History of Medicine and Health

Elaine LaFay presented  “‘The slandered torrid zone’: Medicine, Botany, and the Imperial Vision of an American Tropics along the U.S. Gulf Coast, 1820–1840,” a chapter from her dissertation.
 
Melanie Kiechle, assistant professor of history at  Virginia Tech, has agreed to contribute a comment.
 
A copy of the discussion paper is uploaded to the Medicine and Health Work Group site.
 
LaFay is a PhD candidate in the Department of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania, and currently a Marguerite Bartlett Hamer Dissertation Fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies.
 

Daniel Goldberg (University of Colorado, Denver): “‘The Evidence of the Lost Eye was so Palpable’: The Testimonial Significance of Visible Disabilities in Civil War Veterans’ Encounters with the North Carolina Pension Act of 1885”

Tamara Venit-Shelton (Claremont McKenna College): “Herbs and Roots Only: Toward an Environmental History of Chinese Medicine in the United States.”
Comments by:
Linda L. Barnes, Boston University
Mei Zhan, University of California Irvine.

Averyl Gaylor (La Trobe University in Melbourne): “Dance and Operational Bodily Encounters in Twentieth-Century Australia.” On the interplay between modern dance and modern medical cultures in shaping understandings and ideals of the body in Australia, in the early to mid twentieth-century. Comment by Dr. Whitney Laemmli, Society of Fellows in the Humanities, Columbia University.

Joanna Radin, from the Program in History of Science & Medicine, Yale University, presented “Latent Life in Biomedicine’s Ice Age,” the first chapter of her new book, Life on Ice: A History of New Uses for Cold Blood (Chicago, 2017). Susan Lederer, University of Wisconsin, provided commentary.

Beth Linker (University of Pennsylvania) discussed Huddled Masses: The Making of a Poor Posture Epidemic in America.   Comments by Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Professor Emerita, Cornell University and Carla Bittel, Associate Professor, Loyola Marymount University.

Terence Keel (UC—Santa Barbara) and Osagie Obasogie (UC—Berkeley) in a virtual meet-and-greet on the origins and current projects of their working group on critical race theory and the health sciences.

*Note Special Date*

Kavita Sivaramakrishnan, Columbia Mailman School of Public Health, presented a paper on cancer and aging in India and South Africa.

Merlin Chowkwanyun, Donald H. Gamson Chair in the History and Ethics of Public Health in the Department of Sociomedical Sciences at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health presented a paper, "Is Small Always Beautiful? Is Community Always Great? Re-thinking the Big, Bad Academic Medical Center (1960-1980)" Kimberly Phillips-Fein, Gallatin School, New York University provided a comment.

Dora Vargha (Birkbeck College, University of London, and 2015–2016 Consortium for HSTM Research Fellow) will present “After the End of Polio: Local and Global Consequences of Disease Elimination.” Daniel Wilson (Mulhenberg College) will provide commentary to start the discussion.

Alex Mold (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine) and Nancy Tomes (Stony Brook University) discussed their recently published books on patient consumerism in the UK (Making the Patient-Consumer, Manchester, 2015) and the US (Remaking the American Patient, UNC Press, 2016), and Roberta Bivins (University of Warwick) provided comments to start the discussion.

Wendy Kline (Purdue University) shared a chapter from her book-in-progress, Coming Home: Medicine, Midwives, and the Transformation of Birth in Late-Twentieth-Century America. Judith Walzer Leavitt (U. Madison at Wisconsin) and Barbara Katz Rothman (Baruch College/CUNY Graduate Center) provided commentary and the group discussed.

Heidi Knoblauch of Bard College joined the group to discuss her paper, "Collecting Patients: Clinical Photographs, Record Keeping, and Privacy in the United States, 1862-1939."

Joseph Gabriel (University of Wisconsin) and Jeremy Greene (Johns Hopkins University) discussed each other's books. The group read excerpts from Joe's Medical Monopoly:Intellectual Property Rights and the Origins of the Modern Pharmaceutical Industry and Jeremy's Generic: the Unbranding of Modern Medicine. Lawrence Glickman (Cornell University) gave comments, and then the group discussed.

A discussion between two authors who have recently written books about pain: Keith Wailoo, the author of Pain: A Political History, and Joanna Bourke, the author of The Story of Pain: From Prayer to Painkillers. Keith commented on Joanna's book, Joanna on Keith's, followed by questions and discussion from all seminar participants.

The group discussed a draft paper by Christopher Willoughby of Tulane University, entitled "Running Away from Drapetomania: Samuel Cartwright, Medicine, and Race in the Antebellum South." Sharla Fett of Occidental College and Michael Sappol of the National Library of Medicine provided commentary to start the discussion.

James Colgrove of Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health, Shobana Shankar of Stony Brook and David Barnes of UPenn discussed the Ebola epidemic in historical context.

Deanna Day of UPenn introduced her paper "'As Modern As Tomorrow': Toward a History of the Medicine Cabinet as Architectural Innovation and Ontological Category."

Julia Mansfield of Stanford University and PACHS introduced her paper, "Restoring Civility to Commerce: Samuel Mitchill's Response to Quarantine in the Napoleonic Age."

Margaret Marsh of Rutgers University introduced her paper "The Road to IVF: From 'Fatherless' Sea Urchins to Human 'Conception in a Watch Glass'"