Sarah Naramore is a historian of American medicine at the University of Edinburgh. Her research focuses on the manner in which Americans used medicine to shape concepts of national identity. In her first book, Benjamin Rush, Civic Health, and Human Illness in the Early American Republic, she argues that Philadelphia physician and founding father Benjamin Rush self-consciously constructed a new American medical system to inform scientific and political decision-making. While his specific ideas faded, his conviction that the United States, as a republic, posed unique biological challenges persisted. Currently, Sarah is completing a book manuscript on the history of iodine deficiency and endemic goiter in North America. American Goiter: a story of geography, gender, genetics, and salt, challenges our notions of what counts as an epidemic disease by tracking the history of an endemic disease from its American “discovery” in 1797 to an “epidemic” panic in the 1920s.