News

Congratulations to Emer Lucey on receiving the 2020 Richard H. Shryock Medal from the American Association for the History of Medicine (AAHM) for her essay titled “Beauty and Joy: The Aesthetics of Autism and Down Syndrome.” This work comes out her dissertation that explores the history of childhood developmental disability in the United States, analyzing the role of parent memoirs in the construction of autism and Down syndrome in the twentieth century using oral history, archival sources, and popular media.

Emer is a doctoral candidate in the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology Program in the UW History Department. Her interests include history of American medicine, the body, disability, and global health.

Professor Gregg Mitman has received an Advanced Investigator Grant from the European Research Council (ERC). ERC Advanced Investigator Grants provide up to 2.5 million euros over 5 years, and are intended for established researchers in all disciplines who wish to undertake highly ambitious and innovative projects that promise to break new ground in their respective fields. Mitman received his grant for the project “Bloodborne: Hot Zones, Disease Ecologies, and the Changing Landscape of Environment and Health in West Africa.” The project will examine the relationships between environmental change and the emergence of new threats to public health from multiple perspectives. To learn more, please visit this LMU Munich’s news post web page. Congrats to Professor Mitman on this prestigious award.

Mitman is a Professor of History of Science, Medical History, and Environmental Studies at UW-Madison, and is an affiliated researcher with the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at LMU Munich in Germany.

A recent talk presented by Robert Streiffer, Professor of Medical History & Bioethics and Philosophy, can now be viewed on-line at the University Place website of the Wisconsin Channel of PBS Wisconsin. His talk, titled “The Ethical Landscape of Human Genome Editing,” was presented originally on 13 November 2019 (event poster) and can now be viewed via the below URL (video duration: 1h 6m 17s):

https://www.pbs.org/video/the-ethical-landscape-of-human-genome-editing-odwve1/

Dr. Margaret “Gretchen” Schwarze, Associate Professor in the Department of Surgery, University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, has been awarded the Morgridge Professorship in Vascular Surgery. This professorship will provide Dr. Schwarze with flexible funding to pursue her research. (Find more information on Schwarze’s web page.) Congratulations Gretchen!

In addition to her vascular surgery practice, Dr. Schwarze is a nationally recognized medical ethicist, with expertise in patient-physician communication and decision-making. Her research focuses on improving communication so clinicians can help patients avoid unwanted treatment and make decisions that align with their values, preferences and goals. (School of Medicine and Public Health news announcement)

Pablo F. Gómez, Associate Professor in Medical History and Bioethics, has been awarded the 2019 William H. Welch Medal by the American Association for the History of Medicine (AAHM) for his book The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic (University of North Carolina Press, 2017). Prof. Gómez received the award in a ceremony on 27 April 2019 as part of the AAHM 92nd annual meeting held in Columbus, Ohio. Exciting news Pablo!

The William H. Welch Medal is awarded to one or more authors of a book “of outstanding scholarly merit in the field of medical history published during the five calendar years preceding the award.” This award honors William H. Welch, a major American figure in the history of medicine and public health, who was also one of the first faculty members at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. The Medal was first presented in 1950 to Henry Sigerist.

Staggering Losses: World War 1 and the Influenza Pandemic of 1918 – an exhibit now on display in the Ebling Library Historical Reading Room through November. (Exhibit Poster)
Click here for more details. Also, see March 6, 2019 Wednesday Nite @ The Lab video on the making of the exhibit and what was learned from the process.

Congratulations to associate professor Paul Kelleher for being elected a Hastings Center Fellow in recognition of his being an individual “of outstanding accomplishment whose work has informed scholarship and/or public understanding of complex ethical issues in health, health care, life sciences research, and the environment.” (Visit Hastings Center news for more details.)

Gretchen Schwarze, MD, Associate Professor, Surgery and Bioethics, has been awarded a 2-year, $100,000, Vilas Faculty Mid-Career Investigator Award from the University of Wisconsin. This prestigious campus-level award is given to mid-career faculty in recognition of excellence in research and teaching. Congratulations, Dr. Schwarze! (More details here.)

Professor Pablo F. Gómez’s book “The Experiential Caribbean” was awarded an Honorable Mention of the 2018 Bolton-Johnson Prize for the best book in Latin American History by the Conference in Latin American History at the recent AHA meeting in Chicago. Congratulations Pablo.

Associate Professor Pablo F. Gómez’s book, The Experiential Caribbean (UNC Press, 2017), won the 2018 Albert J. Raboteau Prize for the Best Book in Africana Religions. According to the 2018 prize committee, Pablo’s book “makes creative and generative contributions to our understandings of Africana religions. The study offers new approaches to questions about the nature of African diaspora religions that have long been formulated through frames of cultural retention or exchange. In this analytically transformative work, Gómez moves away from the classificatory schema of religion and western science to show how African diaspora inspirations (in all their multitudes and messy complicated formations) were crucial to the early modern period of history.” An award well earned, congratulations Pablo!

The Albert J. Raboteau Prize, which includes a $500 award, is awarded each year to an academic book that exemplifies the ethos and mission of the Journal of Africana Religions, an interdisciplinary journal that publishes scholarship on African and African diasporic religious traditions.

Nicole C. Nelson, Ph.D., who will join the Department of Medical History and Bioethics as an Assistant Professor on 21 May 2018, was awarded a prestigious Radcliffe Fellowship for the coming academic year. During her time at Harvard University she will explore the question The Truth Wears Off? The Reproducibility Crisis in Historical Perspective. Congrats Nicole! (For more information, please see the press release announcing the 2018–2019 Radcliffe Institute Fellows.)

Susan E. Lederer, Ph.D., Robert Turell Professor of History of Medicine and Bioethics and Chair of the Department of Medical History and Bioethics, was elected President of the American Association for the History of Medicine (AAHM) at their recent annual conference.

