20th Century

Open Books – What’s Being Read in History of Med?

As 2009 dawned, Cultures of Health asked a number of historically-minded scholars of medicine and health what books they had sitting on their night table, stashed in their backpack for long commutes, piled high on their desk, or in hand and blessedly open. If the results don’t quite embody what the Germans might call an Allgemeinhistorischmedizinforschungszeitgeist (all-encompassing medical history research zeitgeist ??), they certainly make a great catalogue of notable texts flagged by writers whose work is high on our reading list. Warm thanks to everyone here for contributing their time and specialist knowledge (and even a trade secret or two).

CLAUDIA AGOSTONI
A few books I’m reading are Alain Corbin, The Lure of the Sea (1994), about the discovery of the seaside between 1750 and 1840, Carlos Zolla and Xavier Lozoya, eds., La medicina invisible (1983), an introduction to ‘traditional medicine’ in Mexico, and Terra Ziporyn, Disease in the Popular American Press (1994), on diphtheria, typhoid fever and syphilis in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

ANN ZULAWSKI
I would like to mention a couple of things. First is A Sojourn in Tropical Medicine: Francis W. O’Connor’s Diary of a Porto Rican Trip, 1927. Edited by Raul Mayo Santana, Annette B. Ramírez de Arellano and José Gabriel Rigau Pérez (2008). The book includes the diary plus really good essays by Rigau Pérez, Ramírez de Arellano, Rodriguez Julía, Silvia de Rabionet on different subjects related to O’Connor and Puerto Rican social life and public health. The second one I haven’t read yet but it looks promising and I include it because of my new plunge into research on Puerto Rico: Nieve de los Ángeles Vázquez Lazo, Meretrices: La prostitución en Puerto Rico de 1876 a 1917 (2008).

WARWICK ANDERSON
I’m currently dipping into Sandra Bamford’s Biology Unmoored: Melanesian Reflections on Life and Biotechnology (2007) and Sarah Franklin’s Dolly Mixtures: The Remaking of Genealogy (2007). Both books reorient biotechnology toward the colonial and postcolonial Pacific, tracing its previously hidden routes across the globe. I’ve come to realize that my Collectors of Lost Souls is really an examination of the colonial Pacific origins of neuroscience! I think a new genre in science studies might be emerging….

DAVID WRIGHT
I just finished a review of James Opp, The Lord for the Body (2005), on faith healing in Canada in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

DIEGO ARMUS
For your survey, here are two titles I’m reading: Jonny Steinberg, Sizwe’s Test: A Young Man’s Journey Through Africa’s AIDS Epidemic (2008), and Richard Evans, Death in Hamburg: Society and Politics in the Cholera Years, 1830-1910 (1987).

MICHAEL WORBOYS
My recent and current HM reading is: The collectors of lost souls: turning Kuru scientists into whitemen, by Warwick Anderson (2008); Prescribing by numbers: drugs and the definition of disease, by Jeremy A. Greene (2007); Biomedicine as a contested site: some revelations in imperial contexts, edited by Poonam Bala (2009); and Mark Honigsbaum, Living with Enza: the forgotten story of Britain and the great flu pandemic of 1918 (2008).

MARIA CARRANZA
Books I’m reading: Matthew Connelly, Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population (2008), Garret Hardin, Población, Evolución y Control de Natalidad: Un mosaico de ideas opuestas (1973), Richard Soloway, Birth Control and the Population Question in England. 1877-1930 (1982), and Sterling Evans, The Green Republic. A Conservation History of Costa Rica (1999). I’m also reading three doctoral theses: Maureen McCormick, “Of Birds, Guano and Man, William Vogt´s Road to Survival” (2005), Thomas Robertson, “Population Growth, Globalization and Environmentalism 1945-1980″ (2005), and Derek Seabury Hoff, “Are We Too Many? The Population Debate and Policymaking in the Twentieth Century United States” (2006).

GEORGE WEISZ
Aside from stuff that is directly related to research, I am reading Andrea Tone’s The Age of Anxiety: A History of America’s Turbulent Affair with Tranquilizers (2008).

JUANITA DE BARROS
I just finished Myron Echenberg’s Black Death, White Medicine: Bubonic Plague and the Politics of Public Health in Colonial Senegal, 1914-1945 (2002). I’ve also started to read Jean Besson’s edited oral history of her father-in-law, W. W. Besson, a doctor in Trinidad (Caribbean Reflections: The Life and Times of a Trinidad Scholar, 1901-1986). Thomas Ward’s Black Physicians in the Jim Crow South (2003) will probably be next on my list.

ALEXANDRA MINNA STERN
Well I just read a book by one of your fellow Canadians: Angus McLaren, Impotence: A Cultural History (2007). It’s entertaining and covers a wide swath of time. I’m about to start a few new books on Latin American topics, Ann Zulawski’s Unequal Cures: Public Health and Political Change in Bolivia, 1900-1950 (2007), Jerry Dávila, Diploma of Whiteness: Race and Social Policy in Brazil, 1917-1945 (2003), and others.

