Medical History and Bioethics
Graduate Students
Michitake Aso: Broadly speaking, I am interested in the history of the environment, science, and medicine in Southeast Asia. I look forward to dealing with questions that arise at the intersections of these fields in a dissertation tentatively titled "Colonial Ecologies: Environment, Health, and Politics in French Indochina, 1890-1940". I plan to focus my research on the rubber plantations of Southern Indochina and look at how the environmental and health changes brought about by these endeavors transformed both the land and the people living on it. I also hope to investigate the post-colonial memories of rubber.
Bridget Collins: Bridget studies the history of American public health, the relationships between environment and health, and the history of women's role in health care (both as providers and as patients). She completed her Master's Paper, “Every Home Safe: Tuberculosis in Madison, WI 1908-1950,” in the Spring of 2006 is currently researching her dissertation, "The Transformation of Domestic Medicine in America, 1900-1960", under the direction of Judith Walzer Leavitt. When she is not working on her dissertation she is instigating department happy hours.
Frederick W. Gibbs: Mr. Gibbs is researching the genre of medieval poison literature and what it can tell us about the overlapping medieval conceptions of poison, drugs, food, and disease. Mr. Gibbs has previously investigated the popularity of medieval astronomy textbooks, with a focus on Sacrobosco's "De Sphaera" and its use in early universities. Mr. Gibbs is also the fantasy chef/owner of Madison's most unpredictable and innovative restaurant, chez frederic, a modest farmhouse in the northern corridor. Drop by for brilliant cuisine and spectacular pyrotechnics.
Bennet M. Goldstein In general, I am drawn to topics of a taboo and stigmatized nature. I am currently investigating medical discourses from the early 20th century that surround psychopathology and sexual perversions, including homosexuality. Using medical literature, psychiatric records, and vernacular culture as sources, I wish to determine the presence of psychiatric internment and treatment of same-sex sexual behavior within patients. By highlighting sexual perversion, I hope to contextualize and reflect on the interactions among mental illness, diagnosis, and patient construction of self-identity.
Brad Moore: Brad focuses on Modern Central European social, political, and medical history. His dissertation project explores the impacts of Stalinism on the science, development, and practice of public health in the former East Germany and Czechoslovakia from 1948 to 1956. Brad seeks to gain a more complete understanding of the communist vision of a healthy socialist citizen, the manners in which ideology succeeds and/or fails in its attempts to manipulate medical science, and the methods of power and influence which society and professionals still wield under authoritarian conditions.
Katie Robinson: Broadly speaking, I work on the history of medicine in the 20th century. More specifically, I am interested in how gender and socioeconomic inequalities operate within two areas. The first includes the history of obesity, bariatric surgery and food addiction, as well as cosmetic bodily alteration and the embodiment of identity. The second area incorporates the history of psychiatry and institutionalization, spatial marginalization of communities, and differential burden of diseases, infectious and otherwise, within these populations. I approach these topics through popular media and culture, utlizing oral histories, film, and magazines as well as archival sources. As an M.D./Ph.D. candidate, I plan to specialize in addiction psychiatry and to incorporate patient narratives in my work whenever possible.
Andrew Ruis: Andrew’s interests are in the history of medicine, public health, and health policy. His master’s thesis, “Bringing the Laboratory to the Street: The Bacteriological Diagnosis of Diphtheria in Late Nineteenth-Century New York City,” received an Honorable Mention for the Shryock Award of the American Association for the History of Medicine. His dissertation, Eating to Learn, Learning to Eat: School Foodservice & Public Health Nutrition in Early Twentieth-Century America, examines the development of school lunch and nutrition programs for children from their beginnings in the mid 19th century to the passage of the National School Lunch Act in 1946.
Gregory Strodtman:Greg is a second year student focusing on the history of gender and medicine in America. His thesis focuses on the connections between gender and the diagnosis of minimal brain dysfunction/ADD in American children from 1963 to 1980. He enjoys cycling, baking, and sampling the culinary delights of Madison.
Amrys O. Williams: I am interested in bringing together the history of science, technology, and medicine with rural, agricultural, and environmental history. My master's paper explored the relationship between ecological thought and conservation programs in Wisconsin's 4-H clubs in the 1930s and 1940s. My doctoral work broadens this research, using 4-H as a lens through which to understand the development of modern rural identity in the United States, focusing on the role of science, technology, and health in shaping both rural young people and the landscapes in which they have worked, at home and abroad.
Shannon Withycombe: Shannon's interests include the history of women's health, the history of sexuality, and the history of the body. She is currently bringing all of these strands together (or attempting to) in her dissertation, "All Was Going Wrong: Personal and Medical Meanings of Miscarriage in Nineteenth-Century America." The dissertation examines how doctors and women together negoiated an understanding of miscarriage. It also touches upon the materiality of death, the production of scientific specimens, and constructions of American womanhood and middle-class ideals.
Anna Zeide: My interests currently lie at the intersections of environmental history and the histories of science and public health. Although my master's research centered on women's activism in conservation education in the 1930s, I am now shifting gears, hoping to focus my doctoral work on the history of canning, food preservation, and nutrition in the early twentieth century United States. For more, visit my website, in progress: annazeide.googlepages.com
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Medical History & Bioethics 1300 University Avenue, Room 1135 Madison, WI 53706-1532 medhisteth@med.wisc.edu |
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