With Roe v Wade upended, the balance of power and authority among lawmakers, medical practitioners, and pregnant and birthing people is suddenly in flux. And at the center of the storm, the safety and autonomy of those carrying (and losing) pregnancies is in jeopardy.

Historical investigations into troubled pregnancies and births, therefore, are salient and urgent.

In her new book Proving Pregnancy: Gender, Law, and Medical Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century America, Felicity Turner examines legal cases of women accused of infanticide and concealment of stillbirth, focusing on evidence from North Carolina and Connecticut. The definition of infanticide as a crime had fluctuated over the previous centuries: in medieval England, it was treated alongside late-term abortion and punished by the church courts as a lesser crime than homicide.^[1] A 1624 English statute, written to address a perceived increase in children born out of wedlock and subsequently abandoned or killed, imposed the death penalty for not only infanticide of “bastards” whose live births could be attested to by witnesses, but also for the concealment of stillbirth. Women who had stillbirths alone were presumed to have committed infanticide, especially if they hid the corpse.

Courtesy University of North Carolina Press.

Puritan colonists brought this conceptualization of infanticide to the new world, and formalized it in late seventeenth-century laws. While the absolute number of cases prosecuted was small, those women who were found guilty were treated harshly and scores of women were hanged for their crimes.^[2]

The mid-eighteenth century into the nineteenth century saw an easing of public attitudes, with increasing sympathy for the desperate women who found themselves pregnant out of wedlock, a situation which threatened social censure and economic ruin. Juries declined to impose the death penalty even when the facts seemed to support it.^[3]

Turner’s focus, though, is not on the previously-told story of the decline of executions or the increase in public sympathy. Rather, Turner centers the book around her idea that through the early decades of the nineteenth century, knowledge about pregnant bodies was the “property” of women, but as the century progressed, that knowledge increasingly became the “property” of male doctors. Through the early nineteenth century, juries of inquest, convened to help coroners determine a cause of death, depended on the testimony of women—midwives, female relatives, and household and community matrons—to decide whether or not a woman had been pregnant and an infant had been born alive or stillborn. As courts were further formalized and law and medicine professionalized during the nineteenth century, (male) physicians increasingly served as expert witnesses in place of the women on juries of inquest, examining babies’ corpses at length using new, avowedly scientific methods. The focus of testimony shifted from the bodies of postpartum women and the gossip networks that observed a growing belly, to the bodies of deceased newborns who might or might not have been born alive.

The term “property” is Turner’s analytic label, not a term from her primary sources. She describes midwives’ and matrons’ traditional authority to examine women’s bodies and discern signs of pregnancy as a form of “intellectual property” (though not in the formal sense used in legal scholarship). During the same decades that this traditional female authority eroded, feminists started demanding that women be accorded the same property rights as men, such as the ability to own property in one’s own name, inherit and bequeath, take loans, and so on–rights that women did, indeed, gain by the late twentieth century. By calling traditional authority a form of intellectual “property,” Turner suggests that we should see a direct trade-off between what was lost and what was gained, rather than interpreting feminist gains as an unreserved triumph.

This argument about the loss of women’s traditional authority emerges from a central lineage of scholarship in the history of women’s health. In 1973, at the height of the women’s health movement, Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English made waves with Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers, which painted a romantic vision of traditional healers as women helping women, and modern medicine as an aggressive masculine takeover of the profession and the female bodies it claimed the authority to treat. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg crafted a more sophisticated and scholarly version of this narrative in her 1986 essay “The Abortion Movement and the AMA, 1850-1880” (in Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America). Smith-Rosenberg showed how nineteenth-century elite doctors campaigned against abortion as part of constructing their medical identity and authority against the midwives, wise women, and “irregular” practitioners such as herbalists and chiropractors who previously provided reproductive care, collaborating with other bourgeois men to control women’s bodies.

In Turner’s narrative, the female examiners on early nineteenth-century juries of inquest successfully shielded female suspects from the shame of examination by men. Only enslaved women, whose chastity and propriety were unprotected, were subject to terrifying and shameful searches by male doctors. The presumption of female expertise was so great that in some cases even enslaved women were called upon as reliable female witnesses. Later, once the legal profession and the courtroom were more professionalized and regularized, physicians were regarded as more appropriate expert witnesses, and women rarely testified on behalf of the state at infanticide trials. Toward the end of the century, lawyers and the public increasingly regarded insanity as the obvious cause of something so “unnatural” as infanticide, and accused women were regularly acquitted based on insanity pleas substantiated by male medical experts.

Turner acknowledges that physicians’ expert testimony saved the lives of many defendants, though she points out that the alternative was sometimes many years in prison, which was not necessarily a great improvement over the death penalty. Despite arguably better outcomes, Turner argues that coming to rely on male physicians’ testimony in these cases was problematic for women as a whole, because it reinforced the male medical profession’s claim to the right to evaluate women’s reproductive bodies and lives. She concludes by calling upon readers to reclaim the female right to evaluate female bodies.

As inspiring as this sounds, it is a problematic sleight of hand. The “property rights” of women in earlier times did not include the right of each individual woman to evaluate the truth of her own body—women were not accorded, in the words of Linda Gordon’s book on the history of birth control, decision-making power over their own bodies as “the moral property of women.” Rather, it was the right of certain women to act as agents of the state in order to punish other women.

In her work on early modern English women, historian Laura Gowing has shown how midwives and matrons examined poor servants pregnant by their masters or fellow servants, whether enacting the legal ritual of pressing them for the name of the father of the child at the height of birth pangs, when they were presumed to tell the truth out of fear of God’s wrath should they die in birth, or examining a woman’s body to determine whether her breasts had milk and her genitals had endured birth recently. These examinations could be menacing to vulnerable young women accused of fornication and infanticide. Midwives and respectable matrons had power, yes, but it was the power to enforce patriarchy on other women as agents of the state.^[4]

Today, obstetricians in the United States are overwhelmingly female, and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists strongly supports abortion access. But the anti-abortion movement has also been led largely by women, and across the country women staff Crisis Pregnancy Centers designed to trick women into forgoing abortions. The gender analysis of traditionalist matrons and midwives as proto-feminists and doctors as anti-feminists clearly no longer holds, and Gowing’s portrayal of early modern English culture calls into question whether it ever did. Empowering women like Alabama governor Kay Ivey and Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett increases the danger that women will suffer difficult births and be prosecuted for pregnancy losses whether intentional or accidental. Women’s claims over other women’s bodies are far from feminist.

Turner is on stronger ground in her analysis of Black women’s childbearing. For example, she introduces dueling narratives of slavery and infanticide, complicating abolitionists’ heart-rending stories of enslaved mothers killing their children in order to save them from lives as chattel. Turner shows that pro-slavery advocates repeatedly described how free Black women sometimes committed infanticide, claiming that this meant Black people were better off under enslavement, and that Black people were by nature immoral and unfit for freedom. In the larger rhetorical battle, the suffering of Black families too often turned into mere talking points.

The Modern Medea, a depiction of Margaret Garner, a enslaved woman who killed her daughter rather than let her return to slavery. (Courtesy New York Public Library)

Many of the stories in the book made me want to know more. Francis Hood, for example, was a Black woman tried for infanticide in North Carolina in 1880. Turner gives many details from extensive newspaper reports of the trial and aftermath. Hood was convicted, but the jurors recommended mercy, and the judge and prosecuting solicitor petitioned the governor to pardon. Hood’s sentence was commuted to imprisonment. Eight years later the citizens of Lenoir, Hood’s home town, petitioned the governor to pardon her. After multiple attempts over two years, he finally complied. Who were these community members fighting for Hood’s freedom? Were they Black or white? Amidst profound Black oppression, why were so many moved to mitigate Hood’s sentence?

In Proving Pregnancy, Turner has uncovered an important and provocative set of sources, and opened a path for further investigation of troubled births, in the past and present.

In December 2022 – a few days shy of the new year – the Texas Maternal Mortality and Morbidity Review Committee (MMMRC) and Department of State Health Services released a joint Biennial Report on maternal mortality and morbidity rates in the state. They use term “maternal mortality” to describe the death of a childbearing person while pregnant or in the year following the end of a pregnancy from any cause related to or aggravated by the pregnancy.^[1] Meanwhile, “maternal morbidity” refers to any health condition attributed to and/or exacerbated by pregnancy and childbirth that negatively impacts the childbearing person’s well-being.^[2]

This report, long overdue, revealed what many had long known: that negative maternal health outcomes were on the rise, with Black parents experiencing disproportionately high levels of harm and death.

The MMMRC was established in 2013 by Senate Bill 495, 83rd Legislature, Regular Session to address a longstanding problem in the state of Texas: disproportionately high rates of pregnancy- and childbirth-related illness and death and racial disparities in maternal mortality and morbidity. In the year that the committee was formed, Black women constituted 31% of maternal deaths even though they made up only 11% of those giving birth.^[3] The Texas Health and Safety Code, Section 34.015 required that the MMMRC and the Department of State Health Services submit a joint report on the findings by September 1st of each even-numbered year.^[4] As a result, the MMMRC had a legal obligation to publish a report before or by September 1, 2022.

Photo of the Admitting Nursery at a Houston-area hospital with listed times for baby showings in approximately 1960.
(John P. McGovern Historical Collections and Research Center, Houston Academy of Medicine – Texas Medical Center Library; Houston, Texas.)