Founded in 1925, the AAHM is the leading American professional association of historians, physicians, nurses, archivists, curators, and librarians, who pursue the scholarly history of medicine including the history of public health, dentistry, pharmacy, nursing and allied arts, sciences, and professions. In 2016 Lederer was honored as the AAHM’s Fielding H. Garrison Lecturer, given to a scholar distinguished for contributions to medical history or other fields of science and learning.

Professor Lederer has been named as a William Evans Visiting Fellow at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. The William Evans fellowship was established in 1946 to finance a Visiting Professorship for a scholar of “academic distinction.” In September-October 2018 Professor Lederer will give a series of seminars, lectures, and public lectures at the University of Otago, the University of Auckland, and other colleges.

A new Health and the Humanities Certificate got underway in Fall 2017 with a five-course, 15-credit program designed to give students a fuller and more nuanced understanding of health that complements study in the biosciences. Co-directed by MHB faculty Nicole Nelson and Judith Houck, the certificate also lists MHB department chair Sue Lederer among its core faculty members. Please visit the certificate program’s web site for more information. Also, please see the recent L&S news article, titled Better health through the humanities, about this new certificate.

Congratulations to our own Micaela Sullivan-Fowler (Curator and History of Medicine Librarian at Ebling Library, as well as Ebling’s head of marketing and communications) for being named Distinguished Academic Librarian! This rank is given only to those who “demonstrate exceptional performance, are recognized beyond the work unit as outstanding, and have a reputation of excellence in the profession.” As we know, Micaela is exceptional in all these ways–not to mention the wisdom, empathy, warmth, and charm she expresses in all she does. We are lucky to have her as our colleague!

At the recent American Association for the History of Medicine annual meeting in Nashville, History of Science program graduate student Vicki Fama Daniel received a First Honorable Mention in the Richard H. Shryock Medal Essay Contest for her paper titled “Medical Identification and the Emergence of a Forensic Paradigm at the 1949 Noronic Disaster.”

Congratulations Vicki!

Assistant Professor Pablo F. Gómez’s forthcoming book, The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic, will come out in April from University of North Carolina Press. As described by the publisher, “Gómez examines the strategies that Caribbean people used to create authoritative, experientially based knowledge about the human body and the natural world during the long seventeenth century.” (please click ‘here’ for more details and how to order.) Congratulations Pablo.

At the MacLean Center’s 28th Annual Dorothy J. MacLean Fellows Conference on Ethics in Medicine on November 12, Medical History and Bioethics Professor Emeritus Norman Fost was awarded the 2016 MacLean Center Prize in Clinical Ethics and Health Outcomes.

“Dr. Norman Fost is a distinguished scholar, teacher, ethics program director, and clinical leader in the fields of bioethics and pediatrics,” said Mark Siegler, Lindy Bergman Distinguished Service Professor of Medicine and Surgery, and director of the MacLean Center. “We are honored to recognize Dr. Norman Fost with this year’s MacLean Center Prize.”

In addition to the $50,000 award that comes with the prize, Professor Fost gave the prize lecture titled “The Hermit, the Mongol, the Swimmer, Bucky and the Dwarfs: Cases That Changed Medicine and Me.” For more information, please see the University of Chicago Medicine press release.

Associate Professor Robert K. Streiffer had a pair of quotes in recent articles about health disclosure and privacy in connection with the two main 2016 presidential candidates. In a September 12, 2016, Charlotte Observer article titled “Why voters need to know about the health of would-be presidents,” Streiffer indicated that “Anything that has a significant or realistic chance of affecting a candidate’s ability to carry out the core functions of the presidency should be disclosed.” Another article titled “An expert’s guide: How to evaluate health disclosures from Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton” from Fox News on September 13, 2016, quotes Streiffer as it concerns the candidate’s medical privacy.

The Disclosing/Enclosing thematic cluster, a multi-year interdisciplinary investigation funded by the UW Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies into the paradoxes of information flow through the lens of enclosures and disclosures of knowledge, recently conducted a STS Summer School held 10-15 July 2016 at the UW Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery.

Attended by 21 students from six countries and led by four UW faculty — Linda Hogle, Nicole Nelson, Pilar Ossorio, and Kris Saha — along with four guest faculty — Stephen Hilgartner (Cornell University), Sheila Jasanoff (Harvard University), Sergio Sismondo (Queen’s University), and Stefan Timmermans (UCLA), this event succeeded in drawing attention to Science and Technology Studies at UW, both within and outside the university, fostering interdisciplinary learning, and providing opportunities for early-stage graduate students new to STS or those who had few STS resources at their home institutions, in addition to students who wanted to delve more deeply into STS concepts with an interdisciplinary group.

More information about this event in addition to this thematic cluster can be found at http://sts.wisc.edu/disclosingenclosing/. Please click ‘here‘ to see faculty group photo.

At the recent American Association for the History of Medicine annual meeting in Minneapolis, History of Science department graduate student Travis Weisse received an Honorable Mention in the Richard H. Shryock Medal Essay Contest for his paper titled “‘A Farewell to Chitterlings’: Alvenia Fulton, Natural Health Foods, and the Civil Rights Movement.”

Another course of good news comes in the form of an accepted book chapter tentatively titled “‘Soil Food’: Dr. Alvenia Fulton, Civil Rights, and the Rise of Black Vegetarianism,” accepted into the edited volume, The Vegetarian’s Dilemma: Re-Thinking Food Choice Throughout Time, ed. Adam Shprintzen, University of Arkansas Press, anticipated to come out in 2017.

Well done Travis!

