Category Archives: Announcements

Congratulations to AAHM Award Winners

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The American Association for the History of Medicine honored the following individuals at its award ceremony on May 5, 2017 on the campus of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN as part of the 90th annual meeting:

Osler Medal: Christopher Sterwald, Duke University Medical School, for “Frosted Intellectuals: How Leo Kanner Constructed the Autistic Family”; First honorable mention:  Sarah Tapp, Emory University School of Medicine, for “’Mothers, Mongols, and Mores’: Physician Advice to Parents of Newborns with Down Syndrome in the Mid 20th Century; and Second honorable mention:  Matthew Edwards, University of Texas Medical Branch School of Medicine, for “Freedom House Ambulance Service: Race and the Rise of Emergency Medical Services, 1967-1975”

Shryock Medal: Wangui Muigai  ‘All My Babies: Black Midwifery and Health Training Films in the 1950s’, Princeton University, Program in History of Science; First honorable mention: Vicki (Fama) Daniel ‘Medical Identification and the Emergence of a Forensic Paradigm at the 1949 Noronic Disaster’, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Program in the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology; and Second honorable mention: Elaine La Fay “‘The slandered torrid zone”: Medicine, Botany, and Imperial Visions of the American Tropics along the US Gulf Coast, 1820-1840’, University of Pennsylvania, History and Sociology of Science Department

J. Worth Estes Prize: Anna E. Winterbottom, “Of the China Root: A Case Study of the Early Modern Circulation of Materia Medica.” Social History of Medicine 28 (2015): 22-44

Pressman-Burroughs Wellcome: Rachel Elder, University of Pennsylvania

George Rosen Prize: Marcos Cueto and Steven Palmer, Medicine and Public Health in Latin America: A History (Cambridge University Press, 2014)

Welch Medal: Johanna Schoen for her book, Abortion After Roe:  Abortion After Legalization (University of North Carolina Press, 2015)

Genevieve Miller Lifetime Achievement Award: Daniel Fox

The Garrison Lecturer for 2018: Julie Fairman, Professor of Nursing, Professor, Department of History and Sociology of Science, Chair, Department of Biobehavioral Health Sciences, Endowed Chair, Nightingale Professor in Honor of Nursing Veterans, Co-Director, RWJF Future of Nursing Scholars Program at the University of Pennsylvania

Medical Historians in the News: Congressional briefings on Zika

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On September 12, 2016 AAHM Past President Margaret Humphreys (Josiah Trent Professor in the History of Medicine, Duke University) participated in congressional briefings on “Zika: Historic Parallels and Policy Responses,” sponsored by the National History Center of the American Historical Association. AAHM Council member Alan Kraut of American University introduced the session, and John McNeill of Georgetown University  was the co-presenter.  For more information and video of the presentation, visit: http://www.mehumphreys.com/dc-zika

AAHM Speakers’ Bureau

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Do you like to talk to the media about the history of medicine?

Do you like to help independent investigators discover research materials related to our discipline?

Do you like speaking to the general public about our specialized field of history?

If so, AAHM wants you! AAHM has established a speakers’ bureau to connect our members with those interested in our special expertise in the history of medicine. Please consider signing up today and sharing your expertise with us.  Sign up by completing this form. Only names, contact information, and publication lists will be shared with those asking for a history of medicine specialist. The AAHM speakers’ bureau list will not be posted online, distributed in blast emails, or circulated on listservs.

AAHM News: New Pedagogy Section in the Bulletin

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New Pedagogy Section in the Bulletin/Call for Syllabi

The Bulletin of the History of Medicine will be adding a three-part focus on pedagogy beginning with its 2016 volume. The spring issue will introduce a new journal section covering topics related to teaching in the history of medicine today. Along with the print section, the journal will debut a pedagogy blog, a more immediate and informal place for the history of medicine teaching community to share what has worked in their diverse classrooms. In addition, the Bulletin will be maintaining a syllabus archive, similar to the one previously hosted by the NLM. Interested contributors to the pedagogy section, blog, or syllabus archive should contact the Bulletin’s editors at bhm@jhmi.edu. Please send all syllabi as PDF files.

Teaching: Teaching the New Paradigm in Black Death Studies

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A blog has just been posted describing the experiences of AAHM member Monica Green in teaching a new course on the global history of plague and the most catastrophic pandemic in human history, the Black Death: http://arc-medieval.blogspot.com/2015/08/teaching-new-paradigm-in-black-death.html. Green taught the course as a semester-long experiment in how to take the new genetics paradigm of Yersinia pestis studies (the organism that causes plague) and create rich historical narratives that could explain the genesis, spread, and effects of the the main plague pandemics in the past two millennia. The blog has links to various resources used throughout the course, as well as to the full syllabus, which is freely available online.

Congratulations to AAHM Award Winners!

