America’s oldest public hospital started as a tiny, one-room infirmary in a New York City almshouse in 1736. Two hundred and eighty-one years later, it’s a sprawling hospital center complex with almost 900 beds, a massive outpatient service, dozens of adult and pediatric specialties, and medical care provided in over 200 languages. David Oshinsky narrates… Read more →
Category: Clio Reads
Quinine, Magic Pollen, and the British Empire in Fiction
Hands down, my favorite book of 2016 (and possibly ever) was The Watchmaker of Filigree Street. I read it with my Dessert Book Club, and every member either loved it or found some degree of enjoyment in it.1 And believe me — in the DBC, our tastes vary greatly, and it is rare that we… Read more →
Option Whatever: The Corporatization of Grief in Sheryl Sandberg’s Option B
Two years ago, my husband Clayton was murdered. That summer, I wrote a lot in my journal. I felt angry at how so many people reacted to Clayton’s death. I wanted to memorialize our memories together. I wanted to remember through writing. I snarkily told my family I was going to publish my own how-to… Read more →
Women Who Are Too Much: Ann Helen Petersen’s Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud
If you read feminist journalism, you’ve probably come across culture writer Anne Helen Petersen’s work at BuzzFeed. With a PhD in media studies focused on celebrity gossip, she has written longreads like “Jennifer Lawrence and the History of Cool Girls” and “That’s What Happened Between Me and Clark: Revising Old Hollywood’s Greatest Scandal.” Petersen has… Read more →
The Baby as Scientist and the Parent as Gardener: Alison Gopnik’s Inspiring Views on Childhood
There’s nothing better than kicking back with a light read in the warm months of the year. Summer is a great time to catch up on new books and reread old favorites. So this summer, Nursing Clio is bringing you a Beach Read series! Lighter than monographs, we’ve got a mix of fiction, pop culture,… Read more →
I did the unthinkable. I saw Fifty Shades Darker. In theaters. By myself.
It was just as bad as I thought it would be. I can get past the ridiculous plot, the #NotMyChristian controversies, and the people who insisted that it can’t be a very romantic movie if the leads have no chemistry. I will also forgive the editors for lacking finesse in the storytelling, which seemed to… Read more →
The Spoils of War: A Review of Sex and the Civil War
Many years ago when I was first starting my dissertation research on Civil War disability, I had an opportunity to sit in on a question and answer session with historian Marcus Rediker, who was talking about his book, not yet released at the time, The Amistad Rebellion. Part of the conversation revolved around the experience… Read more →
Learning to Love Science: Rebecca Onion’s Innocent Experiments and the History of an American Cultural Tradition
As a child, did your parents encourage you to participate in a science fair? Perhaps you received a chemistry set or model of the solar system for your birthday. Were you, like me, completely and utterly obsessed with dinosaurs to the point that you begged your parents for books on paleontology and tried to plow… Read more →
“We’ve Got to Get to Work”: John Lewis’s March
Congressman John Lewis is an American hero. As he tweeted on the anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington, he is the only speaker from that day of legendary oratory still alive. In his twenties, Lewis was the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the youngest member of the “Big Six” leaders… Read more →
Playwright Alice Eve Cohen Asks Us to Reconsider What We Think We Know about Pregnancy and Motherhood
“What makes a mother real?” asks writer and performer Alice Eve Cohen in her newly-published play, What I Thought I Knew. In 1999, Cohen experienced the most improbably and bizarrely complicated pregnancy imaginable. Her play is a crystallization of her stranger-than-fiction pregnancy memoir that was acclaimed at its 2009 publication with book-of-the-year awards from Salon… Read more →