History of Science graduate students Molly Laas and Travis Weisse recently gave talks at the Dietary Innovation and Disease in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries conference held on San Servolo Island, Venice. This international conference explored these key themes by historicising and contextualising the relationship between dietary change and health in the past.

In a session on Diet and Disease, Travis presented a talk titled “When gurus die: Atkins, Pritikin and the post-mortem duel for America’s heart health” while Molly’s talk on “The moral minimum: nutrition science and mass feeding in American prisons and asylums, 1840s-1850s” took place in a session on Nutritionism and Food Science.

Ben fatto Molly and Travis!

Professor Susan E. Lederer, Robert Turell Professor of History of Medicine and Bioethics, Professor of History of Science, Professor of History, University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, will give the Fielding H. Garrison Lecture at the 89th Annual Meeting of the American Association for the History of Medicine (AAHM) in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Her lecture is titled “Bombshells and Bioethics: Henry K. Beecher’s ‘Ethics and Clinical Research’ at 50” and will take place on Friday April 29th at 6pm.

Susan E. Lederer, Robert Turell Professor of Medical History and Bioethics and department chair, will spend Spring 2016 in North Carolina. She will be the Nannerl O. Keohane Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University. In addition to co-teaching a course with UNC professor Rebecca Walker on the history and ethics of human and animal experimentation for both Duke and UNC undergraduates, she will deliver the Nannerl O. Keohane Lecture on February 10, 2016, on the UNC Campus. Her topic will the “Human Bodies and the State in 20th-century America.”

Assistant Professor Pablo Gómez has been awarded a UW Institute for Research in the Humanities (IRH) residential fellowship for the coming Fall semester. Pablo will be working on his second book project during his time at the Institute.

The UW Center for the Humanities has awarded History of Science Assistant Professor Nicole Nelson a First Book Award, one of the three UW junior faculty in the humanities and interpretive social sciences to receive this support. The award will allow Nelson to assemble a “dream team” of readers for her first academic book-in-progress, titled Model Behavior: Animal Experiments and the Genetics of Psychiatric Disorders, which uses ethnographic methods to explore how scientists develop and deploy animal models to produce molecular knowledge about human alcoholism and anxiety. Winners get to invite leading scholars in their field to join an interdisciplinary group of reviewers from among the faculty at UW. The goal is to turn solid and promising manuscripts from UW humanities researchers into first-rate, field-shaping books. Congratulations Nicole!

Tales From Planet Earth returns to Madison November 6-8, 2015. Founded by Gregg Mitman, William Coleman Professor of History of Science, Professor of Medical History and Science & Technology Studies, and Environmental Studies, in 2007, the theme of this year’s festival is Belief.

Visit the Tales From Planet Earth festival web site for additional information, including the festival’s schedule of over two dozen films.

Emer Lucey, a third-year graduate student, recently won third place for best paper at the Health History in Action Conference held August 26-28 at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland.  Emer’s paper, “Ethereal Beauty: The Aestheticization of Autism,” was presented at the Postgraduate Career Development Workshop and Conference organized by the Society for the Social History of Medicine (SSHM), a conference showcasing the best postgraduate research in the history of health and medicine field.  Nicely done Emer!

Linda Hogle, Professor of Medical Social Sciences, is one of four leaders coordinating the “Disclosing/Enclosing: The Paradoxes of Information Flow in Knowledge Communities” thematic cluster funded by the Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies.

This cluster is designed to build connections across disciplines and forge new intellectual directions in STS research at UW Madison. The other three leaders are: Nicole Nelson, Department of the History of Science; Pilar Ossorio, Professor of Law and Bioethics; and Krishanu Saha, Assistant Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering.

Many events are planned for the 2015-16 year, please see the Disclosing/Enclosing web site for more information.

“In the Shadow of Ebola,” a 25-minute film by Professor Gregg Mitman, Vilas Research and William Coleman Professor of History of Science, Medical History, and Environmental Studies, aired June 22, 2015, on PBS Independent Lens and is now available online for viewing – go to the PBS Independent Lens web site to watch the film. For more information about the film, please visit the In the Shadow of Ebola website.

Doctoral candidate Vicki Fama Daniel has been awarded an H-31 Research Grant from the American Association for the History of Nursing. This pre-doctoral grant is designed to encourage and support graduate training and historical research to students at the Masters and Doctoral levels and provides $2,000 in funding.

Vicki will use this grant to support archival work on the role of nurses at various disaster morgues in the early twentieth century, specifically the Triangle fire morgue in New York City in 1911. Happy travels Vicki!

The National Center for Science Education (NCSE) has conferred its 2015 Friend of Darwin Award on Emeritus Professor Ronald L. Numbers, an award “presented annually to a select few whose efforts to support NCSE and advance its goal of defending the teaching of evolution and climate science have been truly outstanding.” In granting this award, NCSE’s executive director Ann Reid noted that “it would be hard to think of anyone who has contributed as much as Ron Numbers has to the understanding of creationism as a historical and social phenomenon, through his own work and the work that it has inspired.” Congratulations Ron!

The Conference on Latin American History (CLAH) has awarded Assistant Professor Pablo F. Gómez an Honorable Mention for the Vanderwood Prize for his 2013 Social History of Medicine article “The Circulation of Bodily Knowledge in the Seventeenth-century Black Spanish Caribbean.” The Vanderwood Prize is awarded annually for a distinguished article on any significant aspect of Latin American history by a member of the CLAH. Pablo had the pleasure of receiving his prize at the annual CLAH luncheon held in conjunction with the recent AHA meeting in New York City. Congratulations on this much-deserved honor!

Professor Richard C. Keller, Department of Medical History and Bioethics and History of Science, has been named as associate dean of the UW–Madison Division of International Studies. Starting January 2015, Keller will serve as the chief faculty advisor to the vice provost/dean on a range of international issues and will assist with general administration of the division. In addition, he will serve as liaison to the International Institute and play a lead role in promoting collaboration among key stakeholders. Further details about Rick’s new position are available at the International Studies web site. Congratulation Rick!

