Public Lecture Series

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 strongly encouraged 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

The 2012-2013 lecture series is underway. This year, our miniseries will feature four lectures that focus on environmental health.

SPECIAL 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, longer-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 not quite fatal."

This miniseries presents five scholars whose research spans the past century to tell much of this history in its full complexity. Physician and historian Carla Keirns will share her research on the history of asthma; Jessica Martucci will explore pesticide contamination in breast milk; Gregg Mitman will discuss the 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.

Thursday, November 29, 2012
Michael Willrich, Ph.D., Brandeis University
Pox: An American History

At the turn of the last century, a powerful smallpox epidemic swept the United States from coast to coast. At the dawn of the activist Progressive era and during a moment of great optimism about modern medicine, the government responded to the deadly epidemic by calling for universal compulsory vaccination. While public health measures eventually contained the disease, they also sparked a wave of popular resistance among Americans who perceived them as a threat to their health and to their rights. At the time, anti-vaccinationists were often dismissed as misguided cranks, but Willrich argues that they belonged to a wider legacy of American dissent that attended the rise of an increasingly powerful government. As Willrich suggests, many of the questions first raised by the Progressive-era anti-vaccination movement are still with us: How far should the government go to protect us from peril? What happens when the interests of public health collide with religious beliefs and personal conscience? Willrich delivers a riveting tale about the clash of modern medicine, civil liberties and government power at the turn of the last century that resonates powerfully today.

Michael Willrich is the author of City of Courts, which won the John H. Dunning Prize awarded by the American Historical Association for the best book on any aspect of U.S. history and the William Nelson Cromwell Prize, awarded by the American Society for Legal History. Currently an associate professor of history at Brandeis University, he worked for several years as a journalist in Washington, D.C., writing for The Washington Monthly, City Paper, The New Republic, and other magazines.

To register for this event, click here

NEW DATE
Wednesday, December 12, 2012
The John K. Lattimer Lecture
Carla Keirns, M.D., Ph.D., Stony Brook University School of Medicine
Putting Asthma on the Map: Weather, Pollen, Pollution and the Geography of Risk

Manipulation of the patient's environment has been central to prevention and treatment for asthma since antiquity. In the past two centuries, physicians and patients have sought to move from testimonials and complaints to quantitative measures of risk. In the late 1890s, physicians in "climactic" medical practices sought to use measurements of humidity, sunlight and rainfall to predict places and seasons that would be safe for asthmatics. In the same period, indoor and outdoor risks such as pollen and dust began to mark regions and spaces as risky or dangerous, and led to efforts to escape attacks through travel or fortify the home environment against the patient's triggers. Recent efforts to predict or create safe places have turned again to the outdoors, both through national regulation of air pollution (politically fraught from the beginning) and the efforts of minority communities and their academic and activist partners to document the disproportionate environmental risks faced by their members.

Carla C. Keirns, M.D., Ph.D., is on the faculty and clinical staff at Stony Brook University School of Medicine, where she serves as a core faculty member in the Center for Medical Humanities. Dr. Keirns's scholarship combines methods from medicine, ethics, sociology, history and health services research to explore the impact of illness on individuals, their families, communities and society, both in the present and across lifetimes and generations. She is the author of Measured Breath: A Short History of Asthma, which the Johns Hopkins University Press is publishing in 2013.

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Thursday, January 17, 2013
Jessica Martucci, Ph.D., Mississippi State University
Our Bodies, Our Nature: Breastfeeding and Maternal Ideology in mid-20th Century America

In 1972, the international breastfeeding support organization, La Leche League, published a pamphlet titled "DDT and Mother's Milk," which addressed the problem of tainted breat milk. "Many mothers have wondered whether they should discontinue nursing their babies," they wrote, adding "The answer is 'No.'" As much as the League wished the issue of DDT and other toxins in milk would just go away, environmental contaminants have been a persistent issue in scientific and popular discussions of breastfeeding. As early as 1951, scientists began recording traces of DDT stored in the fat of humans, while early animal studies suggested that dangerous chemicals might be concentrated in mother's milk. Through the 1960s, research highlighting the concentrations of DDT in human bodies continued to appear in leading medical journals. In this talk, Professor Martucci explores how the overt discussion about environmental contamination, toxic bodies and breastfeeding was just one part of a much deeper ideological debate over the "nature" of motherhood and infant feeding. Drawing upon the papers of La Leche League, interviews and records of early environmental activism in groups such as the Society for a SANE Nuclear Policy and Women Strike for Peace, this talk explores the links between the resurgence of breastfeeding in America and the emergence of an environmental consciousness.

Jessica Martucci is an Assistant Professor in the History Department and Gender Studies Program and is associate member of the Center for the History of Agriculture, Science, and the Environment of the South at Mississippi State University. She received her B.A. in Biology and Environmental Studies at Oberlin College, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. She is currently finishing her first book project, Back to the Breast: Natural Motherhood and Breastfeeding in the 20th Century.

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Thursday, February 7, 2013
Sowande' Mustakeem, Ph.D., Washington University in St. Louis
Ghosts of the Atlantic: Trauma, Disease and Murder in the Seafaring World of Slavery

On 15 June 1791, sailor John Cranston gave testimony before a federal grand jury to assist in deciding the legal fate of Rhode Island slave trader James D'Wolf, who was accused of throwing an enslaved African female overboard while travelling from West Africa to the Caribbean aboard the slave ship Polly. Rather telling is the way in which the Middle Passage comes to the foreground through the story of a notorious American slave trader responsible for and intricately connected to the murder of a bondwoman afflicted with smallpox. The trans-Atlantic Slave Trade was plagued by the constant transmission of bacteria and disease. By playing out within the central social space of the Atlantic Ocean, however, this case offers a useful window into maritime slavery and, more importantly, into how entangled factors of race, class, masculinity and power became manifested through fear of a woman's diseased body, believed to pose both a medical burden and a financial threat against future slave sales once the ship had landed.