Yet in the months leading up to the overdue 2022 release, the report elicited significant controversy. After the Committee failed to release the report by the September 1, 2022 deadline, The Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine – a non-profit organization dedicated to improving maternal and child outcomes – threatened to sue the state for refusing to release vital information to the public that could address Texas’ longstanding maternal mortality crisis.^[5] Two months later, the Committee’s pre-release warning that the report would reveal disturbing racial and class disparities elicited additional outrage given the state’s present assault on abortion rights, which has already proven to disproportionately impact low-income women of color.^[6]

Unfortunately, these concerns did not prove to be unfounded. The report’s results were startling: of the 118 pregnancy-associated deaths reviewed by the MMMRC, 40% were pregnancy-related (i.e., the deaths were explicitly tied to complications arising from pregnancy itself) and 36% were pregnancy-associated.^[7] In fact, 90% of pregnancy-related deaths were found to be preventable. This means that “there was at least some chance of averting the death by one or more feasible changes to the circumstances of the patient, provider, facility, systems, or community factors contributing to the death.” ^[8] Further, Black childbearing people and individuals who lacked private insurance disproportionately died from or experienced severe complications during pregnancy. ^[9] According to the MMMRC, these deaths result in 6,162 years of potential life lost and have left approximately 184 children affected by their mothers’ deaths. ^[10]

As a historian of race and medicine, I was disturbed but – unfortunately – not surprised. An honest examination of the historical record shows how rampant disparities and inequities in maternal health outcomes are due to systemic racism and classism. Systemic racism and classism refer to the complex interactions of large-scale systems, practices, and beliefs that systematically disadvantage racial and ethnic minorities and members of the working class. In the U.S., systemic racism and classism have been critical to the historical formation of not only obstetrics but also American medicine and the healthcare system more broadly. For example, the belief that Black people have inferior, different bodies, and psyches – which emerged in the 18^th and 19^th centuries – was a foundational, widely-held belief held by members of the white professional medical academy.^[11] While this belief has been challenged, it continues to persist, manifesting as rampant racial bias and discrimination amongst providers that, ultimately, impacts the provision of care. In addition, a capitalistic-driven healthcare system continues to drive unequal access to healthcare, particularly among the working class.

Systemic racism and classism explain why the U.S. continues to have the highest maternal death rate among developed nations.^[12] And since Texas accounts for 10% of all births in the U.S., the results of the MMMRC’s reports are particularly damning.^[13] Yet some have argued that the abysmally high rates of maternal mortality are due to a “statistical mirage.” In 2006, Texas added a checkbox to death certificates that asked if the deceased person was pregnant or had been pregnant in the last year of their life. While some of these deaths could have been mistakenly linked to pregnancy, the reality is that systemic racism and classism historically have shaped maternal healthcare policy in Texas.^[14] For example, in 2011, as part of its assault on reproductive autonomy, Texas reduced its family-planning budget by two-thirds in order to defund Planned Parenthood, a domestic and global nonprofit organization that provides reproductive and sexual healthcare and education. This action, however, ignored the fact that Planned Parenthood and its affiliated clinics were the largest providers of pregnancy-related healthcare for low-income women – many of whom were racial and ethnic minorities.^[15]

(American Life League/Flickr | CC BY-NC)

In addition, it is critical to note that Texas has the largest uninsured rate in the U.S. – 18% compared to the national average of 8.6%.^[16] This is, in part, due to two key developments. In 2012, the state legislature blocked billions of dollars in federal aid to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. Further, in 2021, the legislature refused to pass any broad expansion of state and federal healthcare coverage for Texans without insurance.^[17] Given that access to health coverage is directly correlated with better health outcomes, these policy decisions continue to put childbearing people – particularly Black and working-class ones – at undue risk of maternal death.

The consequences of these developments are reflected in the report’s findings. The MMMRC found that six underlying conditions (obstetric hemorrhage, mental health conditions, non-cerebral thrombotic embolism, injury, cardiovascular conditions, and infection) accounted for 79% of all pregnancy-related deaths. Many of the factors that contributed to the onset of these conditions were social and environmental determinants of health that occurred over the course of the women’s lifespans. Limited access to financial resources, poor health literacy, and limited access to continuous care were all prominent factors. However – and this is significant – many of these conditions arose due to the failures of the providers, facilities, and healthcare systems meant to serve these women. Discrimination from providers and the healthcare system accounted for 12% of patient deaths. Providers’ poor clinical skill and care, failure to conduct adequate assessments for risk, delay in referring to or accessing treatment, and a lack of standardized policies and procedures at health facilities and within healthcare systems also played key roles. Black women, who already have the highest maternal mortality rate in the U.S., were disproportionately impacted.

The MMMRC noted that the following question guided their research: “If she had not been pregnant, would she have died?” I contend, however, that this question is both evasive and misguided. Instead, the MMMRC should have asked the following: if she were white or insured, would she have died? The results of the MMMRC’s report tell us the following: probably not. Indeed, as a historian of race of medicine, I believe that the results of the MMMRC’s report are entirely predictable. Yet, as a young, Black woman with aspirations to one day embark on my own personal journey with pregnancy and parenthood, I am terrified – and I know that I am not alone.

Yes, I can “quell my fears” and “protect and empower my future self” by learning how to navigate a medical system that is – both consciously and unconsciously – hostile to people like me. I can read the countless guides – in print and online – intended to instruct me on how to “advocate for myself” if faced with medical paternalism or discrimination. I can “find the right provider,” learn how to ask the “right questions,” or even “bring a companion” to my appointments to support me.

But a critical question remains. As a patient, why should I be responsible for ensuring that I receive the care that I deserve? Concerted and intentional action – such as introducing universal health care, investing in and partnering with communities, and changing the culture of medicine by foregrounding and addressing how race and racism structures medical education and practice – is long overdue. The lives of childbearing people, particularly Black and working-class ones, depend on it.

1. “What Are Maternal Morbidity and Mortality?,” National Institutes of Health (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services), accessed January 27, 2023, https://orwh.od.nih.gov/mmm-portal/what-mmm. ↑
2. What Are Maternal Morbidity and Mortality?,” National Institutes of Health (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services), accessed January 27, 2023, https://orwh.od.nih.gov/mmm-portal/what-mmm. ↑
3. Eleanor Klibanoff, “Delayed Texas Maternal Mortality Report to be Released Next Week, State Says,” The Texas Tribune, accessed February 27, 2023, December 9, 2023, https://www.texastribune.org/2022/12/09/texas-maternal-mortality-report/ ↑
4. Texas Maternal Mortality and Morbidity Review Committee and Department of State Health Services Joint Biennial Report 2022, Texas Department of State Health Services, December 2022. ↑
5. Mary Tuma, “’It’s Easy to Dismiss Black Women’s Lives’: Texas Drags Feet on Maternal Mortality Crisis,” The Guardian (Guardian News and Media, May 30, 2021), https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/may/30/texas-maternal-mortality-crisis-black-women-medicaid. ↑
6. Kennedy Sessions, “Texas Doctors Issue Dire Warning Ahead of State Maternal Death Report,” Chron (Houston Chronicle, December 10, 2022), https://www.chron.com/politics/texas/article/texas-pregnant-mortality-rate-17643565.php. ↑
7. Texas Maternal Mortality and Morbidity Review Committee and Department of State Health Services Joint Biennial Report 2022, Texas Department of State Health Services, December 2022. ↑
8. Texas Maternal Mortality and Morbidity Review Committee and Department of State Health Services Joint Biennial Report 2022, Texas Department of State Health Services, December 2022. ↑
9. Texas Maternal Mortality and Morbidity Review Committee and Department of State Health Services Joint Biennial Report 2022, Texas Department of State Health Services, December 2022. ↑
10. Texas Maternal Mortality and Morbidity Review Committee and Department of State Health Services Joint Biennial Report 2022, Texas Department of State Health Services, December 2022. ↑
11. Jennifer Lyle Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). ↑
12. “Severe Maternal Morbidity in Communities across Texas,” University of Texas System, August 31, 2020, https://utsystem.edu/offices/population-health/overview/severe-maternal-morbidity-texas. ↑
13. Mary Tuma, “’It’s Easy to Dismiss Black Women’s Lives’: Texas Drags Feet on Maternal Mortality Crisis,” The Guardian (Guardian News and Media, May 30, 2021), https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/may/30/texas-maternal-mortality-crisis-black-women-medicaid. ↑
14. Robin Fields, “Maternal Death Rates are Increasing in Texas, but Probably Not as Much as Officials Thought,” The Texas Tribune, January 4, 2018. https://www.texastribune.org/2018/01/04/maternal-deaths-are-increasing-texas-probably-not-much-officials-thoug/ ↑
15. Katha Pollott, “The Story Behind the Maternal Mortality Rate in Texas is Even Sader Than We Realize,” The Nation, September 8, 2016, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/the-story-behind-the-maternal-mortality-rate-in-texas-is-even-sadder-than-we-realize/ ↑
16. Boram Kim, “Texas Maintains Highest Uninsured Rate for Children and Adults in the Country at 18% in 2021,” State of Reform, September 20, 2022, https://stateofreform.com/featured/2022/09/texas-maintains-highest-uninsured-rate-for-children-and-adults-in-the-country-at-18-in-2021/. ↑
17. Karen Brooks Harper, “Texas House Votes down Budget Amendment Aimed at Giving Health Coverage to More Uninsured Texans,” The Texas Tribune (The Texas Tribune, April 22, 2021), https://www.texastribune.org/2021/04/22/texas-house-medicaid-expansion-uninsured/. ↑

We spent all of winter in the NICU. When I was 25 weeks pregnant, I went into preterm labor and gave birth to my daughter. She weighed just one pound 13 ounces and was barely one foot long. Having a micropreemie in the NICU feels like an alternate reality. Time stops working the way one is accustomed. There is a near-constant cacophony of alarms and beeping. A new vocabulary and calculus emerge: types of respiratory support, umbilical lines and PICC lines, blood gas readings, chest x-rays, oxygen pressure requirements, and the ranges and measurements for so many things happening in my daughter’s small body. There was a long list of things to be afraid of: brain bleeds, an often-fatal intestinal infection, sepsis, heart defects, and respiratory distress. I was thrown into a version of new motherhood I did not anticipate.

I had heard stories about Black women’s experiences during pregnancy and birth–stories of not being believed or listened to, of racist aggression from medical staff, of dying from largely preventable complications at much higher rates than other women. Somehow I thought my knowledge of these issues would protect me from experiencing them. I wanted a Black healthcare provider, but there were no Black midwives or obstetricians in Santa Barbara, California. While I met with an OB early on in my pregnancy, I ultimately sought care with a local midwifery practice. Although all of the midwives in the practice were white women, I thought this option would give me the best chance at having the home birth I wanted and avoiding an environment I knew could be deadly for Black women and babies. My own mother birthed me at home, and I always imagined myself doing the same. I envisioned my daughter’s birth as a ceremony to celebrate and welcome her. While I did not think that it would be easy or blissful, I was not prepared for the precarity of giving birth at 25 weeks.

