records demonstrate how asylum labor practices shaped the racialization and “southernization” of Texas asylums. Mckiernan-González positions the asylum as a site where medical authority, coercion, and racial boundary‑making converged.

Kaci DeLisle extends the analysis of the linkages between health, productivity, and racialized identities by examining Progressive Era hookworm campaigns in the South. Public health advocates argued that hookworm parasites explained the “pitiable condition” and presumed “laziness” of poor southern whites. Through treatment, previously stigmatized rural whites could become productive citizens. Public health narratives about hookworm challenged eugenic thinking by promising to “cure” poor southern whites of the traits that shaped their othered identity. DeLisle demonstrates how hookworm eradication reimagined the problematic identity of the southern “Cracker” as contingent and improvable.

Audra Jennings shifts the analysis to New Deal public health policy. Tracing the Social Security Act’s Services for Crippled Children and Works Progress Administration health projects, Jennings shows how policymakers cast disability as a threat to national efficiency while simultaneously excluding disabled people from programs designed to put Americans to work and instituting a subminimum wage for them. Investment in cure and prevention expanded access to medical care, yet New Deal policy also reinforced disabled people’s status as recipients of care and subjects of research and medical authority and strengthened connections between disability and dependency.

Closing the panel, Jerome Dotson analyzes 1970s television as a site of public health messaging about the threat of hypertension to Black health. Sitcoms such as Sanford and Son and Good Times cast hypertension as a problem of personal responsibility, reframing soul food as a biomedical risk and positioning Black women’s cooking as central to disease prevention. Yet, these programs also contained moments of resistance when characters challenged class‑blind nutritional prescriptions. Dotson highlights the role of popular media in shaping, and contesting, dominant narratives about Black health, diet, and responsibility.

Together, these papers reveal that American public health and policy sought to exert control over bodies to control the fate of the national body. In governing bodies, medical authorities drew on, created, and reinforced hierarchies of race and disability.