About the Garrison Lecture

 

The Garrison Lecturer, a scholar distinguished for contributions to medical history or other fields of science and learning, presents original and previously unpublished research in a lecture given at the Association’s annual meeting.


The Garrison Lecturer for 2025 is Ilana Löwy.


Garrison Lecture Committee, 2024-2025

Beatrix Hoffman, chair
Deirdre Cooper-Owens
Nancy Tomes
Leslie Reagan

 

Past Garrison Lectures

  • 2024 Johanna Schoen, “Glasnost and Perestroika in the NICU: Clinical Care and Parent Activism in the History of Neonatal Intensive Care” 
  • 2023 Beatrix Hoffman, “The Menace to Immigrants”
  • 2022 Janet Golden, “Syphilis, 1880-1917: Patients, Disability, History”
  • 2021 Evelynn Hammonds, “Living and Dying in the Intersections: A History of African American Women and HIV/AIDS”
  • 2020 Annual Meeting Cancelled due to the Coronavirus Pandemic
  • 2019 Shigehisa Kuriyama, “Histories of the Self and the History of Medicine”
  • 2018 Julie Fairman, “’We Went to Mississippi’: Nurses and Civil Rights Activism of the 1960s”
  • 2017 Naomi Rogers, “Radical Visions of American Medicine: Politics and Activism in the History of Medicine”
  • 2016 Susan E. Lederer, “Bombshells and Bioethics: Henry K. Beecher’s ‘Ethics and Clinical Research’ at 50”
  • 2015 David Rosner, “Trying Times: Reflections on History, the Courts and Defining Disease” BHM 91 (2017): 473-493.
  • 2014 Barron Lerner, “Great Doctor History, A Personal Journey” BHM 92 (2018): 55-77.
  • 2013 Randall M. Packard, “Break-bone Fever in Philadelphia, 1780: Reflections on the History of Disease” BHM 90 (2016): 193-221.
  • 2012 Susan M. Reverby, “Enemy of the People, Enemy of the State: Two Great(ly Infamous) Doctors in the Court of History” BHM 88 (2014): 403-430.
  • 2011 Martin Pernick, “Disease and the Racial Division of Labor in America”
  • 2010 Keith Wailoo, “The Politics of Pain: Liberal Medicine, Conservative Care and the Governance of Relief in America Since the 1950s”
  • 2009 Katharine Park, “Birth, Death, and the Limits of Life: Caesarean Section in Medieval and Renaissance Europe”
  • 2008 John Harley Warner, “The Aesthetic Grounding of Modern Medicine,” BHM 88 (2014): 1-47.
  • 2007 Steven J. Peitzman, “I Am Their Physician: Dr. Owen J. Wister of Germantown and His Too Many Patients,” BHM 83 (2009): 245-270.
  • 2006 Allan M. Brandt, “Globalization, Health and History”
  • 2005 John M. Eyler, “De Kruif’s Boast: Vaccine Development and the Construction of a Virus,” BHM 80 (2006): 409-438.
  • 2004 Nancy J. Tomes, “The Great American Medicine Show Revisited,” BHM 79 (2005): 627-663.
  • 2003 Nancy Siraisi, “Medicine and the Renaissance World of Learning,” BHM 77 (2004): 1-36.
  • 2002 David J. Rothman, “Serving Clio and Client: The Historian as Expert Witness,” BHM 77 (2003): 25-44.
  • 2001 Martin Pernick — declined
  • 2000 Ludmilla Jordanova, “World Portraiture and Medical Identity”
  • 1999 Henrich von Staden, “Reading and Therapy: Literacy and Medicine in the Ancient World.”
  • 1998 Vanessa Northington Gamble, “Taking a History: The Life of Dr. Virginia Alexander”
  • 1997 Ronald L. Numbers, “Faith, Hope, and Charity: the Religious Roots of American Health Care”
  • 1996 Michael R. McVaugh, “Bedside Manners in the Middle Ages,” BHM 71 (1997):201-223.
  • 1995 John C. Burnham, “How the Concept of the Profession Evolved in the Work of Historians of Medicine,” BHM 70 (1996):1-24.
  • 1994 Judith Walzer Leavitt, “A Worrying Profession: The Domestic Environment of Medical Practice in Mid-Nineteenth Century America,” BHM 69 (1995): 1-29.
  • 1993 Rosemary Stevens, “A Dangerous Occupation? The Historian as Reformer and Policy Maker.”
  • 1992 Roy Porter, “Disease Framed–Disease Fantisized? The Case of Gout,” BHM 68 (1994):1-28.
  • 1991 Geoffrey E.R. Lloyd, “The Transformation of Ancient Medicine,” BHM 66 (1992):114-132.
  • 1990 Saul Benison, “Walter B. Cannon and the Politics of Medical Science,” BHM 65 (1991): 234-251.
  • 1989 Gert H. Brieger, “Classics and Character: Medicine and the Decline of Gentility,”  BHM 65 (1991): 88-109.
  • 1988 Vern L. Bullough, “The Physician and Sex Research,” BHM 63 (1989): 247-267.
  • 1987 Barbara G. Rosenkrantz, “On the Spot: A History of Focal Infections.”
  • 1986 Gerald N. Grob, “Psychiatry and Social Activism: The Politics of a Specialty in Post War America,” BHM 60 (1986): 477-501.
  • 1985 Frederick L. Holmes, “Patterns of Scientific Creativity,” BHM 60 (1986): 19-35.
  • 1984 Arthur E. Imhof, “From the Old Mortality Pattern to the New: Implications of a Radical Change from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century,” BHM (1985): 19-35.
