In 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic, my friend and I were in the midst of writing our honors theses, she on smallpox vaccine hesitancy among the working class and I on female emancipation in Weimar Germany. We would jokingly say “Help, I’m living in my research!” on a regular basis.[1] We drew connections… Read more →
Tag: research
Discovery, Interrupted
It was the third and final week of my first dissertation research trip. I’d spent my first two weeks moving slowly through the collections at the University of Akron’s Cummings Center for the History of Psychology (CCHP). It was a joy to take my time getting to know the clinical psychologists who would feature in… Read more →
“Welcome to the Archive”
Before Nursing Clio takes its annual December break, our editors decided to leave NC readers with a small holiday gift. Please enjoy this delightful archive parody of “Welcome to the Jungle” by AcaSheMia. AcaSheMia is a feminist musical collective made up of faculty from the English Department at North Dakota State University. Originally conceived and… Read more →
Gays in Space: How an Archive of Star Wars Fanzines Helped this Queer Woman Live Her Best Life
In 2016, I drove nine hours from Tennessee to Iowa during my spring break to research homoerotic Star Wars fanzines from the 1970s–1990s. “But why?” asked many of my peers. Well, I went through a bit of a crisis in the last months of my master’s program. Not knowing whether I would ever be in… Read more →
The Heifer and Its Lymph: The Animal Vaccine Establishment’s Register Book
Few people I know like working at the UK National Archives. They find it too impersonal, too frigid, too strict. But since I first worked there in July 2014, it has become my archival home. The place is dependable — you can always find silence in the reading rooms, good espresso in the ground-floor café,… Read more →
Adventures without Archives: Professors without Travel Funding
I am a professor teaching at a public teaching university in Grand Junction, Colorado. I love research and thinking about research. However, I am poor in both time and funding. Like others at similar institutions, I teach a 4/4 load with close to 150 students per semester and my institution does not allow us to… Read more →
Is Your Doctor Experimenting On You?
My friend’s father is in the hospital, and it’s been rough. His cancer treatment did not go as expected. “He’s suffering so much!” my friend sighed. “And the doctors, they’re just experimenting on him. It’s horrible.” When I heard this, I was confused. Was her father in some sort of experimental treatment? “No. But the… Read more →
Pictures of an Institution: Birth Records at Old Blockley
On September 22, 1859, 30-year-old Margaret Merchant of Philadelphia was admitted to the obstetrical ward at the Blockley Almshouse. She was pregnant with her sixth child — a boy, though with the ultrasound almost exactly a century in the future, Mrs. Merchant could not have known that at the time. A mother of five, Mrs…. Read more →
Sex and Gender in a Petri Dish
The HeLa cell line, infamously derived in 1951 from the tumor of Henrietta Lacks, was cultured and immortalized to provide standardized research material for scientists, generating an astonishing 74,000 scientific publications. HeLa, originating from “female” cells, became the most widely used cell line in twentieth century biomedical science, including in critical areas such as cancer… Read more →
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 you know that Dr. Blackwell came from a most extraordinary and progressive family? The Schlesinger Library at Harvard University recently announced the completion of a digitization project aimed at providing online access to approximately 120,000… Read more →