John Carranza // “I wrote this book because I have been taking psychotropic drugs for thirty-five years, with different drugs or drug combinations during different decades of my life.”[1]Lauren Slater’s frank disclosure of taking psychiatric medications and the effect they had, and continue to have, on her body opens her new book Blue Dreams:…
Tag: History
The Complicated History of the Visual Analog Scale: Part 1
Gabi Schaffzin // A few hours after knee surgery, a nurse or doctor might come into your room and ask how you’re feeling. They might show you a scale of 6 faces like this: Maybe a notched line like this: Or, they might show you this line. It will probably have two phrases on it:…
The Politics of Outing and AIDS Activism in the 1980s
John A. Carranza // “Archibald Anson Gidde, a prominent San Francisco realtor and social leader, died Tuesday at his home in Sea Cliff after a bout with liver cancer. He was 42./Mr. Gidde was a witty and flamboyant figure who distinguished himself by spearheading some of the City’s most notable real estate transactions…/A member…
A social and scientific history of hormones
Kathryn Cai // In her forthcoming book Aroused: The History of Hormones and How They Control Just About Everything (June 2018), Randi Hutter Epstein faces a daunting challenge in charting the history of hormonal science from the late nineteenth to the twenty-first century United States. Beginning with the freak shows of the 1890s, which Epstein…
Outing Oliver Sipple: The Health Effects of Being Outed as a Gay Hero
John A. Carranza // Last month, Love, Simon the film adaptation of the young adult novel Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda by Becky Albertalli was released. The movie has garnered recognition for being one of the first major motion pictures that addressed the experience of being a gay teenager struggling with his identity under…
Review-Bellevue: Three Centuries of Medicine and Mayhem at America’s Most Storied Hospital, by David Oshinsky
John A. Carranza Nothing is as important in American culture as the place of the hospital. Hospitals are spaces that we inhabit when we are at our most vulnerable and want to be healed. They are spaces where scientific knowledge manifests and intricate power relations occur. Perhaps this is why hospitals have been the locus…
Oral History and the Physician-Patient Relationship
John A. Carranza There has been much criticism about the time that physicians spend with patients in an average visit. Physicians simply do not have enough time to fully interact with their patients. Couple this with the rising demand for doctors to enter patient information and complaints into databases, and the patient suffers. While this…
The Unknowable Other: Intersubjectivity in Alias Grace
Sneha Mantri The facts are sparse. Grace Marks was born in Ireland around 1828, emigrated to Canada in 1840 with her family, and by 1843, aged barely fifteen, was sentenced to death for the murder of her employer Thomas Kinnear. Her story was sensationalized in the newspaper-tabloids of the day, then promptly forgotten. More than…
Observation and Medicine: Dr. Ashbel Smith’s Pamphlet in the Cholera Outbreak of 1832
John A. Carranza “What I have written on the cholera was commenced in the form of a letter to a medical friend. As I proceeded, my observations spread over a much greater space than I had anticipated, and I resolved to publish them.” [1] Ashbel Smith, M.D. wrote these words to introduce the subject matter…
Lecture recap: “James Hogg and Illness Narratives in a Scottish Context”
With Megan Coyer, Arden Hegele, and Cristobal Silva The fall semester’s Explorations in Medical Humanities series capped with a lecture from Dr. Megan Coyer (Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Glasgow) on the subject of illness narratives and James Hogg’s 1823 novel, The Three Perils of Woman; or, Love, Erasing, and Jealousy, with…