Before my daughter was born, I felt like something was wrong. I explained my symptoms to my midwives and tried to advocate for myself, but I was told over and over again that everything was fine. One morning I woke up with dull back pain and cramping that came in waves. It quickly intensified, so my partner drove me to the hospital. The nurse who cared for me was an older white woman. She seemed irritated by my presence, and I knew that she didn’t believe my pain was as severe as I described. My partner, tracking the contractions with an app, showed the nurse that they were increasing in frequency and intensity. She examined me and insisted things were fine, that this was normal second-trimester pain and that the contractions would be more intense if I was actually in labor. My doctor came in briefly to talk to me but did not examine me. She did not treat me with antibiotics, despite my lab work from that morning indicating infection, a common cause of preterm birth. Instead, she sent me home and instructed me to take ibuprofen.

The medication gave me relief for several hours, but I woke up in the middle of the night in agony, with almost constant contractions. We rushed back to the hospital, where I waited in the lobby for nearly 20 minutes, bending over in the worst pain I have ever felt, before an impatient labor and delivery nurse finally came down to get me. Although I could barely walk to the elevator, I was not offered a wheelchair or assistance. Aside from my partner, I don’t think anyone believed I was actually in labor. When I was finally examined in the labor and delivery unit, my daughter’s foot was coming out of my vagina. Suddenly the room was full of people crowding around my exposed body, reaching inside me to confirm my baby’s position. The pain became too intense to speak or to even know who was speaking to me. I was rushed to the operating room for an emergency C-section and given a spinal block that sent a sharp jolt down my legs. Then the pain was gone. I felt pressure and stretching. My rounding body was suddenly empty, and then she was here. Her heart rate was very low, and she wasn’t breathing, but thankfully she was resuscitated quickly. I saw her for several seconds before they took her to the NICU.

In the NICU, the days of the week lost their significance. Leaving the hospital for the first time without my baby was devastating. I spent as much time as possible at the hospital, taking turns with my partner. We were not allowed to visit our child at the same time or visit more than once a day due to COVID-19 restrictions. I was enraged that there were rules dictating when I could see my own baby. I worried that something would happen to her when I was away, and I wouldn’t be able to get to the hospital fast enough. I worried that I would be exposed to COVID and unable to visit her for weeks. I worried that she missed me and wondered where I was. I worried that we would be less bonded because of the time I had to spend away from her.

My daughter’s doctors and nurses worked hard to keep her stable. She could not breathe or eat or maintain her temperature on her own. She received parenteral nutrition through a PICC line until her digestive system could handle small amounts of breast milk through a feeding tube. The list of medications keeping her alive felt endless: pulmonary surfactant to keep her lungs open, dopamine to maintain her blood pressure, phenobarbital to stop seizures, morphine and ativan to make her more comfortable and less agitated while she was intubated, caffeine to remind her to breathe, antibiotics to fight infection. I watched her through the thick plastic of the isolette, wishing desperately that she was still in my belly. Her eyes were still fused shut, and she had a perfect swirl of dark hair on her fragile head. I spoke to her quietly, read her my favorite Black feminist poems, and told her about all the people who loved her. I asked her to stay, if she could.

When she was eight days old, I held her for the first time. Her nurses and respiratory therapists carefully transferred her tiny body and the tangle of tubes, lines, and wires attached to her, to my chest. She felt impossibly small in my arms. During the almost four months that she was hospitalized, holding her was a brief reprieve from the chaos around us. I watched as other families took their babies home from the NICU – and then one day there was a mother who didn’t get to. I still think of her very often. Almost every day my daughter had episodes where she would abruptly stop breathing, resulting in her heart rate and oxygen levels dropping dangerously low. This was expected because of her prematurity. We were told she would grow out of the episodes, and she eventually did, but nothing can prepare you to watch your child stop breathing. There were constant reminders of how far we were from an ordinary newborn baby phase.

The doctor and the midwives who failed to take my concerns and symptoms seriously are revered in the community where I live. They are widely celebrated by other white women as the most progressive, feminist options for prenatal care. It has been dizzying to reflect on the medical neglect I experienced and the precarity of my daughter’s life alongside such admiration. This was supposed to be the best care I could get, and still my child almost died because my pain was dismissed. In the time since my daughter’s birth I have turned to Black and women of color feminist scholarship and writing to make sense of my experience, to find other stories of Black queer motherhood that would help me feel less alone. In the NICU I read Cherríe Moraga’s Waiting in the Wings, an account of queer, Chicana motherhood and the terrifying start to a premature baby’s life. I read Dána-Ain Davis’s research on preterm birth among Black women, from which I gained the language of obstetric racism to think about the circumstances of my daughter’s birth.^[1] I read Tressie McMillan Cottom’s and Congresswoman Cori Bush’s accounts of going into preterm labor and being violently dismissed by medical staff. Though these stories horrified me, they affirmed that I was not imagining what happened to me.

Lately, I am trying to feel okay with the way my belly spills over the waist of my pants and how my stretch marks have grown around my hips, toward my belly button. I have lost sensation there, a common result of c-sections. For some people, feeling does not return. Reckoning with my postpartum body, a source of joy and a site of trauma, has been challenging. It is hard to think that if I were someone else, someone in a different body, my words may have been heard by nurses and doctors, and my daughter’s entrance into the world might have been different. It is hard to carry the intimate knowledge that I could not protect my child from having to fight so hard just to live. Underneath my folded belly the scar is barely visible: a thin brown line just a few inches long. I look at it sideways in the mirror and think of my daughter’s chubby legs and head full of dark curls. I am amazed that she grew in my body. She came into the world through this small line that was once an opening. I remind myself that my belly was a portal.

1. Davis, Dána-Ain. Reproductive Injustice: Racism, Pregnancy, and Premature Birth. New York, USA: New York University Press, 2019. ↑

Karen Weingarten is a regular contributor to Nursing Clio and Associate Professor of English at Queens College, CUNY. She has just published a new book titled Pregnancy Test and is the author of Abortion in the American Imagination: Before Life and Choice, 1880- 1940.

Lara: How did you get interested in researching the history and culture of the pregnancy test?

Karen: I’ve been writing about the cultural history of abortion and other reproductive technologies since graduate school, but it was only when my sister had a miscarriage when she was eleven weeks pregnant that was then followed by a chemical pregnancy that I started thinking about the technology of the pregnancy test. She was taking a lot of tests, and when she had the chemical pregnancy after the miscarriage she was understandably upset. We both started to do some research about whether chemical pregnancies were miscarriages. (I know your book discusses this, but this was before it came out!) I knew chemical pregnancies were common and that most people didn’t even know they had one unless they were testing regularly for pregnancy. Still, I realized I had a lot to learn about how the home pregnancy test changed how we defined pregnancy and miscarriage, which led to this essay for Nursing Clio. Writing that piece made me realize I wanted to know even more about pregnancy testing, and Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series seemed like a good fit for this project.

The cover for Pregnancy Test, available for pre-order from Bloomsbury.

Lara: I was really struck by the book’s design, which goes marvelously well with its content–it’s a compact, sleek volume that fits easily in my hands and feels to me like it references the kind of instruction manual that might come with a pregnancy test, or a booklet on menstruation for teens. And in your book, the design of the pregnancy test is a major topic. Did you go into your research thinking about the history of design, or did that emerge as you worked?

Karen: To be honest, the history of design wasn’t something I thought about at all when I started my research. However, I saw Meg Crane’s name referenced in a few histories about the home pregnancy test. Meg, as I discuss in the book, designed one of the first home pregnancy tests for the pharmaceutical company Organon. Reading these brief histories raised more questions for me, and after some digging, I realized that Meg must still live in New York City (as I do). I looked up her phone number and left her a voicemail. A few days later she called me back (to my delight!). We had a few brief phone conversations, and then she invited me to her apartment where we talked for over two hours. Her story is so reflective of an era where women’s talents and contributions were dismissed that I knew I had to begin the book with it. Plus, it was fun to learn that the design of the first home pregnancy test led to romance!

Talking with Meg also made me realize how the design of objects, and especially reproductive objects, has often been overlooked. Meg designed the home pregnancy test taking into account what it would be like to use one as a woman, but as she pointed out to me in our conversation, the designers Organon had considered hiring for the home pregnancy test were all men who thought women needed “feminine” decorations to be persuaded to purchase such an object. As I finished writing Pregnancy Test, Michelle Millar Fisher and Amber Winick published their wonderful book Designing Motherhood; reading this book really emphasized to me how design, and especially the design of reproductive technologies, needs to be discussed more because the designs of these objects are political, and they shape how we live our reproductive lives.

Lara: Your interview with Meg Crane really is such a powerful source in your book. You drew upon an incredible variety of primary sources in your research, from interviews to TV and film to comment sections of pregnancy apps. If you had to pick one favorite source to share with Nursing Clio readers, what would it be? Are there any that you are particularly excited to use in your teaching?

Karen: This is such a great question! I felt lucky to be working on this topic at a time when EBSCO provides a full-text, full-color, searchable database for women’s magazines from the nineteenth century to the late twentieth century. It was fascinating and revealing to see how mainstream women’s magazines like Redbook, Cosmopolitan, and Chatelaine featured advice columns, news articles, and advertisements about advances in pregnancy testing. Having access to this database (through the New York Public Library) completely changed my project because it gave me a textured sense of how home pregnancy testing was presented and received when it was first made available. Women’s magazines also depict how sexism and assumptions about women’s bodies shaped reproductive norms in ways that continue today, even if some advancements have been made. It was through reading women’s magazines that I also learned about innovations in pregnancy testing. Because so many of these innovations were commercial, there weren’t medical articles or even news stories about them. Often, they were just announced in advice columns in magazines or in advertisements.

I’ve started to use digital archives like these in my teaching, especially in courses that ask students to situate literature historically. Students love being able to find cool, surprising things in old magazines and newspapers, and I love seeing them discover how norms can change so quickly, even over just a few decades.

Lara: Your own and your sister’s personal stories, too, figure as sources in your book. I can relate, because my own miscarriage was what sparked me to research and write The Myth of the Perfect Pregnancy. Here at Nursing Clio, and in the history of women’s health more generally, the personal is historical. Have you found that people share their own stories when they learn what you’ve been researching? Have any of those stories surprised you, or shaped your research direction?

