Remembering the Forgotten “Black Angels”
Many historians, including myself, have told the story of New York City’s Sea View Hospital, a tuberculosis sanatorium that operated from 1913 to 1961. But only now, with the publication of Maria Smilios’s new book, The Black Angels: The Untold Story of the Nurses Who Helped Cure Tuberculosis, is a crucial part of Sea View’s […]
Another Pragmatic Public Health Decision
There has been much criticism of the decision by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to let Covid-infected people who are feeling better to stop quarantining after five days and simply wear a mask. Most of the concern stems from the fact that up to 31% of people in this category will actually still […]
What the Public Might Learn from Kate Middleton, the Latest “Famous Patient”
There was a time when the last thing a celebrity would do would be to go public with details of a major illness. After all, it’s hard enough dealing with a grave diagnosis and often complicated treatments than to also announce them to the world. And health information has always been treated as confidential, shared […]
Remembering Betty Rollin, Who Told Her Breast Surgeon That Post-Operative Appearance Mattered
Women who had undergone disfiguring surgery for breast cancer, according to one surgeon in the 1970s, needed to “stick an old sock in their bra and get on with their lives.” It was this climate that Betty Rollin, then a television correspondent for NBC, entered when she was diagnosed with the disease in 1975. Rollin, […]
Arthur Ashe and AIDS: Did the Public Have the Right to Know His Diagnosis?
Do prominent public figures who are ill have some type of responsibility to reveal their diseases, or are they entitled to the same privacy as “ordinary” people? That question exploded into the public sphere in April 1992 when tennis star and humanitarian Arthur Ashe learned that a newspaper was about to make public his previously […]
Drunken Driving Is a Persistent Problem but There May Be a Technological Solution
Drunken driving control efforts have sputtered out in recent years with more than 11,000 preventable deaths now occurring annually. Over the past four decades, public health officials have largely focused on changing behaviors — asking people to not drink and drive. But now, there are new auto technologies that can prevent them from doing so. […]
The Trailblazer Who Ensured Women With Breast Cancer Had a Choice
Today, it is not uncommon when a woman diagnosed with breast cancer writes about her experiences. Illness memoirs, hardly only about breast cancer, are now a popular genre. However, this was not always the case. When New York City-based writer Babette Rosmond published her book The Invisible Worm 50 years ago, it was a daring act of […]
“Brian’s Song” at 50 Still Offers Lessons About Cancer for Today
When “Brian’s Song” made its debut as an ABC Movie of the Week in 1971, this tear-jerker about a professional football player who died of cancer became a surprisingly popular hit. Fifty years later, it has sunk into obscurity, along with “Brian Piccolo: A Short Season,” a book written by Jeannie Morris, a journalist and […]
Good history means grappling with people’s complicated legacies
Besides the coronavirus pandemic and the election of Joe Biden as president, another topic made 2020 a dramatic year: the relentless attack on past heroes due to bad — and sometimes appalling — behaviors. From the tearing down of statues of Confederate soldiers to the removal of President Woodrow Wilson’s name from Princeton’s School of […]
Despite All the Backlash, Anti-Depressants Can Really Help
On The Empire of Depression by Jonathan Sadowsky Among the most important early works in the social history of medicine were histories of mental institutions. Here, in often great detail, historians wrote of seemingly barbaric procedures — such as insulin shock therapy, electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) and lobotomy — that had less to do with helping […]