Sara Press // In 1851, the prominent American surgeon and psychologist Dr. Samuel A. Cartwright published an alarming report in the New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal: a disease had become increasingly prevalent among the South’s Black population and was causing slaves to run away from their white masters.[1] Cartwright coined this disease “drapetomania.” While the…
Author: Sara Press
Sara Press is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the History of Science department at Harvard University. She completed her PhD in English Literature and Science and Technology Studies at the University of British Columbia. Her research offers a rhetorical rethinking of settler-colonial constructions of health and illness in Canada and the U.S. to demonstrate how otherness is often pathologized in contradistinction to presumed norms of cis-heteropatriarchal white health. By interrogating specific instances of institutional racism and biases in medical practice and pedagogy, she illuminates material inequalities in North American society, which remain significant obstacles to healthcare.
The Empathy Exams Revisited
Sara Press // On Saturday, May 5th, 2018, I went in to the BC Children’s Hospital to see a doctor about a lump in my neck. It might seem strange that a twenty-seven-year-old was going to a Children’s Hospital. Perhaps even stranger that I was seen by fifteen medical residents that day, and had to…
From Norma and Normman to Kim and Caitlyn
Sara Press// In the summer of 1945, a very average couple, who would come to embody the ideals of American society, emerged into the public eye. Brought to life by Abram Belskie and Robert Latou Dickinson, the Cleveland Health Museum debuted the sculptures of Norma and Normman as “A Portrait of the American People.” Strong…