Karen: Yes, I’ve definitely heard some interesting stories. My favorites have been from people who used home pregnancy tests in the 1970s and 80s and haven’t thought about them since. Then, while hearing about my research, they’ll all of a sudden remember their old-school pregnancy test, and they’ll tell me how odd it is to recall that they used this little chemistry set to learn that they were pregnant. People also loved to tell me about TV shows where pregnancy testing plays a role. I started collecting references from people because every time I talked about my book someone would say, “Oh, that reminds me of that episode in Friends or Roseanne.” Or “GLOW just had an episode with a pregnancy test from 1980.” I couldn’t include all the references in this book, but I’m writing another article about this now!

A “ClearBlue” home pregnancy test system from the 1980s. (Courtesy Wikimedia)

Lara: I’m looking forward to seeing what else you’ve found!

One last question: after the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, pregnancy testing seems like it could be a double-edged sword: potentially empowering, but also potentially coercive and menacing in certain circumstances. What does the history tell us we should be attending to with regard to the pregnancy test’s future?

Karen: Yes, absolutely. I discuss this in the afterword, which I wrote days after the Supreme Court overturned Roe. While the home pregnancy test will always be a helpful and necessary tool for abortion access because it allows people to confirm whether they’re pregnant without consulting a doctor or anyone in a medical establishment, it can potentially be used coercively to identify whether someone is pregnant and trying to seek an illegal abortion. One thing I learned when doing research for this book is that pregnancy testing was used against women almost from its invention. You can collect urine from employees or people seeking welfare services under all kinds of premises, and they’ll never know whether their urine was tested for pregnancy. Employers have used that knowledge to deny women jobs, and it’s not hard to imagine some states using this knowledge in our post-Dobbs world to prosecute women if they suspect they sought an illegal abortion. As I discuss in the book, there have been science fictional representations of these kinds of scenarios, but these days, it’s not hard to imagine that fiction becoming reality. While the home pregnancy test has transformed our relationship to pregnancy diagnosis and led to more medical autonomy, I wish we lived in a world where no one had to worry about how a pregnancy diagnosis might be used against them.

Lara: I completely agree. Thank you for speaking with me about your book. I hope readers will find it an inspiration and resource for thinking about reproductive pasts and futures.

Karen Weingarten’s book comes out March 9, and is available for preorder.

For most of last year, I worried that I’d broken my brain. As an academic whose job entails creating knowledge, this was utterly terrifying. I could still write, but getting words on the page was difficult and painfully slow. As I tried to rehab my writing muscles, I realized I’d missed a key warning sign. Before my writing began to hurt, my interest in cooking had completely disappeared. This should have been a huge red flag because I’m a food media scholar. My intellectual life literally revolves around food. For Nursing Clio alone, I’ve written about sad salads, butter, comfort food, dude food, Super Bowl food, microwave cookbooks, and women nutrition scientists. Even as my academic work led me deeper into the endlessly satisfying world of food, my personal eating life crumbled around me like a slice of burnt toast. My reserves of time and energy dried up. I struggled to feed myself well on a daily basis, let alone enjoy cooking to nurture anyone else.

Academic turned culture writer Anne Helen Petersen felt something similar in 2019. She wrote an essay on millennial burnout that went viral and inspired a book. After organizing her life around work (particularly working hard and all the time) her burnout manifested as “errand paralysis,” or when small and mundane tasks feel insurmountable.

Despite rallying cries to become “slow professors” and embrace “rest is resistance” as an ally, and recent books “unraveling faculty burnout,” working hard and all the time is still common in academia. And despite reading these books myself, I still felt like I had to work to such lengths as I checked off professional milestones — graduate degrees, publications, a faculty position, and the almighty tenure dossier. As I did, my desire to cook and any pleasure I once found in it withered further and further away as culinary errand paralysis took over, worsening with each passing semester, compounding from year to year. Simple things (try a new recipe, plan more than microwavable lunches, deal with leftovers) became seemingly impossible hurdles.

As a graduate of Boston University’s Gastronomy Program (founded by culinary luminaries Julia Child and Jacques Pépin) this feels like a grave confession. Foodies, after all, aren’t just folks who love to eat. They embrace every aspect of food, folding it into their identities with an artisan-crafted wooden spoon.

Emily Contois’s Diners, Dudes, and Diets is now available from University of North Carolina Press. (Courtesy Emily Contois and UNC Press)

What’s more, long standing gender conventions often fuse femininity to domesticity and food labor.^[1] While that’s socially constructed B.S., the truth is that even as a woman without children to feed and with a husband who self-sufficiently cooks and feeds himself a muscle-building diet focused on “macros” and “positive nitrogen balance,” I feel like I’m not pulling off any semblance of a food life very well.

For a while, this cooking chasm was concerning and embarrassing (I teach a course on Food Media for goodness sakes!), but now I recognize it as a burnout symptom. Even if I can’t fix it immediately, I want to better understand it. I’m an academic, so I turned to the literature.

I started with one of my favorite books, Laura Shapiro’s delicious history of mid-century cooking, Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America. I’m not alone in feeling like a cooking flop, as she writes, “The kitchen has always been the place where housewives who feel inadequate must confront their own failings day after day, where guilt runs like tap water and the possibility of disappointing the family burns endlessly.”^[2]

Beyond a personal sense of failure, the question of cooking, or not, points to a more universal conundrum. Food anthropologist Carole Counihan (who I first met on the page during an early semester as a Gastronomy student and later became a mentor) writes, “Across cultures and history, food work can represent drudgery and oppression but also power and creativity.”^[3] There it is in black and white. No matter the culture, time, or place, food has represented labor and leisure, drudgery and joy, necessary duty and creative expression. I’d drowned that already tenuous dynamic in overwork. I had to right the balance.

Luckily, women authors (burned out and otherwise) have deftly navigated these tensions in cookbooks, especially three moderately polemic figures who I affectionately refer to on a first name basis: Poppy Cannon, Peg Bracken, and Sandra Lee. Their cookbooks live in my work office on campus, though there are cookbooks throughout my home, too: atop the fridge in my kitchen, on top of the dining hutch, and they fill a shelf in a bookcase otherwise dedicated to literature, just below my favorite books by Haruki Murakami, Ann Patchett, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the Brontë sisters.

Another bookish figure, Poppy Cannon published The Can-Opener Cookbook in 1952 to much initial consternation between “scornful old-line gourmets and delighted busy housewives.”^[4] She promised a seeming oxymoron: easy haute cuisine made from packaged foods, glamorized recipes supposedly perfect for those short on time or lacking intuition in the kitchen. It was so successful, marvelously unimaginatively named sequels followed — The New Can-Opener Cookbook in 1959 and The New New Can-Opener Cookbook in 1968. Each edition offered recipes like Blushing Bunny, a can of tomato soup enhanced with milk, egg yolks, mustard, and American cheese.

In The I Hate to Cook Book sequel, Hilary Knight’s illustrated cook frowns indignantly, furrows her brow, and squints up at the chef’s hat, questioning the presence and power of beleaguered culinary expectation.

Peg Bracken also found great success with The I Hate to Cook Book, published in 1960. Peg didn’t actually abhor culinary tasks, but the book’s candid title and humorous contents struck a chord with readers. It sold more than 3 million copies and launched a sequel full of recipes like Bastard Barbecue, Blender Coleslaw, and Immediate Fudge Cake.^[5]

Beyond Peg’s quirky approach, I love Hilary Knight’s illustrations throughout the book, including the short-haired woman on the book’s cover. With an exaggerated giraffe-like neck, she wears a white chef’s toque atop her head. However, it literally and figuratively doesn’t fit, as it slides down her forehead and covers her eyebrows. On her, it’s a dunce cap. She stares out at us, eyes wide with panic and perhaps a bit of worry. Her lips pull into a tight, tense line, as her cheeks glow red with some combination of exertion, stress, or even embarrassment. It’s an expression I know all too well myself.

Whereas I didn’t learn of Poppy or Peg until graduate school, I knew Sandra from the Food Network, where her Semi-Homemade Cooking with Sandra Lee first aired in 2003 when I was in high school. Sandra Lee was born in 1966, shortly after Poppy and Peg’s cookbooks came out and were in regular circulation. Carrying on Poppy’s legacy, Sandy made a career out of glamorizing. She combined branded packaged food with a few fresh ingredients, yielding partly-homemade creations, along with festive “tablescapes.” In 2002, her first cookbook promised “cooking fast and fabulous — nothing is made from scratch,” an inversion of foodie devotion to artisanal cooking.

Sandra, Poppy, and Peg each offered a solution to women and other cooks who felt overly tasked with feeding others. They found a voracious audience and sold millions of cookbooks. But what about someone like me, who’s currently struggling just to feed myself? Someone who finds herself subsisting on a buffet of misfit snacks: granola bars and dried apricots, strawberry protein shakes and string cheese?

Judith Jones (famed editor of food stars Julia Child, James Beard, and Edna Lewis) probably would have clicked her tongue at me. As part of her food publishing legacy, she wrote The Pleasures of Cooking for One. After the death of her husband, she was cooking just for herself, leading her to consider people in similar situations, including those “who have been too busy with their careers, but who like good food and gradually come to feel that they’ve been missing something.”^[6]

I suppose I am stuck in this gradual process.

Wading through the muck of my un-cooking moment, I can’t help but think of first wave feminists who imagined cooking as a collective duty, one distributed over a neighborhood, so that the necessity and joy of eating could be shared by all. A version of that arrangement saves me now. Last semester, I became my university’s faculty in residence, living in a dorm with about eighty students. After a long day of work, I get to stroll into the campus dining hall, swipe my card, and have someone else cook — someone else feed and nourish me — during this strange time when I struggle to do so myself.

