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Every year Historical Collections hosts a public lecture series sponsored in part by the Section on the History of Medicine and Public Health. Events are free and open to the public, and lectures begin at 6:00 p.m., with refreshments available at 5:30 p.m. Advance registration for section events is requested but not required.
For further information about medical history programs at NYAM, please call Historical Collections at 212-822-7313 or email history@nyam.org
2012-2013 PUBLIC LECTURE SERIES
As part of our ongoing public lecture series in the history of medicine, this year the Historical Collections and the Section on the History of Medicine and Public health are presenting a wide variety of lectures, including a special four lecture miniseries, A World Not Quite Fatal: New Views on the History of Environmental Health.
The history of environmental health is largely a story of frustratingly mixed success. Consider scenes from not that long ago: city streets awash in unimaginable filth beneath skies dark with a choking brew of toxic fumes; rivers brought to the brink of sterility by run-off from farms, factories and mines; workers and children killed through the manufacture and use of toxic consumer products. Historians of environmental health have explored how in most developed nations such scenes of gross dereliction of stewardship gave way to cleaner air and water, regulations and market constraints that encourage responsibility and a healthier, longr-lived population. But they also show how, over the same years, focus shifted from acute, clear-cut dangers to concerns with chronic insult in these seemingly cleaner environments: low-level toxicants; conditions that give rise to asthma; or the synergistic impacts of the growing number of new chemicals in the built environment. Their concerns echo Rachel Carson's observation that we should not settle for "a world which is just not quite fatal."
This miniseries presents five scholars whose research spans the pst century to tell much of this history in its full complexity. Physician-historian Carla Keirns will share her research on the history of asthma; Jessica Martucci will explore pesticide contamination in breast milk; Gregg Mitman will discusst he interplay of science and business in the state in Firestone-sponsored research in Liberia; and public health historians David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz will discuss their new book on childhood lead poisoning and the ethics of research on children.
UPCOMING EVENTS IN THE HISTORY OF MEDICINE SERIES
Gregg Mitman's talk will examine how American military and industrial expansion overseas -- witnessed firsthand by doctors in the American occupation of the Philippines, on the coffee plantations of the United Fruit Company, in the trenches of the Great War and on the rubber plantations of Firestone in Liberia -- depended upon and helped bring into view an ecological understanding of disease in the service of capital that would, in turn, become the scientific foundation upon which later narratives of ecological imperialism relied.
David Rosner and Geralad Markowitz will discuss a study at the Johns Hopkins Kennedy Krieger Institute in the 1990s where researchers were accused of engaging in unethical, even racist, research, as they attempted to find an inexpensive and "practical" means to ameliorate lead poisoning. They use research about lead poisoning to explore the numerous dilemmas public health must face today as it tries to develop prevention strategies for emerging chronic illnesses linked to low levels of toxic exposure.
From roughly 1600 to roughly 1900, many women (and a few men) in the English-speaking world compiled personal recipe collections in bound notebooks. These manuscript cookbooks contain a wealth of information absent from most printed cookbooks. Stephen Schmidt will discuss what we can learn from studying these manuscript recipe books and touch on the complicated relationship between these documents and printed cookbooks. Examples of manuscript recipe books and related printed cookbooks from NYAM's rare book collection will be on display for attendees to see.
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