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With health reform once again stirring up strong passions in the United States, we find ourselves, as citizens and as educators, confronting a series of difficult questions. Why do we spend so much on medical treatment and yet seem so dissatisfied with the results? Why does American health care seem prone to extremes of over-treatment for some, under-treatment for others? Why do so many people seem to have unrealistic expectations about their health and their medical care? How have we become a society of the worried sick and the worried well?
This seminar, led by historian Nancy Tomes, will allow participants to explore the many contradictions surrounding the treatment of body and health issues in modern culture. On the one hand, modern "progress" seems to promise us a far higher standard of health and wellness than available to our grandparents. On the other hand, the dynamics of modern life seem to make achieving health and well being ever more difficult. Our goal in this seminar will be to grapple with the paradoxes and contradictions that abound in a culture that encourages obsessiveness about perfect health yet provides so many "perverse incentives" to be unhealthy. Among the topics for discussion will be new enhancement technologies (prescription drugs, plastic surgery), acute versus preventive approaches to conditions such as obesity (bariatric surgery versus diet and exercise); changing concepts of physical fitness and body aesthetics (body building, liposuction); and last but not least, changing concepts of mental health and wellness. We will look not only at the development of technologically advanced and expensive measures, but also the persistent problem of under treatment and disparities in health by income and race.
Although the United States will be the starting point for our discussion, participants with interests in other parts of the world are encouraged to add a comparative perspective to its content. And while the seminar leader is a historian, readings and speakers will be broadly interdisciplinary in focus; participants will be encouraged to explore the perspectives to be found in disciplines such as literary theory, psychology, economics, bioethics, and sociology.
Seminar Leader
Nancy Tomes
Professor and Chair of History, State University of New York at Stony Brook
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NANCY TOMES, Professor and Chair of History, State University of New York at Stony Brook, is the author of three books and two edited collections on a wide range of topics in the history of health and medicine. Her early work on the history of mental illness includes A Generous Confidence: Thomas Story Kirkbride and the Art of Asylum Keeping (Cambridge, 1984) and (with Lynn Gamwell) Madness in America: Cultural and Medical Perceptions of Mental Illness before 1914 (Cornell, 1995). From psychiatry she moved to the history of public health. Her book The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women and the Microbe in American Life (Harvard, 1998), won both the History of Science Society's Davis Prize and the American Association for the History of Medicine's Welch Medal.
While a Fellow at the National Humanities Center, she began work on what will soon be her fourth book, Medicine Shop: The Rise of the Modern Health Consumer. Her research has led her to a strong interest in the history of advertising and information. While at the Center, she developed "Medicine and Madison Avenue," a digital collection on the history of health related advertising available on the Duke University Library's website. More recently, she has co-edited two collections on other topics related to her current project: Medicine's Moving Pictures (with Leslie Reagan and Paula Treichler, 2007) and Impatient Voices: The Patient as Policy Actor (with Rachel Grob, Beatrix Hoffman, and Mark Schlesinger, 2010).
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