In her cookbook sequel, Peg Bracken humorously quips, “You don’t recover from hating to cook, any more than you get over having big feet.”^[7] Like Peg, I don’t actually hate to cook. I just hate how tired and exhausted I am after focusing too intensely and for too long on my career at the expense of everything else. I wish I had quick tricks and favorite recipes to recommend for anyone feeling the same struggles. I can say after some winter break rest, my brain is finally starting to feel ready to write again — huzzah! But I haven’t cured the errand paralysis that plagues my cooking. Not yet. Truly addressing my burnout will take more than just a couple weeks off. But as I heal, Poppy, Peg, Sandra, and Judith will cheer me on from the kitchen sidelines. If you need a culinary helping hand, I’m sure they’ll reach out for you, too. So will I.

Acknowledgements
Thank you to friends and scholars KC Hysmith and Diana Garvin for their feedback on this essay, as well as Nursing Clio editor Kristin Brig-Ortiz — and thanks to all the cooks and temporary un-cooks on social media who shared their stories with me as I endeavored to write this essay, one slow and painful word at a time.

It’s been 10 years since archaeologists discovered Richard III’s skeleton under a parking lot in Leicester, England. But historians haven’t yet rewritten Richard’s biography to include this medieval English king’s experience with disability.^[1]

The 2012 discovery of Richard III’s skeleton confirmed his physical disability as historical fact, upending the certainties of earlier scholars who thought it was fabricated by his political enemies. The Tudor historians of the sixteenth century did not invent Richard’s disability but did exaggerate it greatly: the exhumed skeleton shows signs of scoliosis, a sideways curvature of the spine, and perhaps uneven shoulders, but not kyphosis, the medical term for what Shakespeare called a “bunch-back.”^[2] Shakespeare and his contemporaries also treated it as a congenital condition when in all likelihood Richard’s scoliosis did not surface until his adolescence.^[3]

These findings carry the potential for authentic historical disability representation—disability visibility in history. With a little imagination, we can consider the experience of a privileged young Plantagenet noble becoming disabled, and its impact on his mind, emotions, family, and society.

Portrait of Richard III. (Flickr)

Because of Richard’s nobility, many records of his life exist, including the prayer book dating his birth at Fotheringhay Castle to October 2, 1452. Unlike five of his siblings, Richard survived infancy. War was all around, but he lived a comfortable childhood, bouncing from one castle to another—private education from tutors, military training on horseback. At eight years old, he lost his father to the war. A year later, his older brother Edward became king, and Richard became Duke of Gloucester, aged nine.

If it was during his teenage years that Richard developed scoliosis, whom did he tell when his body started changing?^[4] His mother? His brothers? His friends? A doctor? Many with scoliosis don’t experience pain during the early years. Did others at Middleham Castle in Yorkshire, where Richard spent his formative years, know about his condition? Did cruel kids tease him? If he did experience taunts or isolation, it didn’t stop Richard from fathering two children out of wedlock, probably during his late teen years.

Did scoliosis affect nineteen-year-old Richard’s mobility during his first combat experience at the Battles of Barnet and Tewkesbury in 1471? What conversations about his back did Richard have with his wife, Anne, whom he married in 1472?

His spine’s curvature would have increased as he aged to adulthood. Did his lower back start hurting during travels across England on horseback? Did he pass as able-bodied? Did those who knew pity Richard? Did they pray for him, whisper behind his back, stare, or look away? How much of Richard’s life can be approximated by way of analogy to modern accounts of the mental and social experiences of people with scoliosis?^[5]

Richard would have had access to doctors that commoners did not. These doctors may have tried a brace or stretching his spine with ropes. And Richard would have needed to manage the pain of these medical procedures.^[6]

As he gathered lands and alliances, building a stronghold of power in northern England during his twenties, did the adult Richard consider scoliosis to be a central feature of his identity, or was it no big deal? Did his impairment cause physical limitations—a disability? Did he encounter a society not built for people with lessened mobility—another level of disability? Did people who knew of his scoliosis mistreat him because of it—yet another layer? Maybe Anne would massage his back, a moment of intimacy that would have been missed if Richard hadn’t been disabled.

Perhaps his brothers and their wives made snide remarks during their frequent feuds. His disability could have contributed to Richard’s withdrawal from meetings at court, starting in 1478. As Richard became Lord Protector over his nephew, Edward V, how often did he think about his back—hardly ever, daily, once an hour, all the time? People with disabilities know that they’re never far from your mind, even if you never talk about them.

Maybe Richard dismissed concerns about his health when asked but managed the pain in private. Maybe he joked about his body to deflect attention. Did he adjust his saddle or combat style? Did he meet others with scoliosis and form bonds?

People probably read religious significance into his body. Disability may have informed Richard’s religious piety, which is thought to have been genuine. Did he seek miraculous healing through the Church? Was charity offered where not wanted? Well-intentioned gestures can be more of a burden than a blessing.

Perhaps he identified with physically disabled characters from the Bible (Mephibosheth, Herod, people healed in the Gospels). Or from classical literature (Hephaestus, Thersites, Oedipus, Aesop). Or English history and literature (from the Fisher King to the beggars in Piers Plowman). All of these characters would have been familiar to Richard, as they are represented in his personal library.^[7]

There is no record of anyone during Richard’s lifetime suggesting his disability was socially or politically disqualifying. He became the richest and most powerful landowner in England and king in 1483. Did King Richard disrupt assumptions about disability and what disabled people could do? About royalty and who could be king? How did people read Richard in light of the king’s two bodies—a disabled “body natural” paired with an idealized “body politic”?^[8]

He changed clothes several times on his coronation day, perhaps with others around. What did the archbishop of Canterbury think at the coronation, when Richard dropped his purple velvet gown to be anointed on the head, hands, and heart?

There was often music and dance in the York courts, and Richard joined in. During his twenty-six months on the throne, was he able to govern without people constantly thinking about his disability? Or was he questioned? Always wondering whether others were thinking about his body?

How often did he see a doctor? His royal physician, William Hobbes, likely consulted Avicenna’s Canon of Medicine. It may have taken Richard longer to dress, or travel, or catch his breath as he aged. Perhaps he took days off work, downtime allowing Richard to think, read, and talk with loved ones.

Richard’s scoliosis seems to have borne no significant relationship to his political crimes against his family or his legislative accomplishments on behalf of people living in poverty. His complexity of character, which historians have debated for centuries, is only deepened by the discovery of his scoliosis and questions about how or when it may have mattered in his daily life—or not. Richard III is a disability icon precisely because the fullness of his life is neither separable from nor reducible to disability.

Did Richard and Anne’s son, Edward, who lived to be ten years old, ask him questions about his body? When Anne died less than a year later, was Richard’s scoliosis one of the “tribulations, griefs and anguishes” he asked God to free him from in his prayer book? Did disability cause frustration? Resentment? Limited breathing during extended physical exertion, like that experienced by Dominic Smee, a twenty-first-century person with a scoliosis similar to Richard’s whom Channel 4 recruited to study Richard’s physicality? In his own recreation of Richard’s experience in battle, Smee found that his scoliosis wasn’t really a hindrance on the battlefield.

Richard’s ribs likely bulged up on one side of his back when, after his death in battle at thirty-two years old, he was stripped and tossed over a horse. As Richard’s corpse was stabbed and desecrated, some would have seen a disability they never knew about. Did they mock the body of their enemy? Stab around his spine on purpose? Express political hatred through violence upon disability?

The discovery of Richard’s disability creates questions that the historical record doesn’t answer. We are forced into guesswork that bridges emerging knowledge about disability in medieval England with the possible beliefs and behaviors of Richard’s friends and enemies. We are brought to question how much the lived experience of scoliosis in the twenty-first century might illuminate the daily life of a medieval king. The only certainty is that the years ahead will bring historians to confront the disability experience in Richard III’s life as much as he did himself.

• Good biographies include Charles Ross, Richard III (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981); David Horspool, Richard III: A Ruler and His Reputation (London: Bloomsbury, 2015); and Michael Hicks, Richard III: The Self-Made King (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019). ↑
• The second edition of Shakespeare’s Richard III (1598) contains the first English instance of the word “hunch-backt,” a misprint for “bunch-bckt,” which appears in all other editions. ↑
• Jo Appleby, Piers D. Mitchell, Claire Robinson, Alison Brough, Guy Rutty, Russell A. Harris, David Thompson, et al., “The Scoliosis of Richard III, Last Plantagenet King of England: Diagnosis and Clinical Significance,” The Lancet 383, no. 9932 (May 2014): 1944. ↑
• Up to this point, the most historically informed recovery of Richard’s disability experience in medieval England is Mary Ann Lund, “Richard’s Back: Death, Scoliosis and Myth Making,” Medical Humanities 41, no. 2 (2015): 89–94. ↑
• See for example Elisabetta d’Agata, Enjoy Life with Idiopathic Scoliosis during Adolescence: Psychology for Professionals of Scoliosis (Barcelona: Junio, 2019). ↑
• Good guides to medieval medical and cultural conventions of disability come in two books from Irina Metzler, Disability in Medieval Europe: Thinking about Physical Impairment in the High Middle Ages, c.1100–c.1400 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006) and A Social History of Disability in the Middle Ages: Cultural Considerations of Physical Impairment (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013). ↑
• See A. F. Sutton and L. Visser-Fuchs, Richard III’s Books: Ideal and Reality in the Life of a Medieval Prince (Stroud: Sutton, 1997). ↑
• See Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957). ↑

On a Thursday morning in 1726, French colonial officials in Pondichéry – France’s principal colonial holding on India’s southeastern coast – received word that a dead body had been discovered at the bottom of a well. The governor of Pondichéry dispatched three officials to investigate the report. The officials quickly located the body and identified the dead man as the French soldier Le Bel, but it would take over three hours of interviewing witnesses before they began to make sense of his death.^[1]

Le Bel’s wife, Marie-Anne, stated that a loud splash in the home’s well had roused her early that morning. Realizing she was alone in bed, Marie-Anne went in search of her husband. She found herself in the courtyard, gazing into the family’s well, when she discovered her husband’s body. Marie-Anne began to scream, and two men nearby quickly arrived to help. When questioned by the officials, both men confirmed that they had seen Le Bel in the well and that, although they had retrieved him, he was already dead. The investigators returned to their questioning of Marie-Anne, asking her if she knew why her husband might have been in the courtyard. She replied that Le Bel had been sick for ten months with a “lung abscess.”^[2] The investigators confirmed Le Bel’s illness with the surgeon-major, Antoine Ferrier, who also testified that he found neither contusions nor wounds on the body that might indicate foul play. Thus, in Ferrier’s professional opinion, there could be but one cause of death: the illness from Le Bel’s lung had “transport au cerveau” – gone to his head – something Ferrier claimed had happened before. Ferrier concluded that Le Bel, during a delusion, had thrown himself into the well and drowned.^[3]

Courtesy France, Archives Nationales d’Outre Mer (INDE, P 014, ff.89 (1718)).