A trio of Medical History and Bioethics faculty – Linda Hogle, Pilar Ossorio, and Kris Saha – and a faculty colleague from the History of Science department – Nicole Nelson – form the team leaders of an exciting thematic cluster titled Disclosing/Enclosing. This cluster is being funded by the Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies and intends to build connections across disciplines and forge new intellectual directions in STS research at UW Madison. Specifically, the Disclosing/Enclosing cluster will investigate the many paradoxes of information flow through the lens of enclosures and disclosures of knowledge.

The cluster began this Fall 2014 semester with a full schedule of events, and will resume in the Spring 2015 term with an equally busy agenda, including taking part in a conference in April on the UW campus titled Secrecy and Transparency. Please visit the STS web site for more information about this cluster and its schedule of events.

Cluster leaders (left to right): Linda Hogle, Pilar Ossorio, Kris Saha, and Nicole Nelson:

Hearty congratulations to Assistant Professor Pablo F. Gómez, History of Science and Medical History and Bioethics, who has received a 2014-15 “First Book Award” from the UW Center for the Humanities. Pablo’s book, titled Wondrous Bodies: The Early Modern Caribbean and the Imagination of the World, builds on his extensive research into the history of medicine and corporeality in the early modern African and Iberian Atlantic worlds.

About this award, “The Center’s First Book Award is funded by a short-term humanities programming grant from the A.W. Mellon Foundation. The First Book program is open to all tenure-track, junior faculty in the humanities and interpretive social sciences with manuscripts that are near completion, but still in a position to benefit from review. The goal is to turn solid and promising manuscripts into first-rate books.” Please visit the UW Center for the Humanities website to learn more information about this well-deserved accolade.

Krishanu Saha has received a NSF CAREER Award to improve the genetic engineering of stem cells. Saha, an Assistant Professor in the Biomedical Engineering and Bioethics and the Medical History and Bioethics departments, will use his his $400,000 National Science Foundation CAREER Award over the next five years to focus on improving the process to directly evolve DNA sequences and proteins in human stem cells. Congrats Krishanu.

Further details available at http://www.engr.wisc.edu/news/archive/2014/may07.html.

Linda Hogle, Nicole Nelson, Pilar Ossorio, and Kris Saha will lead a new initiative entitled “Disclosure and Enclosure: the Paradoxes of Information Flow in Knowledge Communities” to advance interdisciplinary research, teaching, and outreach on the social study of science, technology, and medicine.

This new thematic cluster is funded by the Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies. More information can be found at http://sts.wisc.edu/disclosingenclosing/.

We welcome Aaron G. Wightman, MD, MA, Assistant Professor in the Medical History and Bioethics and the Department of Pediatrics. He is a pediatric nephrologist and has research interests in ethical issues around informed consent and related research ethics questions.

Claire Wendland, an Associate Professor of Anthropology with an appointment in Medical History and Bioethics, has been honored with Romnes Faculty Fellowship. These awards recognize exceptional faculty members who have earned tenure within the last six years.

Selected by a Graduate School committee, the eight 2014 award winners will each receive an unrestricted $50,000 award for research, which is supported by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.

Congratulations to Professor Emeritus Norm Fost, who retired in May. One of the early champions of the field of bioethics, he served in the Department of Medical History and Bioethics and the Department of Pediatrics and developed an enormous body of work in clinical research ethics over the years.

Brad Moore has received a two-year American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Public Postdoctoral Fellowship to work as the Research and Partnerships Manager at Lenox Hill Neighborhood House in New York City. Lenox Hill is a 120-year-old settlement house that provides an extensive array of effective and integrated human services—social, educational, legal, health, housing, mental health, nutritional and fitness.

Brad completed his Ph.D. titled “Healthy Comrades: Czechoslovak Hygiene Services and the Pursuit of a Communist Modernity, 1948-1958” in 2013 (Advisors: Richard Keller and David M. McDonald). Congrats Brad!

Pablo Gomez’s 2013 article, “The Circulation of Bodily Knowledge in the Seventeenth-century Black Spanish Caribbean,” published in Social History of Medicine has won the 2014 Andrés Ramos Mattei-Neville Hall Article Prize for articles published in 2012 and 2013. This prize is a biennial prize that recognizes the best article in the field of Caribbean history and is awarded by the Association of Caribbean Historians. Well done Pablo!

The Society for French Historical Studies has awarded Richard C. Keller the William Koren Prize for his article, “Place Matters: Mortality, Space, and Urban Form in the 2003 Paris Heat Wave Disaster,” published in French Historical Studies 36, no. 2 (Spring 2013): 299-330. The Koren prize is awarded annually for an outstanding journal article published on any era of French history by a North American scholar in an American, European, or Canadian journal. (Prize Citation)

Professor Susan Lederer will be giving the George Sarton Memorial Lecture in the History and Philosophy of Science at the upcoming 2014 AAAS annual meeting in Chicago on Saturday, 15 February 2014, at Noon. The title of her talk is “The Living and the Dead: Biomedical Science, American Society, and the Human Body.”

For more details, please visit the AAAS meetings web site at http://meetings.aaas.org/.

Bridget Collins has received a 2013 Capstone Teaching Award for her outstanding work as a University of Wisconsin teaching assistant. In recognition of the critical role TAs play in undergraduate instruction, this campus-wide award acknowledges teaching assistants who have performed as outstanding teachers throughout their UW-Madison tenure. Nominees are dissertators at the end of their graduate program and planning to defend their dissertations by the end of the school year. Bridget is a graduate student who is finishing her dissertation titled “From Cradle to Grave: Infectious Disease in the 20th-Century American Home.”