MARIA SILVIA DI LISCIA
I was reading Diego Armus’ recent book, La ciudad impura. Salud, tuberculosis y cultura en Buenos Aires, 1870-1950 (2008), and a few more general articles on demography, especially Robert Woods, “Medical and Demographic History: Inseparable?” in Social History of Medicine 20 (3) 2007; also Claudia Agostoni’s new edited collection, Curar, sanar y educar. Enfermedad y sociedad en México, siglos XIX y XX (2008).

NANCY STEPAN
Am currently reading (though not yet finished!) a book by Sarah M. Sufian, called Healing the Land and the Nation: Malaria and the Zionist Project in Palestine, 1920-1947 (2007). I am interested in malaria control and malaria eradication, and this book manages to combine the malaria control story with the politics of British Mandate Palestine and Zionist nation-building in a very interesting way. It really shows how the political context shapes public health discourse and policies, and how the old stereotype of the ‘unhealthy’ Jew so deeply affected the whole concept of Zionism. I know a bit about this from studies of the uses of eugenics (!) in the early Zionist response to immigrants (including Holocaust survivors from Europe); but this book adds a very different dimension, tying notions of the healthy body to the notion of a healthy landscape free of malaria, in a complex and very detailed way. Patterns of Jewish settlements, for instance, were mapped out against malaria geography.

PAULO DRINOT
I’m re-reading Allan Brandt’s No Magic Bullet (1987) on VD in the US from 1880, and some Peruvian books I got at the Feria del Libro in Lima, including Augusto Martín Ueda Tsuboyama, Historia del Cuerpo de Ingenieros de Minas del Perú, 1902-1950 (2002).

GABRIELA SOTO LAVEAGA
Here are titles of books that are, at this precise moment, crowding my desk. I’m using these for a new chapter for my second book project – a physician strike in Mexico. Cold War, Deadly Fevers: Malaria Eradication in Mexico, 1955-1975 (2007) – Marcos Cueto; The Social Transformation of American Medicine (1984) – Paul Starr; Doctors Within Borders: Profession, Ethnicity and Modernity in Colonial Taiwan (2002) – Ming-Cheng Lo; Dis-ease in the Colonial State: Medicine, Society and Social Change among the AbaNyole of Western Kenya (2002) – Osaak Olumwullah; Decentralizing Health Services in Mexico: a Case Study in State Reform (2006) – eds Nuria Homedes and Antonio Ugalde; The Collectors of Lost Souls: Turning Kuru Scientists into Whitemen (2008) – Warwick Anderson.

MARIOLA ESPINOSA
On the top of the pile next to me, to pick up now that I have some time, is Eric Jennings, Curing the Colonizers: Hydrotherapy, Climatology, and French Colonial Spas (2006). What I did pick up and begin reading as soon as I was done with schoolwork was a novel, so far interesting: Luis Leante, Mira si yo te querré (2007). The female lead is a Spanish doctor who is looking for someone in Maghreb …

MARTIN PERNICK
Now that I’m done with exam books, my reading to-do list is headed by the following for specific research interests: Drew Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (2008); the other essays in Leslie Reagan et al eds, Medicine’s Moving Pictures: Medicine, Health and Bodies in American Film and Television (2007).

RICARDO GONZALEZ LEANDRI
At this very moment I have in my hands two books that I am, one reading and the other re-reading for a few things I’m putting together on health and social themes of interventionist public policy: Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (2005), and the other, States, Social Knowledge and the Origins of Modern Social Policies, by Dietrich Rueschemeyer and Theda Skocpol. Parallel to this I’m reading a lot of things on Argentina: Susana Belmartino, La atención médica en Argentina en el siglo XX. Instituciones y procesos (2005), Diego Armus, La ciudad impura. Salud, tuberculosis y cultura en Buenos Aires, 1870-1950 (2008), and Lila Caimari, Apenas un delincuente. Crimen, castigo y cultura en la Argentina, 1880-1955 (2005). Another thing I’m reading almost in the form of permanently consulting it, because of its breadth and fine focus are the two volumes of Susana Torrado, ed., Población y bienestar en la Argentina del primero al segundo centenario. Una historia social del siglo XX (2007). And as I’m writing a biography of José María Ramos Mejía I decided to go back and re-read the initial chapters of Freud in the Pampas: The Emergence and Development of a Psychoanalytic Culture in Argentina, by Mariano Plotkin (2003).

MICHELLE MURPHY
How fun! I’m reading Stefan Helmreich’s Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas (2009), Sarah Franklin’s Dolly Mixtures: The Remaking of Genealogy (2007), and Melinda Cooper’s Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in a Neoliberal Era (2008). Amongst other things, like Benjamin’s The Arcades Project, and the Foucault Birth of Biopolitics, 1978-1979 lectures.

NISIA TRINDADE LIMA
My most recent readings were Diego Armus’ book: La ciudad impura: salud, tuberculosis y cultura en Buenos Aires, 1870-1950 (2008) which I started on a flight back to Rio, and a book that is a lovely source for research I have begun on social sciences and health in the 1950s: Health, Culture and Community: Case Studies of Public Reactions to Health Programs, edited by Benjamin D. Paul with the collaboration of Walter B. Miller (New York, Russell Sage Foundation, 1955).