Just six weeks after Le Bel’s death, officials in Pondichéry investigated the death of a seventy-five-year-old local South Asian man named Canagesabay.^[4] Again, investigators were called to inspect the events surrounding the death. The investigators spoke with Canagesabay’s brother and his two sons, and all three men recounted that Canagesabay had suffered from serious stomach pains that had become increasingly worse over the last year.^[5] They reported that Canagesabay had become so ill during the last month that he could eat “only milk and sugar.”^[6] The day before he died, Canagesabay was in such pain he requested a doctor, who subsequently prescribed some unspecified remedies. Canagesabay’s brother and sons stated that just as day was breaking, they awoke to the sound of screams coming from the street. Running outside, the three men saw Canagesabay hanging from a tree.

After his family brought him back to the house, Canagesabay survived for another half-hour before dying. According to the investigator’s report, the three men also claimed that Canagesabay had announced six months earlier that he wanted to throw himself into the street in front of the house – implying some forethought in ending his life.^[7] Surgeon-major Antoine Ferrier, the same man who decided Le Bel’s case, ruled Canagesabay’s cause of death as “strangulation” resulting from the hanging, without any indication he considered the chronic illness as a mitigating condition as it had been in Le Bel’s case.

Much of Canagesabay’s story parallels that of Le Bel: a chronic physical ailment preceded and seemingly precipitated self-inflicted death. Yet, early modern Europeans were hardly equitable when it came to the application of medical grace, especially when it came to any social “others.” The outcomes of the two cases were decidedly different since, as we will see, the conclusions of suspicious deaths were influenced by investigators’ perceptions of race and social status.

The findings in these two cases reflected a broader shift in Europeans’ mindsets regarding suicide. By the seventeenth century, public officials in France and elsewhere increasingly concerned themselves with suicide as a matter of public order and as part of a larger effort to investigate the circumstances around suspicious deaths. This greater attention to the circumstances of death contributed to what has been called a “medicalization” of suicide, especially at the turn of the eighteenth century. Testimonies from investigations into reported suicides revealed that witnesses and family members began amplifying connections between chronic illness and suicide during this period. Official reports, witness statements, and even interviews with survivors made references to “melancholy, mental and physical maladies over which they reputedly had no control.”^[8] These investigations – both in the metropole and in the colonies – emphasized the existence of new reasonings and attitudes that tied chronic illness to suicide. With these new rationalizations explaining the circumstances, negative associations with the act of suicide lessened and mitigated some of its social and legal implications.^[9] In a way, these changes made such deaths more palatable and prosecuted less harshly.

As we can see, the findings of the Le Bel investigation in Pondichéry aligned with similar thinking in the metropole. Transport au cerveau was a medical term professionals used to signify the progression of a physical illness towards affecting one’s mental capacity.^[10] Ferrier’s assessment of Le Bel’s cause of death fit with a growing tendency among medical, legal, and judicial officials to embrace the reasoning that people deemed to have committed suicide could not be held responsible for their actions. This maneuvering allowed the officials to work around the dictate in French law and (inconsistently applied) criminal sentence requiring French subjects who were determined to have committed suicide to hang by their feet in the gallows; have their bodies dragged through the street; be denied Christian burial; as well as have their personal goods and assets confiscated. The seizure and the subsequent management of those goods could be a messy and complicated practice. The implications for such seizures on estates in the colonial setting, which might span the globe, could be even more unwieldy.^[11] By concluding that French subjects were legally not at fault in their own deaths, probates might be more easily managed by heirs and less detrimental to social order in communities.

Courtesy France, Archives Nationales d’Outre Mer (INDE, P 006, ff.109).

Le Bel himself was certainly concerned with his post-mortem estate. Just days before his death, Le Bel had written a note on the very subject.^[12] In the letter, Le Bel empowered Monsieur Dugué – one of the men who had helped hoist his dead body from the well – to “sell the effects in [his] godown” (basement, or cellar room of a house used for storage). The proceeds of the sale would settle debts that Le Bel owed around the city, including a bequest of 20 pagodes to the city’s Capuchins to fund two masses for him. Le Bel’s careful manipulation of legal probate practices demonstrates his broader awareness that officials would be likely to view his apparent suicide as an act beyond his personal control, particularly in the context of his well-known chronic illness.

While officials had accepted the medical circumstances of Le Bel’s death at face value, they approached Canagesabay’s presumed suicide with greater skepticism. Upon finishing the report, the investigators presented their findings to the Superior Council–the city’s highest legal and administrative authority. After reviewing the information, the authorities condemned Canagesabay, who was himself a French subject as a resident of Pondichéry, to a sinner’s death. The Superior Council ordered his body to be hung by his feet from the tree where he had killed himself until sunset, after which he was to be thrown into the street.^[13] The disparate treatment of the suicides of Le Bel and of Canagesabay raises the question of why some were afforded the grace of suicide’s medicalization when others were not.

Though Enlightenment thinkers had established greater links between (temporary) madness and suicide, not everyone could lay claims on such explanations. Women were usually excluded from such explanations, ironically, due to the perception their physical/corporeal weakness made them more susceptible to chronic mental hysteria.^[14] And, though seemingly inconsistent, this susceptibility frequently prevented investigators from attributing such deaths to temporary mental incapacity. Similarly, according to some French doctors, South Asians were “nearly all weak and feminized.”^[15] These sentiments extended to men like Canagesabay, linking their status as a racialized-other with established beliefs of female predisposition to physical weaknesses.^[16] When confronted with the death of South Asian others, investigators were predisposed to blame the death on perceived inferiorities associated with the increasingly racialized identities of the deceased.

The officials’ inherent distrust of South Asian residents is further evidenced by the fact that none of the investigators chose to confirm Canagesabay’s chronic illness. This may have stemmed from the fact that South Asians in Pondichéry rarely sought out French medical remedies, and French officials rarely interacted with South Asian medical practitioners. Even at the end of his illness (and as he had likely done previously), Canagesabay sought out a South Asian rather than a European medical practitioner for remedies. Given this divide, Ferrier or others in the French medical marketplace were likely unaware of Canagesabay’s struggle with chronic illness.. Even if the officials had confirmed Canagesabay’s illness with his doctor, there is little reason to believe this information would have changed the results. The French were skeptical about the skills of local practitioners. One traveling doctor noted that “Hindu doctors […] are men without study, science, or any knowledge of anatomy.”^[17] The separation between Franco-European and South Asian medical knowledge proved just another barrier to allowing grace towards Canagesabay’s actions.

Circumstances surrounding suspicious death in Pondichéry, given the distance from the metropole, became fresh canvases where investigators painted complex narratives of human motivation.^[18] Like all forms of violence, perceptions of and responses to suicide in the eighteenth century were deeply tied to legal, social, and intellectual contexts. Diverse people committed suicide for diverse reasons, even if official investigations shaped subsequent narratives. The medically produced fictions around one corpse might not fit for another. Clearly, both Le Bel and Canagesabay battled chronic illness at the end of their lives. While that struggle might have offered new medicalized explanations for their actions – and have absolved them of responsibility – deeply ingrained social and cultural prejudices profoundly colored their stories and, likely, their families’ grief.

1. All citations regarding the cadaver of Le Bel can be found in France, Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer [Hereafter FR, ANOM], INDE, P 029, ff.87-88, Procès-Verbal d’un cadavre trouvé noyé. ↑
2. FR, ANOM, INDE, P 029, ff.87 : “elle nous avait répondu qu’étant malade depuis dix mois d’un abcès au poumon, ce que nous avait confirmé a dit Sr. Ferrier.” ↑
3. FR, ANOM, INDE, P 029, ff.87 : “[il] aurait déclaré que sa maladie lui aurait pu causer un transport au cerveau, lui étant déjà arrivé plusieurs fois pendant sa maladie […]” ↑
4. FR, ANOM, INDE, P 029, ff.123-124, Procès-Verbal d’un cadavre trouvé pendu. ↑
5. FR, ANOM, INDE, P 029, ff.123 : “ils ont dit que ledit Canagasaby était malade depuis environs quatre ans d’un malade ventre lequel était devenu très cruel depuis un an […]” ↑
6. FR, ANOM, INDE, P 029, ff.123 : “ […] manger depuis environ un mois que du lait et du sucre.” ↑
7. FR, ANOM, INDE, P 029, ff.123-124 : “qu’il y a environ six mois que ledit Canagesabay se voulu jeter dans une rue de sa maison […] ” ↑
8. Jeffrey R. Watt, ed., From Sin to Insanity: Suicide in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 2004), 6. ↑
9. For an expansive introduction, see Kevin Siena, “Suicide as an Illness Strategy in the Long Eighteenth Century,” in Histories of Suicide: International Perspectives on Self-Destruction in the Modern World, ed. John Weaver and David Wright, (University of Toronto Press, 2009), 53–72. ↑
10. “transport,” in Le Dictionnaire des arts et des sciences. tome 2, (Paris,1694), 513. ↑
11. Laurie M Wood, “Recovering the Debris of Fortunes between France and Its Colonies in the 18th Century,” Journal of Social History 51, no. 4 (June 1, 2018): 808–36. ↑
12. FR, ANOM, INDE, P 029 ff.89 : “Quittance de Le Bel” ↑
13. FR, ANOM, INDE, P 029, ff. 124 : “nous ordonnons que le corps mort dudit Canagesabay sera pendu par les pieds de même arbre ou il s’est pendu, et y restera exposé jusques au soleil coucher après quoi il sera jeté à la voirie…” ↑
14. See Evelyne Berriot-Salvador, “The Discourse of Medicine and Science” in Natalie Zemon Davis et al., A History of Women in the West, Vol 3: Renaissance and Enlightenment Paradoxes, (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992), 348-388. ↑
15. Bibliothèque de l’Académie nationale de médecine, La Société Royale de Médecine, Carton 182, Dossier 4. ↑
16. Aristotle’s climate-based somatic theory, which equated negative effeminate characteristics with non-white bodies, was increasingly popular among Enlightenment thinkers including Montesquieu, Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, fourth edition., New Approaches to European History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 47-50. ↑
17. Mr. D.L.F “Traité des Maladies Particulières aux Pays orientaux et dans la Route et de leurs Remèdes” in Luillier, Nouveau Voyage aux Grandes Indes avec une instruction pour le Commerce des Indes Orientales. (Paris, 1726), 213: “Les médecins gentils […] sont gens sans étude, sans sciences & sans aucune lumière de l’anatomie […]” ↑
18. Le Bel and Canagesabay are hardly alone in this story, as the notarial and criminal records of Pondichéry contain numerous more cadaver reports–some suspicious, some not. ↑