Warmest congratulations Bridget on this well-deserved honor!

Charo was presented the Adam Yarmolinsky Medal, awarded to an IOM member from a discipline outside the health and medical sciences. She has been a dedicated contributor to the work of the IOM and the Academies, having served on numerous committees and two boards. For more than a decade, her expertise as an attorney and ethicist in committee deliberations has been invaluable on a series of complex and controversial topics. Her knowledge of federal policy and federal agencies in all their breadth-from law to regulation—and her vigorous engagement in discussions have proved instrumental in questioning assumptions, provoking deeper inquiry and dialogue, and posing crucial questions to further the work of the committees on which she has served. As a subcommittee chair on the Committee on the Assessment of Health Outcomes Related to the Childhood Immunization Schedule, Charo illustrated superb skills in leading difficult discussions on issues of trust, patient autonomy, science literacy, and parental concerns, and in finding avenues for reaching consensus. Additionally, her contributions to The Future of Drug Safety: Promoting and Protecting the Health of the Public were extensive and included sections on the history of drug regulation by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and an assessment of the FDA before and after drug approval. The FDA has acted on a majority of the report’s recommendations and, as a result, has profoundly changed its process for handling drug safety issues. She has enriched committee deliberations and reports with her academic scholarship and detailed knowledge of some of the most critical issues in government health and science policy.

Charo is the Warren P. Knowles Professor of Law & Bioethics in the School of Law and School of Medicine and Public Health, University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Carl Bialik, ‘The Numbers Guy’ columnist for the Wall Street Journal, interviewed Professor Rick Keller as part of his 17 August 2013 blog posting titled “The Challenge of Counting Heat-Wave Deaths.” Click ‘here‘ to read Bialik’s blog which offers access to a longer 16 August print article titled “Death Tolls From Summer Heat Waves Are Hazy” (available to WSJ subscribers only).

During the recent American Association for the History of Medicine (AAHM) meeting held in Atlanta, GA, third-year graduate student Vicki Fama’s received an Honorable Mention in the Shryock Medal Essay Contest for her essay “Heroes and Villains: Displaying and Viewing Bodies at the United States Army Medical Museum, 1862-1888.” Named for Richard Harrison Shryock (1893-1972), a pioneer among historians interested in the history of medicine, this contest grants an annual award to a graduate student for an outstanding, unpublished essay on any topic in the history of medicine. Bravo Vicki.

On 15-16 February 2013, over 60 friends and colleagues of Ronald L. Numbers participated in a conference: Science without God: Religion, Naturalism and the Sciences: A Conference to Honour Ronald L. Numbers. Organized by Peter Harrison and Jon Roberts and hosted by Michael Ruse at Florida State University, the conference goal was to test the conventional wisdom about the relationship between science, naturalism, and religion. Seventeen pre-distributed papers ranging from Ancient Natural Philosophy to 19th and 20th century Biology were read with feedback provided by assigned commentators and the audience.

It was a splendid two-day affair that included a fish fry (including unlimited local oysters) on the Saturday at the Ruse’s home. A further aim of the gathering is to publish an edited collection of the talks under the guidance of Harrison and Roberts.

Now emeritus Professor of the History of Science and Medicine at the University of Wisconsin, Numbers has several book projects underway as well as guiding three graduate students in their doctoral studies.

The department welcomes Pablo F. Gómez as an Assistant Professor. In addition to a Ph.D. in History of Medicine and Latin American History from Vanderbilt University in 2010, Pablo completed his M.D. at CES University, Medellín, Colombia, in 1994. His interests include History of Medicine and Science in the Atlantic World, Latin America, and the African Diaspora; Early modern corporeal epistemologies; and Race and medicine. Welcome Pablo!

Third-year graduate student Vicki Fama received the best paper award for her paper titled “Heroes and Villains: Displaying and Viewing Bodies at the United States Army Medical Museum, 1862-1888” at the recent 2012 Washington University Graduate History Conference held October 26-27 in St. Louis. Organized by the university’s history department with “The History of the Body” as its theme, the conference featured a dozen papers over two days. Well done Vicki!

Pilar Ossorio, Associate Professor of Bioethics and Law, has been appointed as a member of the Secretary’s Advisory Committee on Human Research Protections (SACHRP). This Health and Human Services (HSS) Advisory Committee on Human Research Protections is a federal advisory committee tasked with protecting the rights of human participants in research.

As a member of SACHRP, Ossorio is charged with looking for improvements to the current system of human research protection programs, with particular emphasis on vulnerable participants. Reporting to HSS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, SACHRP plays an instrumental role in reviewing and revising the rules that govern human research.

Ossorio has appointments at both the UW Law School and the UW School of Medicine and Public Health/Department of Medical History and Bioethics, and in 2011, was named the inaugural Bioethics Scholar-in-Residence at the Morgridge Institute for Research.

R. Alta Charo has been appointed to the Advisory Council for the new National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) at the National Institutes of Health by Health & Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.

In her new role, Charo will advise on ethical and regulatory issues raised by translational research, such as privacy and civil rights concerns raised by research using human tissues residing in large biobanks or public health implications of deploying genetics and personalized medicine to target drug development toward narrower segments of the population. She will also participate in overseeing the peer review process for research proposals submitted to NCATS.

Charo is the Warren P. Knowles Professor of Law and Bioethics with a dual faculty appointment at the UW Law School and the UW Medical School. She currently teaches courses in biotechnology law, bioethics and torts, and is developing new offerings in public health law and FDA law.

Bradley Moore, a dissertator in the Joint PhD Program in History and the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology, has been awarded the 2011 Roy Porter Prize. Presented by the Society for the Social History of Medicine and named in honor of the late Professor Roy Porter, this prize is given for the best original unpublished student essay.

