Thank you so much for this book. We’ve both been teaching on Technology & Disability for a few years now, and it’s incredible to see your research in this vein. How do you describe your book, Hearing Happiness: Deafness Cures in History? Hearing Happiness is both American history and a memoir about what it means to… Read more →
Category: Clio Talks
The Politics of Method: An Interview with Henry Cowles
“The scientific method does not exist. But ‘the scientific method’ does.” So begins Henry M. Cowles’s new book The Scientific Method: An Evolution of Thinking from Darwin to Dewey about the very idea that science could be reduced to a single set of steps. Cowles argues that appeals to such a method – “shared across… Read more →
“For Those on Both Sides”: An Interview with Mary Ziegler about Abortion and the Law in America
Recently, Florida State University law professor Mary Ziegler sat down with Nursing Clio to talk about her new book, Abortion and the Law in America: Roe v. Wade to the Present. The book illustrates how the question of “abortion rights” is only one piece of the puzzle – rather both antiabortion and pro-choice advocates have… Read more →
Alvenia Fulton, Soul Food, and Black Liberation: An Interview with Travis Weisse
For the first annual Nursing Clio Prize for Best Journal Article, honorable mention went to Travis Weisse’s excellent and groundbreaking “‘Alone in a Sea of Rib-Tips’: Alvenia Fulton, Natural Health, and the Politics of Soul Food.” Known as the ‘Queen of Nutrition,’ Alvenia M. Fulton was a Black alternative health practitioner and health food promoter… Read more →
All My Babies and Black Midwifery: An Interview with Wangui Muigai
Wangui Muigai is the winner of the inaugural Nursing Clio Prize for Best Journal Article for “‘Something Wasn’t Clean’: Black Midwifery, Birth, and Postwar Medical Education in All My Babies,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, vol. 93, no. 1 (2019), 82–113. An assistant professor of history and African and African American studies at Brandeis… Read more →
The Slow Moon Climbs: Talking Menopause with Susan Mattern
Recently, I heard an interview with TV anchor Gayle King on the NPR show On Point about her career as a journalist, her recent interview with R. Kelly, and her experience working in a visual field while aging. One caller mentioned the “menopause pooch,” and congratulated King for redefining what a TV anchor looks like. In… Read more →
Intertwined Histories and Embodied Lives: An Interview with Cassia Roth
In A Miscarriage of Justice: Women’s Reproductive Lives and the Law in Early Twentieth-Century Brazil, Cassia Roth offers an innovative approach to the intertwined histories of honor, reproduction, maternity, and medicine in modern Brazilian history. With deep archival research, nuanced argumentation, and sensitivity toward historical actors — their suffering and their agency — Roth traces… Read more →
How Did We Get Here? An Interview with Lara Freidenfelds
Lara Freidenfelds’s new book, The Myth of the Perfect Pregnancy: A History of Miscarriage in America, explores the history of pregnancy and miscarriage in the U.S., unveiling a rich story of consumerism, medical advances, mothering advice, scientific technologies, and changing ideals of parenthood, gender, and family. Using the lens of miscarriage, Freidenfelds examines how we got… Read more →
Ruth Taylor Ballard: A Nursing Pioneer In the Jim Crow South
In 1954, the public school system of Mobile, Alabama, launched its first training program for black nursing students. It was a one-year Licensed Practical Nurse Program (LPN). Before then, an African American who wanted to study nursing had to travel to places like Selma, Montgomery, and Tuskegee. Few had the means or the ability to… Read more →
Uncovering the History of Child Psychiatry: A Conversation with Deborah Blythe Doroshow
I recently had the pleasure of talking to Deborah Doroshow about her new book, Emotionally Disturbed: A History of Caring for America’s Troubled Children, which explores the development of Residential Treatment Centers (RTCs) for “emotionally disturbed” children. The book does a masterful job of explaining how this new category of mental illness came into being… Read more →