In Wonder Foods: The Science and Commerce of Nutrition, Lisa Haushofer (Senior Research Associate in the History of Medicine Department at the University of Zurich) offers a vital history of our relationship with food, which is often easily distracted by the latest “superfood” or nutrition fad. She analyzes four “wonder foods” that gripped American and British food culture from the 1840s through the 1940s. Rather than a linear story of scientific discovery followed by commercial application, Haushofer’s book documents how nineteenth-century nutrition science and food business fueled one another, often working in lockstep. This cooperative relationship led to at least two deleterious results. First, it exacerbated food inequalities on a global scale. These nutrition-infused business relationships spawned a slew of products that realized an economic worldview that valorized efficiency, productivity, and value, while promoting imperialism, extractive logics, market-driven solutions, and white supremacist imperatives. Second, the partnership between nutrition and commerce shifted consumers’ food outlook toward not only nutrients but also products, particularly those that made (and make) miraculous promises. For all they inspire, wonder foods have done little to address food insecurity or malnutrition, which is by design. But, as Haushofer shows so well, they’ve done much to create current Western food systems, shape food cultures, guide humanitarian efforts, and impose a limited view of our food future that needs more inclusive reimagining.

(Courtesy University of California Press)

Emily: Congratulations, Lisa, on this wonderful book, and thanks for chatting with me! I love to judge a book by its cover, so let’s start there. How did you and your publisher select the archival image for the book’s cover, which also appears in chapter 4? What do you hope it visually communicates to readers about what “wonder foods” are and what they can teach us?

Lisa: I’m so glad you asked about the cover — I adore it. The cover design is by Glynnis Koike, a graphic designer and illustrator who specializes in comics and zines . The historical image on the cover accompanied an article in a medical journal on the supposedly “digestive” effects of

alleksana

extract, one of many wonder foods marketed during the late 19th-century obsession with digestive enzymes. The two tubes supposedly illustrate the before and after of food digestion with papaya extract. Publishing a colored image was quite unusual for a medical journal during this time. It only makes sense when you understand it as a product of a commercial-scientific culture that systematically blurred the boundaries between scientific product testing and product promotion. The image illustrates the close ties between nutrition science and commerce, as well as the typical side-by-side of substance and spectacle in such products, both central themes of the book.

The fad which this product forms a part of–so-called “pre-digested” or “artificially digested” foods–was also informed by racist and eugenicist ideas to restore “degenerate” and “over-civilized” white digestive systems to their original strength. It’s one of several examples I use in the book to show how wonder foods were never purely about scientific/technological advances but also about who was deemed worthy of eating, digesting, and thriving.

Emily: I’m always fascinated by how writers organize their books, and yours is both elegant and efficient. Chapters progress chronologically as they explore four wonder foods that each represent the nutritional fascinations of particular historical moments: Gail Borden’s meat biscuit (1840s-1860s), Benger’s self-digestive gruel (1870s-1890s), John Harvey Kellogg’s health-food breakfast cereal (1890s-1920s), and Fleischmann’s yeast (1920s-1940s). How did you come to this structure and to select these particular products to chart this wonder foods history?

Lisa: The idea to structure the book around products came partly from the exposure I’ve had in the past to museums, exhibitions, and teachers in the history of science and medicine who liked to think with things. Material objects and experimental setups shape the production of knowledge, which is a lesson that struck me as a graduate student. In the book, I show how nutritional products were not just commercial applications of nutritional knowledge produced elsewhere. They were an integral part of wrestling with big nutritional questions such as how does food nourish, where exactly does digestion happen, how can sufficient food be produced for a growing number of people, and so on.

I also liked the narrative structure that a focus on particular products brings with it; it introduces readers to seemingly-marginal objects and then takes them on a journey through the world these products inhabited. This creates a reading experience that’s absorbing and playful rather than laborious, which was important to me.

At the outset, I looked for products that were important at the time and represented larger trends in nutrition. I found them at large exhibitions, where products were discussed and rewarded with prizes, and where they were also referred to with language that marked them as extraordinary, such as “special foods,” “protective foods,” or “health foods.” The choice to focus on products made in Britain and the United States allowed me to follow the epicenters of empire, industrialization, and nutrition science from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries.

Together, the products chart a chronological arc that follows the development of the relationship between the nutrition sciences and nutritional entrepreneurship, from their initial use in military, imperial, and industrial contexts to their broader application in growing consumer markets and global health contexts.

Emily: What are the key lessons you hope readers take from Wonder Foods? Perhaps this is a two-part question: what does your book contribute to the history of nutrition, but also how do these historical insights help us to understand our food culture (and food marketplace) today?

Lisa Haushofer, author of Wonder Foods. (Courtesy Lisa Haushofer and Black Edge Productions)

Lisa: The book wouldn’t have been possible without the amazing work of so many of my colleagues working on the history of nutrition and food studies (such as yourself!) who have shown the degree to which nutrition science was intertwined with culture and politics. My book builds on their work and emphasizes the close connection between the formation of the nutrition sciences and the commercial and imperial cultures in which they were embedded from the start. Our nutritional ideas and language have not just become more “scientific” but reflect the very specific economic and extractivist contexts that produced them. And this has consequences for how we still relate to food today. We relate to food and our bodies through metaphors of accumulation, extraction, and optimization. This not only steers our nutrition science in somewhat narrow directions but eclipses other relationships to nutrition we might form.

I also hope to direct readers’ awareness towards the violence, racism, knowledge appropriation, and ecological extractivism that are a feature, not a bug, of our modern food culture. Food Studies is, to this day, often misunderstood as a purely “fun” field of inquiry that deals with marginal, amusing curiosities. And of course, there is joy in studying food. And joy is a very valid emotion to mobilize in our academic work. But we should be under no illusion that in dealing with the histories of food and nutrition, we are dealing with some of the most violent, most exploitative, most haunting developments that have shaped our present world. The writing choices I’ve made in the book are an attempt to capture this peculiar side-by-side of the entertaining, the curious, the ridiculous, on the one hand, and the brutal, on the other.

Emily: Lastly, how has your training and experience as both a physician and a historian of science shaped your scholarship in this book, and perhaps your future projects, too?

Lisa: One thing that struck me back when I was a medical student and worked as a physician was how little emphasis was placed on nutrition in medical education, and at the same time, how often the topic was brought up by patients, even with diseases that had little or nothing to do with nutrition. By contrast, when I began learning about the history of medicine and science, I was confronted with a past in which food constituted a central tool in a physician’s diagnostic and therapeutic arsenal. So the book is also an attempt to understand how nutrition was expunged so thoroughly from medical education and practice, and pushed instead into a parallel space, under regulated and dominated by commercial interest.

My medical background and my historical training also fuel my keen interest in the history of cure more broadly. Looking at changing ideas about cures and curing can tell us a lot about how we imagine and approach the underlying problems, and can also show us alternative approaches that we might have missed. Nutritional products make visible how the solutions we devise for particular health problems are embedded in the social and cultural contexts of their times. My new project extends these ideas. It looks at the history of symptomatic treatments in modern medicine. Our modern biomedical culture is closely entwined with the idea that biomedical science can locate the infectious or pathological causes of disease and develop specific remedies that will act to remove the cause. But in reality, very few treatments in modern medicine have lived up to this promise. My research examines the historical processes at the heart of this tension.

In 2017, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts announced that it would stop using race as a factor in estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR) calculation, a measure of kidney function. Then, in 2020, several other medical systems, including the Massachusetts General Brigham system, the University of Washington, and the University of Pennsylvania, agreed to do the same. In 2021, a task force of researchers from the American Society of Nephrology and the National Kidney Foundation recommended that other clinicians adopt the race-neutral approach. Previously, the typical practice had been for doctors to calculate eGFR differently for Black patients than for all other patients. But how did medical researchers initially get the idea that the bodies of Black patients function differently than the bodies of patients of other races? And why is eGFR only one of many ways that biological notions of race are embedded into medical education and practice?^[1]

(Courtesy University of North Carolina Press)

Christopher D.E. Willoughby’s Masters of Health: Racial Science and Slavery in U.S. Medical Schools (UNC Press, 2022) seeks to answer these questions. Willoughby argues that medical schools in the antebellum United States were critical sites in the formation of a national medical community that shared ideas about racial science and about doctors’ authority to make claims about race. Extensively researched, the book draws its evidence from early 19^th-century medical student theses, lecture notes, published books and treatises by prominent doctors and scientists, the papers of faculty members, and museum records.

The first medical schools in colonial America were the Medical Department of the University of Pennsylvania and the New York College of Physicians and Surgeons at King’s College (now Columbia University), both founded in the 1760s. Forty-five additional schools would join them by 1860. The book shows how these medical schools promoted the notion that there were biological distinctions between races as a central aspect of professional training. Graduates and faculty of the schools spread scientific racism across the country in their roles as physicians.

