Carrie Buck was three months shy of her twenty-second birthday when she was forcibly sterilized on October 19, 1927. Buck’s […]
Eugenic Sperm
In 1974, a Los Angeles Times staff writer interviewed Dr. Donald Adler, a Beverly Hills gynecologist who ran a sperm […]
The Spaces of Screening: Tracing the Spatial Geographies of Mobile Mammography from Carparks to the Cosmos
In 2019, Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) launched a new cancer detection initiative. In this pilot program, the NHS harnessed […]
Where a Pregnancy Can Last for Years: The Remarkable Colonial Reports of Sleeping Pregnancies in the Maghreb
A couple patiently waits for a healthy child after a pregnancy that has lasted several years. A desperate widow claims […]
“Kiss Via Kerchief”: Influenza Warnings in 1918
Just over one hundred years ago, New York Health Commissioner Royal S. Copeland responded to the threat of “Spanish” influenza […]
Carrying Community: The Black Midwife’s Bag in the American South
The classic 1953 documentary film All My Babies features the life and work of Mary Coley, a legendary African-American “granny” […]
A Miscarriage of Justice
My book, A Miscarriage of Justice: Women’s Reproductive Lives and the Law in Early Twentieth-Century Brazil (Stanford University Press, 2020), […]
Just Being There: The AIDS Crisis and the Shanti Project’s Hospital Counselor Program
When Ward 5B premiered at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, the nurses of the first AIDS inpatient unit in the United […]
Containing Explosives: The Cold War Link between Bombs and Breasts
I don’t know that it’s possible to watch Mad Men without experiencing a healthy envy of Betty Draper’s flawless white, […]
Assassination as Cure: Disease Metaphors and Foreign Policy
On January 3, 2020, I was at my mother’s house where CNN is her constant companion. A drone strike ordered […]