Sowande' Mustakeem received her Ph.D. in Comparative Black History in May 2008 from Michigan State University. She then accepted a two-year Andrew Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellowship in History along with a jointly-appointed tenure track position in History and African & African American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, where she is currently on the faculty. Her research and teaching interests focus on comparative slavery, gender, violence, the social history of medicine and studies of the Atlantic/African Diaspora. She is currently working on a book manuscript which conducts a social history of the MIddle Passage by examining critical factors of gender, health and power aboard British and American slave vessels during the legal era of the 18th century Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. Mustakeem has received several national fellowships and has published a number of book chapters and scholarly articles, including her most recent publication, "'She Must Go Overboard & Shall Go Overboard': Diseased Bodies and the Spectacle of Murder at Sea," which centers on the experience and subsequent mistreatment of a black woman suffering from smallpox aboard an 18th century American slave ship.

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Monday, March 4, 2013
Gregg Mitman, Ph.D., University of Wisconsin--Madison
Ecological Imperialism Revisited: Entanglements of Disease, Commerce and Knowledge in a Global World

This talk examines how American military and industrial expansion overseas -- witnessed firsthand by doctors in the American occupation of the Philippines, on the coffee plantatins 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. The appearance of disease as an agent of empire in the writing of global environmental histories is deeply entangled with ecological and evolutionary understandings of disease that emerged in the wake of the First World War. Hans Zinsser, who harnessed the tools of ecology and evolution to tell the biography of typhus in his popular 1935 book Rats, Lice, and History, along with his colleagues Richard Strong and George Shattuck, had, in their travels across the globe, become increasingly preoccupied with the movements of diseases like typhus, syphilis and yellow fever and their role in human history. This same preoccupation culminated, forty years ago, in Alfred Crosby's The Columbian Exchange, and a few years later in Plagues and Peoples by William McNeill, two grand historical narratives on a global scale driven by the movement of plants, people and parasites across space and time.

Gregg Mitman, Ph.D., is Vilas Research and William Coleman Professor of History of Science, Medical History and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin -- Madison. His most recent book, Breathing Space: How Allergies Shape our Lives and Landscapes (Yale University Press, 2007), was awarded the 2012 William H. Welch Medal from the American Association for the History of Medicine.

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NEW DATE
Wednesday, April 16, 2013
The Lilianna Sauter Lecture
David Rosner, Ph.D., Columbia University and Gerald Markowitz, Ph.D., John Jay College of Criminal Justice and CUNY Graduate Center
Lead Wars: The Politics of Science and the Fate of America's Children

This talk explores the controversy over research at the Kennedy Krieger Institute at Johns Hopkins University, where researchers were accused of engaging in unethical, even racist, research. During the 1990s, researchers at the Kennedy Krieger Institute had studied 108 African American children aged six months to six years to find an inexpensive and "practical" means to ameliorate lead poisoning. Historians Rosner and Markowitz examine the case in light of contemporary public health ideology, which prioritizes harm reduction over the historical goals of prevention. They argue that the questions posed by the KKI case, as well as advances in environmental science documenting the long term effects of low-level toxins, will hopefully encourage a braoder discussion about the relationship of science and society, science and industry, research and patients' rights, and what might be called the conundrum of public health. Their research uses lead poisoning research 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.

Gerald Markowitz is Distinguished Professor of History at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. David Rosner is Ronald H. Lauterstein Professor of Sociomedical Sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University. They are co-authors of Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution (University of California Press, 2002); Deadly Dust: Silicosis and the Politics of Disease in Twentieth Century America (Princeton University Press, 1991), and Dying for Work: Workers' Safety and Health in Twentieth Century America (Indiana University Press, 1987).

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Thursday, May 23, 2013
The Annual Friends of the Rare Book Room Lecture
Stephen Schmidt
The Best Cake in the World: What Hand-Written Recipe Books Tell Us that Printed Cookbooks Don't
Special reception and a chance to talk more with the speaker for Friends of the Rare Book Room immediately following the lecture.

From roughly 1600 to 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: where and from whom the recipes were collected; nonstandard but possibly common ways of substituting expensive or rare ingredients or circumventing tricky or time-consuming techniques; the type of cooking vessel or the size, shape and number of baking pans used in the preparation of recipes; the management of the fire or oven; the contexts in which dishes were served and the ways in which they were presented at table. Sometimes manuscript cookbooks can also tell us which dishes were truly popular and regularly eaten in a period, although in the past, as today, many more recipes were collected than were actually ever made. This talk will discuss the pleasure and profit to be gained from studying manuscript cookbooks and will also touch on the complicated relationship between these documents and printed cookbooks. Some of the recipe books and printed cookbooks from NYAM's rare book collection will be discussed and will be on exhibit so that attendees will have a chance to see them.

Stephen Schmidt is the principal researcher and writer for The Manuscript Cookbooks Survey, an online survey of pre-1865 English-language manuscript cookbooks held in U.S. libraries and other institutions, and is also a personal chef and cooking teacher in New York City, where he lives. He is the author of Master Recipes, a 940-page general purpose cookbook, was an editor of and a principal contributor to the 1997 and 2006 editions of Joy of Cooking, has contributed to The Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink and Dictionnaire Universel du Pain, and has written for Cook's Illustrated magazine and many other publications. He is currently working on Lemon Pudding, Watermelon Cake, and Miracle Pie, a history of American home dessert with recipes.

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For information about past lectures sponsored by the Section on the History of Medicine and Public Health, click here.