  • 1983 John Duffy, “American Perceptions of the Medical, Legal and Theological Professions,” BHM (1984): 1-15.
  • 1982 Charles E. Rosenberg, “Medical Text and Social Context: Explaining William Buchan’s Domestic Medicine,” BHM 57 (1983): 22-42.
  • 1981 Abraham M. Lilienfeld, “Ceteris paribus: The Evolution of the Clinical Trial,” BHM 56 (1982): 1-18.
  • 1980 John Z. Bowers, “The Odyssey of Smallpox Vaccination,” BHM 55 (1982):17-33.
  • 1979 James Harvey Young, “’This Greasy Counterfeit’: Butter versus Oleomargarine in the United States Congress, 1886,” BHM 53(1977): 392-414.
  • 1978 James H. Cassedy, “An American Clerical Crisis: Minister’s Sore Throat 1830-1860,” BHM 53 (1979): 23-38.
  • 1977 Jane M. Oppenheimer, “Taking Things Apart and Putting Them Together Again,” BHM 52 (1978):149-161.
  • 1976 William B. Bean, “Walter Reed and the Ordeal of Human Experiments,” BHM 51 (1977): 75-92.
  • 1975 Lester S. King, “Evidence and its Evaluation in Eighteen Century Medicine,” BHM 50 (1976): 174-190.
  • 1974 Ilza Veith, “Blinders of the Mind: Historical Reflections on Functional Impairment of Vision,” BHM 48 (1974): 503-516.
  • 1973 Genevieve Miller, “In Praise of Amateurs: Medical Historiography in America before Garrison,“ BHM 47 (1973): 586-615.
  • 1972 Franz Rosenthal, “The Position of the Physician in Muslim Society.”
  • 1971 William R. LeFanu, “The Lost Half Century in English Medicine, 1700-1750,” BHM 46 (1972): 319-348.
  • 1970 Richard H. Shryock, “The Medical Reputation of Benjamin Rush: Contrasts over Two Centuries,” BHM 45 (1971): 507-552.
  • 1969 Whitfield J. Bell, Jr., “A Portrait of the Colonial Physician,” BHM (1970): 497-517.
  • 1968 Lloyd G. Stevenson, “A Reconsideration of the Institutes of Medicine.”
  • 1967 C. Donald O’Malley, “Helkiah Crooke, M.D., F.R.C.P., 1576-1648,” BHM (1968):1-18.
  • 1966 J. B. de C. M. Saunders, “Geography and Geopolitics in California’s Medicine of the 19th Century,” BHM (1967): 293-324.
  • 1965 William S. Middleton, “Turner’s Lane Hospital,” BHM 40 (1966): 14-42.
  • 1964 John B. Blake, “Women and Medicine in Ante-Bellum America” BHM 39 (1965): 39-99.
  • 1963 Saul Jarcho, “Some Observations on Disease in Prehistoric North American,” BHM 38 (1964): 1-19.
  • 1962 Owsei Tempkin, “Basic Science, Medicine, and the Romantic Era,” BHM (1963): 97-129.
  • 1961 George Rosen, “Psychopathology in the Social Process: Dance Frenzies, Demonic Possession, Revival Movements and Similar So-Called Psychic Epidemics, An Interpretation,” BHM (1962): 13-44.
  • 1960 Ludwig Edelstein, “The Distinctive Hellenism of Greek Medicine,” BHM 40 (1966): 197-225.
  • 1959 Walton B. McDaniel, II, “A View of Nineteenth Century Medical Historiography in the United States of America,” BHM 33 (1959): 415-435.
  • 1958 Claude E. Heaton, “Three Hundred Years of Medicine in New York City,” BHM (1958): 517-530.
  • 1957 Paul Klemperer, “The Pathology of Morgagni and Virchow,” BHM 32 (1958): 24-28.
  • 1956 F. N. L. Poynter, “Medicine and the Historian,” BHM 30 (1956): 420-435.
  • 1955 Samuel Noah Kramer, “The First Prescription in Man’s Recorded History: A Sumerian Clay Tablet from 200 D.C.” Abstract in BHM 30 (1956): 41-42.
  • 1954 Esmond S. Long, “The Decline of Chronic Infectious Disease and Its Social Implications,” BHM 28 (1954): 368-384.
  • 1953 Dorothy M. Schullian, “An Introduction to the History of Medicine, 1498,” BHM 27 (1953): 403-413.
  • 1952 Benjamin Spector, “The Growth of Medicine and the Letter of the Law,” BHM 26 (1952): 499-525.
  • 1951 Isreal E. Drabkin, “Soranus and His System of Medicine,” BHM 25 (1951): 503-518
  • 1950 Roland H. Bainton, “Michael Servetus and the Pulmonary Transit of the Blood,” BHM 25 (1951): 1-7.
  • 1949 Henry R. Viets, “George Cheyne, 1673-1743,” BHM 23 (1949): 435-452.
  • 1948 Erwin H. Ackerknecht, “Anticontagionism between 1821 and 1867,” BHM 22 (1948): 562-593.
  • 1947 E. Ashworth Underwood, “Apollo and Terpsichore: Music and the Healing Art,” BHM 21 (1947): 639-673.
  • 1946 John F. Fulton, “Science in American Universities, 1636-1946, with Particular Reference to Harvard and Yale,” BHM 20 (1946): 97-111.
  • 1945 No Lecturer
  • 1944 No Lecturer
  • 1943 William S. Middleton had been invited, but no annual meeting was held due to World War II.
  • 1942 Francis R. Packard, “Medical Case Histories in a Colonial Hospital,” BHM 21 (1947): 639-673.
  • 1941 George Sarton, “The History of Medicine versus the History of Art,” BHM 10 (1941):123-135.
  • 1940 Arturo Castiglioni, “Aulus Cornelius Celsus as a Historian of Medicine,” BHM 8 (1940): 857-873.