2010 was an important year for scholarship documenting the history of the carceral state. In January, legal scholar Michelle Alexander […]
Ghosts are Scary, Disabled People are Not: The Troubling Rise of the Haunted Asylum
This past spring, the defunct Willard Psychiatric Center (previously known as the Willard Asylum for the Chronic Insane) in Ovid, […]
A Cut Above? Cesarean Sections in Brazil
In the opening scene of The Knick, Steven Soderbergh’s period drama about a fictionalized version of the Knickerbocker Hospital in […]
All Memorials are Political — Just Ask the Homeopaths
Over this past summer, I spent about two weeks on a research trip in Washington D.C. I decided to take […]
Average-looking Married Couples Having Caring, Respectful Sex
A friend of mine recently lamented that when he sat his teenage son down to have “The Talk,” he had […]
Elizabeth Blackwell in the Digital World
You’ve probably heard of Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman in the United States to earn a medical degree, but did […]
Exploding Myths About Medicine’s Wage Gap: Lessons From the Past and Present
It’s not news that women are paid less than men for comparable work, subject to variation across race, field of […]
Big Promises, Bigger Failures: When Public Education Makes You Sick
Promises, promises… We take it as a given that schooling is good for us, that overall population health increases with […]
Obergefell v. Hodges and the Legacy of AIDS
So, yeah… gay marriage is legal now. It’s kind of a big deal. That was about all I could offer […]
A Pot of Herbs, A Plastic Sheet, and Thou: A Historian Goes for a “V-Steam”
The first time I walked into the women’s area of my local Korean spa a few years back, my nose […]