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The American Association for the History of Medicine honored the following individuals at its award ceremony and 90th anniversary celebration on May 2, 2015 at the Commons on the campus of Yale University in New Haven, CT:

Osler Medal: Julia Cockey Cromwell, (Johns Hopkins University),“Viral Knowledge: Autopsy and the 1918 Influenza Pandemic”
Honorable Mention: John Thomas Stroh, (University of Kansas School of Medicine, Class of 2014 and resident at the Children’s National Medical Center, Washington, DC) “The English Reformation and the Birth of London’s Royal Hospitals”

Shryock Medal: Marissa Mika, (University of Pennsylvania),“Surviving Experiments: Burkitt’s Lymphoma Research in Idi Amin’s Uganda”
Honorable Mention:Cara Kiernan Fallon, (Harvard University),“Husbands’ Hearts and Women’s Health: Gender and Heart Disease in Twentieth-Century America”

J. Worth Estes Prize: Hoi-eun Kim, “Cure for Empire: The ‘Conuer-Russia-Pill,’ Pharmaceutical Manufacturers, and the Making of Patriotic Japanese, 1904-45,” Medical History 57 (2013): 249-68

Pressman-Burroughs Wellcome: Deborah Blythe Doroshow, Yale University, for her project, “Emotionally Disturbed: The Care and Abandonment of America’s Troubled Children”

George Rosen Prize: Margaret Humphreys for her book, Marrow of Tragedy: The Health Crisis of the American Civil War (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013)

Welch Medal: Leslie J. Reagan for her book Dangerous Pregnancies: Mothers, Disabilities, and Abortion in Modern America (University of California Press, 2010)

Genevieve Miller Lifetime Achievement Award: Caroline Hannaway

The Garrison Lecturer for 2016: Susan E. Lederer, Robert Turell Professor of Medical History and Bioethics and Chair of the Department of Medical History and Bioethics, University of Wisconsin

Medical Historians in the News: Genetics and the Historiography of the Black Death

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Monica Green recently wrote an article for Perspectives on History: The Newsmagazine of the American Historical Association. It describes the circumstances of the “intrusion” of genetics into the historiography of the Black Death, and suggests to historians why it is high time for us to embrace this new connection with the historicist sciences. The article is available at: http://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/december-2014/genetics-as-a-historicist-discipline.

Women and Healthcare in Early Modern Europe

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Women and Healthcare in Early Modern Europe, a special issue of Renaissance Studies (Vol. 28, no. 4, September 2014; Guest editor: Sharon T. Strocchia), is now available online at:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/rest.2014.28.issue-4/issuetoc

This collection of essays by an international team of scholars brings fresh interpretive perspectives and impressive archival research to bear on the reappraisal of women’s medical activities in early modern Europe. Spanning England and the continent from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, the collection situates female practitioners not on the margins of medical practice but rather at the nexus of household medicine, emerging structures of public health, and the production of medical knowledge. The essays demonstrate how increased demand for healthcare services in the early modern period opened new opportunities for women’s participation in a variety of health-related activities, from pharmacy and ‘physick’ to the provision of care. Drawing on a wide range of sources—court records, letters, inventories, printed herbals, parish account books, physicians’ journals, proceedings of state health boards—the collection showcases how innovative public health initiatives capitalized on domestic medical skills and probes sites of knowledge production and exchange outside university and guild settings. Whether spotlighting local artisans and noblewomen who worked without formal compensation or ‘expert’ practitioners who purveyed their skills in the marketplace, the essays cast new light on women’s claims to medical expertise and their self-perception as healers. Taking up issues of importance for Renaissance scholars working across the disciplines, this collection re-orients our understanding of how healthcare was organized, practiced and gendered in early modern Europe.

Table of Contents:

  • Sharon T. Strocchia, Introduction: Women and Healthcare in Early Modern Europe
  • Debra Blumenthal, Domestic Medicine: Slaves, Servants, and Female Medical Expertise in Late Medieval Valencia
  • Alisha Rankin, Exotic Materials and Treasured Knowledge: The Valuable Legacy of Noblewomen’s Remedies in Early Modern Germany
  • Elaine Leong, ‘Herbals she peruseth’: Reading Medicine in Early Modern England
  • Richelle Munkhoff, Poor Women and Parish Public Health in Sixteenth-Century London
  • Jane Stevens Crawshaw, Families, Medical Secrets and Public Health in Early Modern Venice
  • Annemarie Kinzelbach, Women and Healthcare in Early Modern German Towns

The articles by Leong and Stevens Crawshaw are available open access, and plans are underway to make the editor’s Introduction open access in the near future.

For further information contact: Sharon Strocchia, Professor of History, Emory University, Atlanta, GA 30322
http://history.emory.edu/home/people/faculty/strocchia.html