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Jacqueline Antonovich on the Medical Politics of White Supremacy
The Berkshire Conference of Women Historians awards prizes each year to female historians or historians who identify as a woman for both books and articles. The 2023 article in the fields of the history of women, gender, and/or sexuality Honorable Mention was...
A medical doctor bag, stethoscope, and white doctor's coat
Just Lucky
By Paul A. Lombardo I began my book Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court and Buck v. Bell, with an account of my introduction to the Buck case in 1980, when I saw a newspaper story about a lawsuit brought by someone who had been...
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Getting Under Our Skin: The Cultural and Social History of Vermin
By Lisa T. Sarasohn Let’s be perfectly clear: I despise bugs, even the supposedly socially useful ones, like bees or spiders. And I particularly don’t like the nefarious ones that I feature in my book, Getting Under Our Skin: The Cultural and Social History of...
DSM: A History of Psychiatry’s Bible
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association has been called “the most important book of the twentieth century.” While this evaluation is debatable, the history of the DSM is certainly one of the most interesting stories in...
The Making of "The Making of a Tropical Disease" – The Sequel
I was approached by my editor at the Johns Hopkins University Press about preparing a revised second edition of my book The Making of a Tropical Disease: A Short History of Malaria. The book was the first volume in the Johns Hopkins Biographies of Disease...
The Ethics of Being Collected
When I was writing The Collectors of Lost Souls (2008), the picaresque yet tragic story of investigations of the lethal neurological disorder called kuru, the ethics of this scientific enterprise were much on my mind. As the narrative began to cohere and...
The Story Behind “Fat in the Fifties”
There is a story that fatness, widespread at least among modern historians, became a morally and discredited condition pretty recently – perhaps in the 1980s, when female models began to grow thinner and male models more muscular. Before that was the era of...