Moore’s essay, “For the People’s Health: Ideology, Medical Authority, and Hygienic Science in Communist Czechoslovakia, 1952-62,” looks at the effects of Soviet-inspired communism on approaches to public health and hygiene in the former Czechoslovakia, particularly the manner dialectical-materialism and “Pavlovian medicine” became tools of both continuity and change within established medical traditions. Congratulations Brad!

Read about Professor Rick Keller’s research on the 2003 heat wave that gripped Europe and Paris in particular. Two recent news articles tell the whole story: “Forget blizzards and hurricanes, heat waves are deadliest” (UW-Madison News) and “Seely on Science: Heat waves more deadly than hurricanes, floods” (Wisconsin State Journal).

Gregg A. Mitman, Vilas Research and William Coleman Professor of History of Science, Medical History and Environmental Studies and the Nelson Institute interim director, was awarded the William H. Welch Medal for his 2008 book Breathing Space: How Allergies Shape our Lives and Landscapes at the recent American Association for the History of Medicine (AAHM) annual meeting in Baltimore, Md.

Gregg’s book, published by Yale University Press, offers an intimate portrait of how allergic disease has shaped American culture, landscape and life. It draws on environmental, medical and cultural history, and the life stories of people, plants and insects, to trace how America’s changing environment from the late 1800s to the present day has led to the epidemic growth of allergic disease.

The Welch Medal is awarded to one or more authors of a book (excluding edited volumes) of outstanding scholarly merit in the field of medical history, published during the five calendar years preceding the award. Congratulations Gregg!

Gregg Mitman and Paul Erickson have won he the 2012 Ralph Gomory Prize for their article Latex and Blood: Science, Markets, and American Empire which appeared in Radical History Review (Spring 2010 issue). This prize, made possible by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, recognizes historical work on the effects of business enterprises on the economic conditions of the countries in which they operate. The award consists of a $5,000 cash prize, presented at the Business History Conference annual meeting.

Mitman is Interim Director of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies and William Coleman Professor of History of Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is also a professor in the Department of Medical History, the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, and the Robert F. and Jean E. Holtz Center for Science & Technology Studies. Erickson (UW History of Science PhD ’06) is an assistant professor of history and science in society at Wesleyan University.

Doctoral Candidate Bridget Collins has received a Vilas Travel Grant and a Holtz Center Travel Grant to support two weeks of research at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, on the Children’s Bureau records. Happy travels Bridget!

Congratulations to Anna Zeide who has received a University Exceptional Service Award. This award recognizes outstanding graduate student teaching assistants who, in addition to their regular teaching duties, perform exceptional service related to the education mission of their departments in the form of volunteerism, committee work, mentoring, and more.

Anna’s considerable service includes: work with the Nelson Institute’s Center for Culture, History, and Environment (CHE) as a Project Assistant; helping at Community GroundWorks, a local nonprofit that connects people to nature and food; acting as a liaison with the UW GreenHouse Environmental Learning Community; assisting in her own department on brownbag panels and other committees; and giving her time in work across campus — serving as a panelist for new graduate student orientation; panelist for the 40th Earth Day celebration; teaching a course on food for the PEOPLE (Pre-College Enrichment Opportunity Program for Learning Excellence) program, which is a pre-college pipeline for students of color and low-income students; organizing an oral history workshop; and contributing to a Slow Food UW handbook.

Well done Anna!

Katie Robinson, a M.D./Ph.D. candidate in the History of Science, has received a 2011-2012 UW-Madison Population Health Dissertation Grant provided by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholars Program. Robinson plans to use this grant toward her dissertation which explores the history of the Fat Acceptance Movement and its struggles with medical and scientific communities over the last forty years. Her project offers an interdisciplinary understanding of the current “obesity epidemic.” Rather than taking the dangers of obesity at face value, she examines the creation of scientific knowledge as a contested and politically fraught process. Congratulations Katie!

Professor Susan E. Lederer, Robert Turell Professor of Medical History and Bioethics, and Chair, has been elected a Fellow of the Hastings Center. Her work focuses on the history of medical research and the use (and abuse) of the body in medicine and medical research. She brings a deep background in the medical humanities and the gifts and sensibilities of a historian. She joins fellow department members R. Alta Charo, JD, and Norman Fost, MD, MPH, as Hastings Center fellows.

Founded in 1969, the Hastings Center is the world’s first research center devoted to bioethics. Its elected association of nearly 200 international fellows performs research in numerous fields influential in bioethics.

In the Winter of 2012, Ronald L. Numbers will be Visiting Professor at the University of Toronto in their Centre for the United States. He will teach an undergraduate/graduate course on “Science, Medicine, Religion in America” in the Department for the Study of Religion from January 31 – February 3, 2012 and February 28 – March 2, 2012.

Numbers is Hilldale Professor of History of Science and Medicine in the departments of Medical History and Bioethics and History of Science, Medicine, and Technology.

Professor Gregg Mitman has been named Vilas Professor, one of the highest honors for established UW faculty. Vilas Professorships, created “for the advancement of learning,” recognize proven research ability and unusual qualifications and promise. The individual must have contributed significantly to the research mission of the University and be widely recognized both nationally and internationally for the quality of research.

Gregg Mitman is interim director of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies and William Coleman Professor of History of Science and Professor of Medical History and Science & Technology Studies. He joined the faculty in 2001. Earlier this year, he was named the next president of the American Society for Environmental History. His latest book, Breathing Space: How Allergies Shape Our Lives and Landscapes, was supported, in part, by fellowships from the National Humanities Center, the John S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

Doctoral candidate Kathleen Robinson received a UW Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies travel grant in support of her planned research work at the Dodd Research Center in Storrs, CT, and the Schlesinger Library in Cambridge, MA, to examine archival materials in the Mayer Collection of Fat Liberation. Congrats Katie!

