Join Nancy Tomes, PhD, Distinguished Professor of History, Stony Brook University, and author of The Gospel of Germs for the Thirteenth annual Weisse Lecture on the History of Medicine. A complimentary luncheon will be served to attendees following the lecture.
Nancy Tome’s research interests have ranged widely over the past four decades, but almost all her work has focused on the intersection between expert knowledge and popular understandings of the body and disease. Those interests are reflected in her publications: A Generous Confidence: Thomas Story Kirkbride and the Art of Asylum Keeping (Cambridge, 1984; paperback, Penn, 1994), Madness in America: Cultural and Medical Perceptions of Mental Illness Before 1914, with Lynn Gamwell (Cornell, 1995), The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women and the Microbe in American Life (Harvard, 1998), and Remaking the American Patient: How Madison Avenue and Modern Medicine Turned Patients into Consumers (UNC, 2016); plus two co-edited collections, Medicine’s Moving Pictures, with Leslie Reagan and Paula Treichler (Rochester, 2007), and Patients as Policy Actors, with Beatrix Hoffman, Rachel Grob, and Mark Schlesinger (Rutgers, 2011); and a website, “Medicine and Madison Avenue,” on the history of health-related advertising, developed in collaboration with Duke University Library’s Special Collections. In her current research, she is returning to her longstanding fascination with the history of psychiatry while also pursuing many unfinished threads from Remaking the American Patient, including the impact of the Internet on doctor-patient interactions, and a comparative look at medical consumerism in other countries.