The Department of History

NEW  PUBLICATION in June 2009

Picturing Medical Progress from Pasteur to Polio is published by Rutgers University Press (352 pages with 22 color plates and 108 monochrome figures).  For table of contents, ordering information, reviews, extra images,  and ideas for teachers, please click here or go to the Rutgers Press website.

This book was reviewed in the New York Times and the Journal of the American Medical
Association and was honored with two national awards.  It received the 2010 Ray and Pat Browne Award given by the Popular Culture Association/ American Culture Association “for the best single-author book published in 2009,” and the book was rated "Outstanding" and selected for the "2010 Best of the Best from the University Presses for Public and Secondary School Libraries" by the American Library Association.

“Celebrating July 6” is a new opinion piece on a Medical Humanities blog at NYU.  Click here and look for July 6 entry.

 

Bert Hansen, Professor of History at Baruch College of The City University of New York, teaches courses on American civilization and on the history of science and medicine.  He holds a bachelor's degree in chemistry from Columbia and a Ph.D. in history of science from Princeton. His scholarly writings explore the uses and transformations of science and medicine both within the professions and in the wider public culture.

Trained as a medievalist, Hansen's early career examined the relations between natural sciences and magic from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century in "Science and Magic," a chapter in Science in the Middle Ages, edited by David C. Lindberg (Chicago, 1978); in Nicole Oresme and the Marvels of Nature (Toronto: Pontifical Institute, 1985); and in "The Complementarity of Magic and Science Before the Scientific Revolution," American Scientist (March 1986).

After redirecting the focus of his research to the nineteenth century, he then explored the medical understanding of childbirth at the time just before this segment of general medical knowledge was transformed into a highly technical and esoteric specialization: "Medical Education in New York City in 1866-1867: A Student's Notebook of Professor Budd's Lectures on Obstetrics," New York State Journal of Medicine (August and September 1985).

The active dialogue between doctors and their patients was the subject of "American Physicians' 'Discovery' of Homosexuals, 1880-1900: A New Diagnosis in a Changing Society," in Framing Disease: Studies in Cultural History edited by Charles E. Rosenberg and Janet L. Golden (1992).

For the American Journal of Public Health (November 1997), he examined a non-verbal dialogue in "The Image and Advocacy of Public Health in American Caricature and Cartoons from 1860 to 1900." More recently in the same journal, he published "Public Careers and Private Sexuality: Some Gay and Lesbian Lives in the History of Medicine and Public Health," AJPH (January 2002).

In April 1998, the American Historical Review published "America's First Medical Breakthrough: How Popular Excitement about a French Rabies Cure in 1885 Raised New Expectations of Medical Progress." A follow-up article appeared in December 1999 in the Bulletin of the History of Medicine, "New Images of a New Medicine: Visual Evidence for Widespread Popularity of Therapeutic Discoveries in America after 1885."

Professor Hansen extended his examination of the images of medicine in popular culture into the mid-twentieth century with research on children's comic books that contained stories about medical history and medical science in "Medical History for the Masses: How American Comic Books Celebrated Heroes of Medicine in the 1940s," Bulletin of the History of Medicine (Spring 2004), and "True-Adventure Comic Books and American Popular Culture in the 1940s: An Annotated Research Bibliography of the Medical Heroes," The International Journal of Comic Art (Spring 2004).

Professor Hansen has a long-standing commitment to sharing specialized historical analysis with wider audiences. "The Complementarity of Magic and Science" was published in a general magazine for scientists in all fields. Later it was selected for reprinting as a model of expository prose in a college textbook, Good Writing: A Guide and Sourcebook for Writing Across the Curriculum by Linda Simon (St. Martin's Press, 1988). His article on obstetrics in the 1860s was honored with the Laurance D. Redway Award For Excellence in Medical Writing. His study of the first stage in the medicalization of homosexuality was included in an anthology of readings in medical history used in college and medical school courses, Sickness and Health in America edited by Judith Walzer Leavitt and Ronald L. Numbers, third edition (Wisconsin, 1997). "America's First Medical Breakthrough" was included in another teaching anthology, Major Problems in the History of American Medicine and Public Health: Documents and Essays edited by John Harley Warner and Janet A. Tighe (Houghton Mifflin, 2001).

Hansen's first virtual publication appeared in December 2006 in an on-line quarterly journal for teachers, History Now, sponsored by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.  His article discusses "Medical Advances in Nineteenth-Century America" in a theme issue on Nineteenth-Century Technology.  For this issue, see History Now.

Recent presentations have included the Chauncey and Elizabeth Leake Lecture at the University of Wisconsin (January 1999), the First Annual Gay and Lesbian Awareness Month Lecture at the National Library of Medicine of the National Institutes of Health (June 2000), opening plenary session of The Rockefeller University Centennial History Conference (November 2000), the 16th Annual AMS/Paterson Lecture of the Canadian Society for the History of Medicine (May 2002), a public lecture at The College of Physicians of Philadelphia (September 2002), a public lecture at the Department of the History and Sociology of Science of the University of Pennsylvania (February 2003), the Charles E. Culpepper Foundation Lecture at the University of Minnesota (October 2003), the Iago Galdston Memorial Lecture at the New York Academy of Medicine (October 2003), the 25th Annual Morris Saffron Lecture of the Medical History Society of New Jersey (May 2004), and a conference keynote at the University of Manchester, England (September 2004).

On April 19, 2005, at the Spring Gala of the American Pasteur Foundation at the Waldorf Astoria in New York City, Dr. Hansen offered remarks on the history of Louis Pasteur's scientific studies of wine and their relations to an understanding of fermentation more generally and of their contribution to establishing the discipline of microbiology.  The Foundation's purpose is to raise funds for the Institut Pasteur in Paris.  (Additional information may be found at www.pasteurfoundation.org.)

At the gala, William J. Clinton, 42nd President of the United States, received the Pasteur Foundation's 2005 Award for his exemplary work on behalf of developing nations and their fight against HIV/AIDS.   The award was presented by the Ambassador of France to the United States, Jean-David Levitte, and the Director General of the Institut Pasteur, Philippe Kourilsky .

The award was a rare chromolithograph from 1886, a political cartoon illustrating Pasteur's celebrity for creating the rabies vaccine.  In this cartoon, civil service reform was portrayed as a kind of vaccine against corruption, and then-president Grover Cleveland was shown as Pasteur Cleveland vaccinating the government against the spoils of rabies.  This image, entitled  "Judge 's Wax Works – The Political Eden Musée," was discussed by Professor Hansen and illustrated in his 2009 book. 

(Pasteur Foundation photos: Joe Vericker/Photobureau)

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