Congratulations to Walt Schalick, MD, PhD, who has accepted a clinical position with the Central Wisconsin Center for the Developmentally Disabled, effective June 20, 2011. The Center is a state residential and short-term treatment facility for individuals with developmental disabilities, located in Madison.  Dr. Schalick was an active member of the Disability Studies Cluster at the University, through which he galvanized opportunities for the interdisciplinary study of disability history, law and ethics. In addition to teaching the history of disability within the Department of Medical History and Bioethics, he was affiliated with the Waisman Center and the Department of Orthopedics and Rehabilitation, where he both provided clinical care of patients and engaged with ethicists, policy-makers and clinicians on a variety of topics related to developmental disabilities, particularly regarding children.

Walt’s dedication to treating young patients and his sensitivity in working with their families will be enormously beneficial to the CWC in his new clinical position.  We wish him well in this new direction in his career.

Wrestling With Nature: A Mini-Conference in Honor of David Lindberg took place on June 4, 2011, at the Pyle Center on the UW-Madison campus. Eight talks appeared on the day’s schedule – seven presented by PhD students guided by Lindberg – followed by five speakers who each described “The Lives of David Lindberg.” A dinner at the new Wisconsin Institute of Discovery concluded the program.

In further celebration of Lindberg’s contributions to the history of science, a book titled Wrestling with Nature: From Omens to Science has been published by the University of Chicago Press. Edited by Peter Harrison, Ronald L. Numbers, and Michael H. Shank, the book “offers a fresh perspective on the history of science and on what it meant, in other times and places, to wrestle with nature.”

Amrys Williams received a 2011 Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship in connection to her dissertation titled “Cultivating Modern America: 4-H Clubs and Rural Development in the Twentieth Century.” Congrats Amrys.

Congratulations to Gregg Mitman who has been elected President of the American Society for Environmental History for a two-year term starting in 2013. Mitman will be the third UW-Madison professor to lead the ASEH since the society’s founding in 1977.

Mitman is William Coleman Professor of History of Science and Professor of Medical History and Science & Technology Studies. Also, he is the interim director of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies.

For her many distinguished academic contributions, Professor Emerita Judith W. Leavitt was honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Association for the History of Medicine (AAHM) at their recent 2011 annual meeting in Philadelphia.

This award is presented “to a member of the Association who has retired from regular institutional affiliation or practice, with a distinguished record of support of the history of medicine over many years, and who has made continuing scholarly contributions of a distinguished nature.” Congratulations Judy!

Amrys Williams is the recipient of the 2011 Dean’s Fellowship in the History of Home Economics from the Cornell College of Human Ecology. This fellowship includes a $6,000 stipend to support a six-week summer residency to use the unique resources available from the College and the Cornell University Library System in pursuit of scholarly research in the history of home economics and its impact on American society.

Williams is pursuing a dissertation entitled “Cultivating Modern America: 4-H Clubs and Rural Development in the Twentieth Century” that explores these ideas in the context of the youth agricultural and domestic science clubs known as 4-H. Her advisor is Prof. Gregg Mitman.

Update: On November 14, 2011, Amrys presented a talk on the results of her Cornell research viewable at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rU4bIUaLZsc.

Recent graduate Shannon Withycombe has been named a New Faculty Fellow by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) and will join the History department at Duke University for the academic years 2011-2012 and 2012-2013. This fellowship program allows recent Ph.D.s in the humanities to take up two-year positions with an American university or college where their particular research and teaching expertise augment departmental offerings.

Shannon received her Ph.D. in 2010 with a dissertation titled Slipped Away: Pregnancy Loss in Nineteenth-Century America. We wish her well in this new position.

Jeffrey M. Jentzen (Ph.D. 2007) talks about his recently published dissertation (now book) on death investigation in America on the February 1, 2011, episode of PBS/Frontline titled “Post Mortem.”

Professor Richard C. Keller has been awarded a H. I. Romnes Faculty Fellowship from the UW-Madison Graduate School. This award is intended to recognize and support tenured faculty and is based on the quality, significance, and productivity of a nominee’s research as well as the quality and programmatic value of their teaching and service. Congrats Rick!

In association with this year’s “Go Big Read” book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot, the department Colloquium Series will examine diverse perspectives on the nature and implications of appropriations in science. All talks are open to the public (location). The scheduled colloquia are:

February 8 – Mitch Aso (University of Wisconsin-Madison), “The ‘Vietnamization’ of Rubber: Appropriating French Colonial Science in Postcolonial Vietnam”

March 22 – Pilar Ossorio (University of Wisconsin-Madison), “Appropriating Research Data and Medical Information”

March 29 – Bruno Strasser (Yale University), “Collecting Experiments: The New Production of Biomedical Knowledge”

April 19 – Nicholas Dew (McGill University), “Weight in the Tropics: French Expeditions and the Globalization of Science, c. 1670-c. 1740”

Professor Schalick has received a grant from the Social Security Administration to explore the role of disability in aspects of financial literacy via the UW FLAD Project.

On October 1 and 2, the long and distinguished career of Judith Leavitt in the University of Wisconsin Department of Medical History and Bioethics was celebrated. Event program here.

