The rise and fall of Type A man

Abstract

The argument presented is that Type A man became the subject of a new medical discourse that in the late 1950s unveiled the “cause” of coronary heart disease. Type A man, identified by means of the Type A behavioral pattern, became visible through a new medical gaze. The rise of this new social and diagnostic category was through the medicalization of the attributes of traditional masculinity. The approach of the paper is Foucauldian, and the method is genealogical: it traces the social construction of Type A man in the scientific medical literature in the 1950s and 1960s. It is argued that the fall of Type A man began when the construct was coopted by the psychologists whose efforts to measure the psychological dimensions of the coronary-prone personality and behavioral pattern eventually fragmented the concept.