PAUL GREENOUGH
Here are three I could easily recommend that I’ve read recently; all are large-scale research trajectories brought to fruition. Warwick Anderson, The Collectors of Lost Souls: Turning Kuru Scientists into Whitemen (Johns Hopkins, 2008) is the most consciously medical-historical and wonderfully (and humorously) written. Allan Brandt, The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product That Defined America (Basic Books, 2007) will be the most popular but it’s also a gem that instructors will mine for decades, while the WHO report, Closing the Gap in a Generation: Health Equity through Action on the Social Determinants of Health (2008) is a kind of jumble (because assembled by committee) but nonetheless a monument for understanding that most medical problems are actually political in origin.

LAURENCE MONNAIS
Here are the three latest books on medicine/health that I’ve read: BARNES, L. L., (2007) Needles, Herbs, Gods and Ghosts. China Healing and the West to 1848; BIVINS, R. (2008) Alternative Medicine: A History; and CURTH, L. Hill (2006), From Physick to Pharmacology. Five Hundred Years of British Drug Retailing.

LUZ MARIA HERNANDEZ
I have been reading Carlos Viesca Treviño’s works on pre-Hispanic Nahua medicine, La medicina prehispánica de México (1986) and Ticiotl (1997), as I have been working on an article about an 18th century healer.

JAMES HANLEY
We’ve had a book club out here in the snow for several years. We recently read Forgotten Lunatics of the Great War (2004) by Peter Barham, and Carol Byerly’s Fever of War (2005) on the influenza epidemic in the US Army in World War I. We are getting together in February to do Ruth Richardson’s The Making of Mr Gray’s Anatomy (2008).

HOWARD MARKEL
Right now I am knee deep in Arthur Schlesinger’s three-volume Age of Roosevelt (2003) — the first volume on how we got into the great depression is fascinating and eerie after reading recent editions of the financial pages in the newspapers. I am also reading Drew Gilpin Faust’s book on death during the Civil War era, This Republic of Suffering (2008).

CORI HAYDEN
If you define ‘reading’ loosely! Here’s some of what’s stacked up on my desk that I’ve been dipping into: Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and Isabelle Stengers, A History of Chemistry (1996), Primo Levi, The Periodic Table (1975), Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money (1907). Yes, light holiday reading …

GILBERTO HOCHMAN
Some books I’m reading and others that, though I haven’t read them yet, I promise to read over the next few months. Nísia Trindade Lima and Dominich Miranda de Sá, eds, Antroplogia Brasiliana – Ciência e educação na obra de Edgard Roquette-Pinto (2008) is a wonderful collection that covers the innumerable aspects of the work and public life of Roquette-Pinto (1884-1954) as a doctor, educator, ethnologist and popularizer of science. The indigenous “problem” in Brazil, eugenics, popular education, the role of radio in education, immigration are just some of the themes that Roquette-Pinto devoted attention to. His optimism on the country’s future, also demonstrated in his political and intellectual engagement in the dilemmas of nationality, is one of the aspects underlined by various authors and makes the book a great entrée to Brazilian social thought in the first half of the 20th century. An excellent panorama of Brazilian output in the area of history of science is Ciência, história e historiografia (2008), edited by Marta de Almeida and Moema de Rezende Vergara. From a seminar commemorating 21 years of the Museum of Astronomy and Related Sciences (MAST) research group in history of science, the articles by historians from various institutions are organized into four parts: I. Science, nation, power; II. Science, trajectories and biographies; III. Artefacts and visions of modernity; and IV. Representations and knowledge (saberes) about nature. An important contribution for understanding the contextual nature of epidemics and the little-studied impact of the Spanish flu in Brazil is Anny Torres, A Influenza Espanhola e a cidade planejada – Belo Horizonte, 1918 (2008). In particular, it reveals the dynamic and consequence of the epidemic in the planned capital of Minas Gerais, inaugurated in 1897 and imagined as hygienic. Gisele Sanglard’s book, Entre os Salões e o Laboratório: Guilherme Guinle, a Saúde e a Ciência no Rio de Janeiro, 1920-1940 (2008) is a new book on an untouched theme: private sponsorship of science in Brazil in the first half of the 20th century. More specifically, on the relation of the industrialist and philanthropist, Guilherme Guinle with the doctor-scientist Carlos Chagas, and the results that came of it: the building of syphilis and cancer hospitals in Rio during the 1920s while Chagas was director of public health. Another important dimension was his support for projects begun by Evandro Chagas and Carlos Chagas Jr. (the sons of Carlos Chagas), and by Walter Oswaldo Cruz (the son of O. Cruz). The book explores the social dynamic that allowed for the encounter between the laboratory and the bourgeois and aristocratic salons of Rio de Janeiro between 1920 and 1940.

Unless otherwise expressly stated, all content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files and any other original works), is licensed under a Creative Commons License.