Lauren A. Mitchell // On the phone, Dr. Joanna Pearson softly chuckles. “My brother sometimes asks me what ‘psychiatrist Joanna’ would ask ‘author Joanna.’” It has been a while since we’ve spoken, but she is warm and upbeat, as I have known her to be. We are discussing her new short story collection, Every Human…
Category: Book Reviews
Review: “Quackery” highlights history of trusting medical experts
Emilie Egger // Review of Lydia Kang and Nate Pedersen. Quackery: a Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything. New York: Workman Publishing Company, Inc. 2017. The publishers of Quackery promise “67 shocking but true medical misfires that run the gamut from bizarre to deadly,” and the book’s authors are well-suited to this…
Gay Health Activism and the State: A Review of Katie Batza’s “Before AIDS: Gay Health Politics in the 1970s”
John A. Carranza // In 2009, I joined the San Antonio AIDS Foundation (SAAF, pronounced “safe”) as a volunteer. I graduated with my BA in history the previous year and had a job with a flexible schedule that allowed me to engage in this work. I was drawn to the organization because of its history of…
Turning to the Structural in the Health Humanities
Gabi Schaffzin // I remember being at the South by Southwest Interactive conference in 2014 when Anne Wojcicki, co-founder and CEO of 23andMe gave one of the keynotes. The Yale-educated former investment banker was explaining how the healthcare related portfolio that she had managed in her past life actually profited from people getting sick; she…
A New History of Hereditary Science: ‘Genetics in the Madhouse’
David Robertson // Aided by the rapid growth of publicly available big data and internet search engines, genealogy tracing has become a hugely popular activity. But its origins are not so technologically glamorous: as historian Theodore Porter puts it, ‘The science of human heredity arose first amid the moans, stench, and unruly despair of mostly…
Neurodiverse Reading
Ittai Orr // In See It Feelingly: Classic Novels, Autistic Readers, and the Schooling of a No-Good English Professor (Duke Univ. Press, 2018), Ralph Savarese writes that literature is a kind of social medicine, that it represents a “way of restoring relation” (193). There is no better illustration of this power of literature—or rather, of a…
Book Review: “Exhumations, and Governing the Disappeared in Peru’s Postwar Andes”
Emilie Egger// Rojas-Perez, Isaias. Mourning Remains: State Atrocity, Exhumations, and Governing the Disappeared in Peru’s Postwar Andes. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017. “I have interrogated [the] formulation of death as the limit of power or as the power relationship’s outside edge,” anthropologist Isaias Rojas-Perez writes in Mourning Remains: State Atrocity, Exhumations, and Governing the Disappeared…
