Dr. Hanne Blank Boyd is a writer, editor, and consultant whose published work lies at the intersection of bodies, selves, and cultures. Publishing under the name Hanne Blank, she is the author or editor of ten books that include Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality (Beacon Press), Virgin: The Untouched History (Bloomsbury), and most recently FAT (Bloomsbury, 2020). Formerly… Read more →
Category: Clio Talks
Pregnancy Test: An Interview with Karen Weingarten
Karen Weingarten is a regular contributor to Nursing Clio and Associate Professor of English at Queens College, CUNY. She has just published a new book titled Pregnancy Test and is the author of Abortion in the American Imagination: Before Life and Choice, 1880- 1940. Lara: How did you get interested in researching the history and culture… Read more →
Wondering About Wonder Foods: An Interview with Lisa Haushofer
In Wonder Foods: The Science and Commerce of Nutrition, Lisa Haushofer (Senior Research Associate in the History of Medicine Department at the University of Zurich) offers a vital history of our relationship with food, which is often easily distracted by the latest “superfood” or nutrition fad. She analyzes four “wonder foods” that gripped American and… Read more →
Abortion in the American Imagination: Before Life and Choice, 1880-1940 by Karen Weingarten
Abortion in the American Imagination takes us back to the early twentieth century, when American writers first dared to broach the controversial subject of abortion. Putting authors like Wharton and Faulkner into conversation with the era’s films and non-fiction, Karen Weingarten uncovers a vigorous public debate decades before Roe v. Wade. Along the way, she… Read more →
Abortion Care As Moral Work: Ethical Considerations of Maternal and Fetal Bodies, An Interview with Johanna Schoen
The timely anthology from Rutgers University Press, Abortion Care As Moral Work: Ethical Considerations of Maternal and Fetal Bodies, edited by Johanna Schoen, brings together the voices of abortion providers, counselors, clinic owners, neonatologists, bioethicists, and historians. The authors describe their motivations for offering or studying abortion care; discuss how anti-abortion regulations have made it… Read more →
No Real Choice: How Culture and Politics Matter For Reproductive Autonomy by Katrina Kimport
In the United States, the “right to choose” an abortion is the law of the land. But what if a woman continues her pregnancy because she didn’t really have a choice? What if state laws, federal policies, stigma, and a host of other obstacles push that choice out of her reach? Based on candid, in-depth… Read more →
The History of Medicine on TV: A Conversation with Diagnosing History editors Katherine Byrne, Julie Anne Taddeo, and James Leggott
With the second season of Bridgerton as one of the most-watched shows on Netflix so far this year, it’s clear that period dramas continue to be hugely popular. Amidst the fancy costumes and beautiful sets, one of the most common themes in a period drama is health and medicine. Medical plots and subplots provide drama,… Read more →
Abortion in Mexican History: An Interview with Elizabeth O’Brien
Nursing Clio’s third annual best article prize went to Elizabeth O’Brien, an assistant professor of the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University, for her article, “The Many Meanings of Aborto: Pregnancy Termination and the Instability of a Medical Category Over Time.” I had the pleasure of interviewing Elizabeth about her work on the history… Read more →
Condoms in China: An Interview with Sarah Mellors
For the second annual Nursing Clio Prize for Best Journal Article, honorable mention went to Sarah Mellors’s “The Trouble with Rubbers: A History of Condoms in Modern China.” An assistant professor of East Asian history at Missouri State University, she wrote this article in response to contemporary concerns about the low rates of condom usage… Read more →
Feeding Fascism, Gender, and Food Work: An Interview with Diana Garvin
Rather than fearsome dictators, tabletop politics take center stage in Feeding Fascism: The Politics of Women’s Food Work, a new book published in 2022 with the University of Toronto Press by Diana Garvin, Assistant Professor of Italian at the University of Oregon. Feeding Fascism considers Italian women’s everyday experiences under fascism through their efforts to… Read more →