Welcome!

Welcome to Nursing Clio!

Nursing Clio is a collaborative blog project that ties historical scholarship to present-day political, social, and cultural issues surrounding gender and medicine. Men’s and women’s bodies, their reproductive rights, and their healthcare are often at the center of political debate and have also become a large part of the social and cultural discussions in popular media. Whether the topic is abortion, birth control, sex, or the pregnant body, each and every one of these issues is embedded with historical dynamics of race, class, and gender. Our tagline – The Personal is Historical – is meant to convey that the medical debates that dominate today’s headlines are, in fact, ongoing dialogues that reach far back into our country’s past.

The mission of Nursing Clio is to provide a platform for historians, health care workers, community activists, students, and the public at large to engage in socio-political and cultural critiques of this ongoing and historical debate over the gendered body. It is our contention that Nursing Clio will provide a coherent, intelligent, informative, and fun historical source for these issues.

The co-production of knowledge is a vital aspect of this group blog project and currently Nursing Clio has nine contributors from across the country, including graduate students, professors, and health care workers. As this project matures, we look forward to recruiting more bloggers who can add unique perspectives to our site.

Jacqueline Antonovich is the creator and co-founder of Nursing Clio and served as executive editor from 2012 to 2021. She is an Assistant Professor of History at Muhlenberg College. Her current research focuses on women physicians, race, gender, and medical imperialism in the American West. Jacqueline received her PhD from the University of Michigan in 2018.