In association with this year’s “Go Big Read” book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot, the department Colloquium Series will examine diverse perspectives on the nature and implications of appropriations in science. All talks are open to the public (location). The scheduled colloquia are:

September 28 – Ruth Richardson (Hong Kong University, University of Cambridge), “Human Bodies & Their Parts: Appropriations & Donations from Bodysnatching to Transplants”

October 5 – Dominique Tobell (University of Minnesota), “Circulating Knowledge, Appropriating Capital: Building the Pharma-Medical Complex in Post-War America”

November 2 – Helen Tilley (University of Wisconsin-Madison), “Appropriation, Exchange, or Entanglements? Studying the History of African Colonialism, Decolonization, and the Codification of ‘Traditional Medicine’”

November 30 – Hannah Landecker (University of California, Los Angeles), “An Image is Worth a Thousand Dollars: Pictures of Human Matter in the Visual Culture Industry”

History of Science doctoral candidate Bridget Collins has received a 2010-2011 Charles Donald O’Malley Short-Term Research Fellowship from the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and History and Special Collections for the Sciences in the UCLA Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library. This will support her ongoing dissertation research on the “Transformation of Domestic Medicine in America, 1900-1960.”

The Committee on Distinguished Teaching Awards has honored Professor Judith Leavitt for teaching excellence with a Chancellor’s Award. She will receive this award along with nine of her faculty colleagues at a ceremony on April 21 at 3:30 p.m. at the Pyle Center.

Having taught at UW-Madison since 1975, Leavitt has developed numerous courses over the years, on subjects that instructed students about the experience of patients, the experience of illness and the experience of women, writes nominator Susan Lederer, chair of the Department of Medical History and Bioethics.

Leavitt is Rupple-Bascom and Ruth Bleier Professor in the Medical History & Bioethics, History of Science, and Gender and Women’s Studies departments.

Dayle B. DeLancey has been named as one of the first two Centennial Scholars at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. The Centennial Scholars Program was created to develop faculty whose diversity enhances the quality of education and research at the school, according to Patricia Kokotailo, MD, MPH, associate dean for faculty development and faculty affairs at the School of Medicine and Public Health. “These two individuals, who are clearly committed to careers in academic medicine, will serve as visible and available role models for students and trainees, especially those from under-represented minority backgrounds,” says Kokotailo.

Ronald Numbers has completed his four-year term (2005-2009) as president of the Division of History of Science and Technology of the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science. He passes the baton to LIU Dun of China.

Tales from Planet Earth is a three-day festival showcasing environmental films from around the world. This journey across the globe will explore how stories told through film shape our understanding of nature and inspire action on behalf of environmental justice and the diversity of life. All festival events are free and open to the public on a first-come, first-served basis. Donations help support the festival and will be accepted at the door.

The department welcomes Dayle B. DeLancey to the department. Her interests and research include 19th- and 20th-c. history and ethics of African-American health experiences, U.S. public health (esp. vaccination and disaster relief campaigns), medical technologies (esp. vaccines and pharmaceuticals), the public understanding of medicine (esp. fears, myths, and rumors), and race and gender in medicine. Explorations of discourse and print culture inform much of her work. Welcome Dayle.

History/History of Science doctoral candidate Brad Moore has received a Fulbright-IIE grant in support of a dissertation on public health in the former Czechoslovakia (tentatively titled “Healthy Comrades: The Stalinization of Public Health in East Germany and Czechoslovakia, 1948-1956”). He plans to begin his year of overseas research in the summer of 2009.

Walt Schalick and Monica Green (Arizona State University) have received a grant from the NEH for “Disease in the Middle Ages,” a seminar planned for Summer 2009 at the Wellcome Centre in London.

Walt Schalick and Monica Green (ASU) have received a grant from the NEH for “Disease and Disability in the Middle Ages,” a summer seminar in London based at the Wellcome.

Ronald L. Numbers, Hilldale Professor of the History of Science, received the Sarton Medal at the annual meeting of the History of Science Society in Pittsburg. It is the highest honor conferred by the society and given in recognition of a lifetime of exceptional scholarly achievement by a distinguished scholar, selected from the international community.

Walt Schalick and Julie Anderson (Manchester) have inaugurated a monograph series through Manchester University Press: Disability History: A Series. Submissions are welcome.

Susan E. Lederer, our new department chair, comes to us from Yale University. She may have been the first medical history graduate student here at the UW-Madison to have taken a field in bioethics (with Dan Wikler who also served on her dissertation committee). We are very happy to have Sue back and look forward to her interest in and contributions to medical curriculum reform and the power of a radical union of medicine and public health.

Susan E. Lederer, Flesh and Blood: Organ Transplantation and Blood Transfusion in Twentieth-Century America (Oxford University Press, 2008)

Tales from Planet Earth is a three-day festival showcasing environmental films from around the world. This journey across the globe will explore how stories told through film shape our understanding of nature and inspire action on behalf of environmental justice and the diversity of life. All festival events are free and open to the public on a first-come, first-served basis. Donations help support the festival and will be accepted at the door.

Gregg Mitman, a UW-Madison historian of science and medicine, was interviewed in a Wisconsin State Journal article September 2, 2007, where he discussed his new book “Breathing Space: How Allergies Shape our Lives and Landscapes” (Yale University Press).

Also, Mitman’s book was reviewed by the Seattle Times on June 5, 2007.

We are very pleased to welcome Walton O. Schalick to our department. Walt is joining the UW-Madison faculty starting Fall 2007 as an assistant professor of medical history, orthopedics & rehabilitation, history of science, and pediatrics.

Richard C. Keller, Colonial Madness: Psychiatry in French North Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

Ronald L. Numbers, Science and Christianity in Pulpit and Pew (New York: Oxford University Press, August 2007).

Warwick Anderson is leaving UW-Madison for University of Sydney, where he will be University Research Professor in the History Department and the Centre on Values, Ethics, and the Law in Medicine. We will miss Warwick’s creative intellect.

Warwick Anderson has won a 2007 Guggenheim Fellowship for his project, “The Science of Race Mixing in the Twentieth Century,” which looks at the transnational network of research on race mixing, or miscegenation.

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