Historical Collections hosts two series of public events: the public lecture series sponsored by the Section on the History of Medicine and Public Health, and public programs related to exhibitions in the Library's Main Reading Room. Unless noted, events are free and open to the public, and lectures begin at 6:00 PM, with refreshments available at 5:30 PM. CME credit is available for the lectures sponsored by the Section on the History of Medicine and Public Health; advance registration for section events is requested but not required.
Contact Miriam Mandelbaum, Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts, at 212.822.7310 for a current exhibit schedule. For further information about medical history programs at the Academy, please call Christian Warren, PhD, at 212.822.7314 or email history@nyam.org
ONLINE EXHIBIT
Click here to visit our online exhibit, A Telling of Wonders: Teratology in Western Medicine through 1800.
2007-2008 LECTURE SERIES
The Academy's Section on the History of Medicine and Public Health is pleased to present a full schedule of lectures for the 2007-2008 season. All lectures are free and open to the public. Unless otherwise noted, lectures begin at 6:00 p.m. with receptions at 5:30 p.m. This year's mini-series, Medicine and Wartime, will focus on the interplay of medicine and war. November's lecture will be the first lecture in this series, with three others to come in the spring.
Thursday, March 27, 2008, 6:00 PM with reception at 5:30 PM
The Iago Galdson Lecture
Diabetes: A Cultural History
Arleen M. Tuchman, Vanderbilt University
Today government sources inform us that Native Americans, African Americans, and Hispanics/Latinos run the greatest risk of developing Type 2 diabetes. A hundred years ago, however, Jews were thought to be the most likely population to develop this disease. This talk, which is part of a larger study of the interplay between culture, diet, and medicine in the making of today's diabetes epidemic, explores how and why this shift may have occurred.
Aleen Marcia Tuchman is Professor of History and Director of the Center for Medicine, Health, and Society at Vanderbilt University. Her research interests include the cultural history of health and disease, the rise of scientific medicine, and scientific and medical constructions of gender and sexuality. Tuchman is the author of Science, Medicine, and the State in Germany (1993) and Science Has No Sex: The Life of Marie Zakrzewska, M.D. (2006). Her article "Situating Gender: Marie E. Zakrzewska and the Place of Science in Women's Medical Education," Isis (2004) won the 2006 History of Science Society's Margaret W. Rossiter Prize for the best article on the history of women in science in the previous three years.
To register for this event, click here
Thursday, April 24, 2008, 6:00 PM with reception at 5:30 PM
Medicine in Wartime, Part III: Limb Lab: Getting Amputee Soldiers Back to Work in World War I America
Beth Linker, University of Pennsylvania
Looking across the Atlantic in the spring of 1917 at the ravages of the Great War, the U.S. Council of National Defense prepared for the worst, envisioning its own country re-"arming" hundreds of thousands of limbless American soldiers. The Council thus ordered the Army Surgeon General's Office to create a "Limb Laboratory" where orthopedic surgeons would standardize and construct affordable prosthetic arms and legs for returning disabled veterans. The choices that Limb Lab orthopedists made concerning which type of artificial limbs best suited America's maimed veterans stemmed not only from medical theory and practice, but also from deep-seated political, cultural and economic concerns shared by many other social progressives at the time. Many Americans saw the Civil War pension system as a horrible failure that created a generation of unemployed, emasculated old men who hobbled along city streets with peg legs and canes begging for change. The motivation to furnish amputee soldiers with replacement limbs thus satisfied the wider social vision of the rehabilitation project. Defining masculinity as the ability to earn wages, orthopedists believed that artificial limbs were necessary to make disabled soldiers whole again, bringing them into their rightful place as "industrial citizens." With this aim in mind, the Limb Lab emphasized the utility of artificial limbs, claiming that amputee men should have "tool-like" appendages rather than anatomical replicas in order to be competitive with able-bodied men on the job market.
Beth Linker is Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research and teaching interests include the social and cultural history of U.S. medicine in the 19th and 20th centuries, the history of the body, disability history, gender studies, and the history of bioethics and health care policy.
To register for this event, click here
Thursday, May , 8, 2008, 6:00 PM with reception at 5:30 PM
The Lilianna Sauter Lecture
Medicine in Wartime, Part IV: Place, Health and War: World War II Mustard Gas Experiments in Transnational Perspective
Susan L. Smith, University of Alberta
In the early 1940s, medical scientists funded by the U.S. Chemical Warfare Service conducted painful mustard gas experiments on at least 60,000 American soldiers. The Allies, including the governments of Canada, Britain, Australia, and the United States, conducted these experiments on their own soldiers in order to identify the impact of chemical weapons on the health of soldiers. One component of the research program involved examining how mustard gas affected men of various "races." At least eight separate experimental programs in the United States focused specifically on Japanese American and African American soldiers and one focused on testing Puerto Ricans on an island off Panama. The researchers were searching for evidence of race-based differences in the responses of the human body to mustard gas exposure. In the 1940s in a climate of contested beliefs over the existence and meanings of racial differences, medical researchers examined the bodies of these specific minority groups for evidence of how they differed from whites.
Susan L. Smith is a Professor of History and Classics at the University of Alberta specializing in the history of health and medicine. Her current reserach focuses on race, health, and war. She is the author of two books on race and health in the United States, Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired: Black Women's Health Activism in America, 1890-1950 and Japanese American Midwives: Culture, Community, and Health Politics, 1880-1950.
To register for this event, click here
For information about past lectures in this series, click here.
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