History of Medicine Lectures

The Civil War's profound impact on medical practice in America had much less to do with technological breakthroughs in therapies or surgical techniques than with the lessons of clinical and organizational experience in treating millions of sick and wounded.

The first permanent Board of Health in the United States was created in response to a cholera outbreak in New York City in 1866.  By the mid-twentieth century, thanks to landmark achievements in vaccinations, medical data collection and community health, the NYC Department of Health had become the nation's gold standard for public health.

Efforts to eliminate drunk driving have been around as long as automobiles, but every movement to keep drunks from driving engages two vocal factions: those who argue vehemently against drunk driving and those who believe the problem is exaggerated and overregulated.  Even as people continue to be killed, many Americans remain unwilling to take stronger steps for a variety of reasons.

Dr. Neal Flomenbaum will talk about emergency medicine in late nineteenth-century lower Manhattan and events that occurred at the time that The New York Hospital moved from its original location near City Hall to its second site between West 15th and West 16th Streets.

From its beginnings in seventeeth-century New Amsterdam to the latest visions of twenty-first century technology, hospital architecture has done more than care for New Yorkers' physical health.  It has documented our historical and cultural life as well. This talk will examine the design and construction of hospitals in New York City from the 1600s through today, with a particular eye toward understanding them as remarkable records of the evolving technology and philosophy of health care, and of New York's changing architectural and historical scene.

In this talk, Leslie Reagan tells the largely forgotten story of the German measles epidemic of the early 1960s and how it created national anxiety about dying, disabled and "dangerous" babies. 

The seventeenth century witnessed a growing emphasis on vivisection compared to previous times. Although ethical and philosophical debates about the suffering of animals can be documented at the time, this talk focuses on the actual practices of vivisection, especially the techniques employed and its purposes.

Anne-Emanuelle Birn, ScD will trace the history of cooptation in the context of international health, covering the fates of such progressive ideas as decentralization, gender empowerment, and community participation, and the mixed prospects of "mainstreaming" these approaches.

Jeffrey Jentzen, MD, PhD will deliver the 2010 John K. Lattimer Lecture on the inconsistencies and inadequacties of the American system of death investigation, focusing on the assassination of President Kennedy, the killing of Bobby Kennedy, and Chappaquiddick.

Speaker Vinh-Kim Nguyen draws on his experiences as a physician and anthropologist in Burkina Faso and Cote-d'Ivoire in the years immediately following 1994, when effective antiretroviral treatments for HIV were discovered. He argues that when antiretrovirals were scarce inAfrica, triage decisions to determine who would receive lifesaving treatment altered social relations in West Africa.

A mythology has long reigned among many practitioners that knowledge about an occupational and environmental illness like lead poisoning, once established in one nation, authomatically spreads elsewhere. More recently, an alternative proposition has consolidated among social scientists, that knowledge such as that about lead poisoning has to always be rediscovered in a particular nation for it to spread. By looking at some early evidence from an ongoing comparative study of the development both of hazards and of knowledge about lead poisoning in the United States versus Mexico, Sellers will seek a middle ground between these two approaches to knowledge dissemination in occupational and environmental health.