As Willoughby shows, scientific racism and the exploitation of Black people for medical research was neither an exclusively Southern or Northern phenomenon. Instead, the national and sometimes international medical community created by universities and promoted through journals, textbooks, and other widely read publications transcended sectional boundaries. Southerners, many of whom were from slaveholding families, studied at Northern medical schools and frequently returned to Southern states to practice medicine. In the 1850s, Willoughby says, most graduates of the University of Pennsylvania’s medical school were from Southern states, with similar demographics at Jefferson Medical College, also in Philadelphia. Even during the Civil War, many Southern students continued to attend Northern medical schools, and some physicians sent letters to each other across the Mason-Dixon line expressing their desire to maintain their professional relationships after the war ended. While these doctors may have had different opinions about slavery, they had shared ideas about scientific racism and about the importance of the “white male fraternity” of physicians.^[2]

Willoughby also describes the increasing popularity of the theory of polygenesis among doctors, who marshaled scientific authority to express racial ideologies about the body in ways that endure to the present. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, many physicians had subscribed to the theory of monogenesis—the idea that all humans derived from the same origin— and rejected polygenesis—the idea that races had distinct origins and were different species—as conflicting with the biblical origin story. By the 1850s, however, the circulation of texts such as Josiah Nott and George Gliddon’s Types of Mankind and the discussion of polygenesis as a subject of study in universities made the theory much more widely accepted by doctors and medical students, even though, Willoughby notes, it had critics outside of the medical community. While polygenesis appealed to slaveholders as a justification for slavery, holding pro-slavery politics was not required to accept and promote the theory; students learned this idea from faculty members at Northern medical schools as much as in their Southern hometowns. The belief that race was biological and that racial difference was important to science and medicine was a critical aspect of medical education, expressed through lectures, experimentation, theses, and faculty publications.

Building on Foucault’s notion of the “clinical gaze,” Willoughby introduces his own concept, “the clinical-racial gaze,” which he argues “combined the racial gaze of the slaveholder with the clinical gaze of the anatomist.”^[3] Doctors advanced their authority by presenting themselves as experts on the nature of the body and on race as embodied. They increasingly emphasized quantitative data and used specialized instruments, such as the craniometer and the microscope, to present their findings as precise and scientific. Occasionally, they even testified at trials as medical experts to prove or disprove an individual’s claim about racial identity.

Faculty members and students also experimented on Black people, both living and dead. The idea that Black and white people were different species did not prevent medical schools from using the bodies of Black people for teaching and research purposes. Willoughby provides several examples of medical faculty members and students conducting painful and degrading experiments on people of color. Additionally, as other scholars have shown, the growing importance of dissection in medical education created a demand for corpses, leading to illegal grave robbing. While medical schools dissected cadavers from a variety of sources, including the bodies of poor whites, they typically encountered less public resistance when they robbed graves that held Black people. Furthermore, the relatively high presence of African Americans in almshouses from which medical schools often sought bodies contributed to the schools’ access to the cadavers of Black people. Willoughby points out that although Southern medical schools marketed themselves as having ample access to cadavers, obtained because of slavery, the practice of body snatching and the racial disparity in whose bodies were snatched originated in Northern cities. Northern medical schools also welcomed cadavers from Southern states, reinforcing Willoughby’s focus on the racial exploitation of medical education as something national, as opposed to regional.

As part of their demonstration of mastery over the body, medical schools established museums in which they displayed human remains. These museums functioned as teaching and research collections and increased institutional prestige. Willoughby writes, “U.S. medical schools constructed their racial pedagogy through global networks of grave robbers,” as universities drove demand for human specimens to analyze for racial differences.^[4] Among the most famous of these are the Warren Anatomical Museum, donated to Harvard in 1847, and the notorious crania collection of Samuel Morton, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and faculty member at the Pennsylvania Medical College, a now-defunct medical school in Philadelphia. Students were taught “to think of the human body as an object.”^[5] Analyzing, experimenting on, and displaying bodies and body parts were central aspects of medical education and how physicians created and demonstrated their professional expertise. Many of these institutions still hold the human remains collected during this period.

The Warren Anatomical Museum, c. 1906. (Courtesy Wikimedia)

As the imperial influence of the United States grew, the networks became even more expansive. Physicians and race scientists such as Morton had crania and other specimens shipped to them from all over the world. Doctors also developed theories that people of different races were suited to different climates, allowing ideas about racialized medicine to transcend national boundaries.

Willoughby mentions at various points that the medical students and professors about whom he writes were white men, most of whom were interested in maintaining racial and gender exclusivity in their profession. The book briefly discusses Harvard’s 1850 admission of three Black students, including Martin Delany, before the school forced the men out after protests from white students.^[6] Some greater attention to medical schools’ admissions policies and internal debates about whether to admit Black students could have enriched the book, adding information about how faculty and students thought about race in relation to their medical education and training.

As many institutions examine their relationships to slavery and its legacies, including the impact of racial science on contemporary medical care, Masters of Health will be an important resource to readers interested in the history of the university, the history of medicine, and intellectual history. The book also raises important implications for medical and scientific education, including the ways in which contemporary professional training continues to include biological notions of race.

On the tropical beach of a remote island, a group of ailing Europeans was spread across the white sands. Some lay soaking in medicinal baths assisted by local attendants; others dined on a special healing diet prepared from rare, locally-sourced ingredients. These exclusive treatments were not available in Europe, and sufferers were willing to pay an exorbitant amount to travel nearly three thousand miles to this far-flung location for the possibility of a cure.

So observed Christopher Columbus on his third voyage to the Americas in 1498. During a brief stop in Cabo Verde, a Portuguese-controlled archipelago off the Senegalese coast, Columbus saw European leprosy sufferers gathered on the island of Maio to be “fed on a diet of turtle meat and washed in turtle blood,” by which they were “speedily cured of their leprosy.”^[1] The notion that exotic substances could help cure the most incurable of diseases is nothing new to historians of medieval leprosy (a disease category that overlapped with, but was not identical to, the modern biomedical definition of leprosy or Hansen’s disease), but the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries mark a shift: not only did medicinal substances from far off places reach European markets in unprecedented quantities, but people were traveling significant distances in search of new remedies – what might be considered a form of medical tourism.^[2]

In fact, with a few notable alterations, the scene Columbus narrates wouldn’t be out of place in today’s health, wellness, and medical tourism industry. While medical tourism is often considered a way to save money on expensive treatments, some patients are willing to pay a premium to access medical care that is unavailable in their home country or state. Think women in the US traveling across state lines for legal abortion services or international COVID-19 vaccine tourism. Similarly, early modern accounts suggest that a select group of leprosy sufferers traveled great distances of their own volition (and on their own dime) for treatment.

Christ kills 10 people with leprosy. (Wellcome Collection)

These early modern medical tourists don’t fit with what we think we know about the history of leprosy. The idea of leprous travelers probably conjures images of nineteenth- and twentieth-century leprosy sufferers quarantined in remote imperial “leper colonies,” like the Kalawao leper settlement on the Hawaiian island of Molokai. Or perhaps an image of the medieval mendicant leper appears instead, equipped with a clapper and alms bowl. In both cases, travel was often involuntary. Many imperial states forcibly relocated individuals diagnosed with leprosy, supposedly to protect the healthy population (see, for example, the case of Anacleto Palabay). While mendicant lepers could move with comparative freedom in the medieval period, the extent to which this mobility was a choice rather than a necessity is questionable: once diagnosed, a leprosy sufferer was considered legally “dead” and thus barred from forming marriage contracts, holding office, or possessing property. This deprived most leprosy sufferers of a means to support themselves. Those lucky enough to enter leprosaria – hospitals modeled on monastic orders to provide lepers with material and spiritual care – renounced significant personal freedoms, including freedom of movement.^[3] Less fortunate leprosy sufferers were often left with few options but to beg.^[4]

What set apart those early modern leprosy sufferers who made the nearly three-thousand-mile journey from Lisbon to Cabo Verde from the examples above? They were, almost without exception, wealthy and elite. Franciscan cosmographer André Thevet, for example, described one such leprous traveler as a “gentleman from Portugal,” who outfitted his own ship to Cabo Verde. The unnamed gentleman “hired the best possible crew and procured livestock” to prepare for his journey.^[5] The cost of leasing, outfitting, supplying, and manning a ship from Europe to the Cabo Verde islands would have been an expensive endeavor, particularly if the intended voyage did not involve commercial exchange to offset costs.^[6] This kind of expedition would only be available to the extremely rich and well-connected, which perhaps explains why other famous recipients of Cabo Verdean sea turtle treatments include a Burgundian nobleman and King Louis XI of France.^[7] To these super-wealthy and influential leprosy sufferers, the chance to be cured was well worth the high cost and risks of a voyage to the islands – and not without reason.

By the mid-fifteenth century, most treatments for leprosy available in Europe were considered palliative rather than curative, leading sufferers to turn to more exotic, exclusive, and expensive medicinal substances, like Cabo Verdean sea turtles.^[8] Early voyagers to Cabo Verde appear to have been introduced to the culinary and curative properties of these sea turtles by West African sailors who had been recruited to help European ships navigate the coastline.^[9] It was also Africans, many likely enslaved, who later provided the necessary healing labor to care for leprous European visitors. According to Eustache de la Fosse, a Flemish merchant who visited Cabo Verde in 1483, Africans brought to the islands from the mainland would catch sea turtles, slaughter them, and bathe European leprosy sufferers in the turtle’s blood. “Once the blood is dry,” he explained, “[the leprosy sufferers] are so benumbed that they must be fed by hand like nestlings for two or three days; after, they are very well and feel great relief.”^[10] In addition to medicinal baths, other observers claimed that lepers were fed a therapeutic diet of sea turtle flesh and eggs.^[11] The reasoning behind sea turtle treatments didn’t concern most of these travelers, but it seems possible that such treatments drew on pre-existing African healing practices.^[12] Unsurprisingly, none of the accounts mention whether African healers and bodyworkers received any payment for their time-consuming and intimate work. Then, as now, the bodily care of wealthy foreigners often depended on local labor and expertise that was poorly compensated, if at all.

Cabo Verde’s fame as a destination for medical tourism lasted less than fifty years. With the rise of the Atlantic slave trade, Cabo Verde quickly grew to become an important entrepôt for the sale and export of enslaved people from West Africa to Europe and the Americas. By the mid-1520s, the African and mestiço population of Cabo Verde outnumbered European inhabitants by more than eight to one.^[13] The drastic shift in demographics and social dynamics profoundly affected European perceptions of the islands and their therapeutic reputation. Valentim Fernandes, a Moravian-born Portuguese printer who visited Cabo Verde in 1507, suggested that the influx of enslaved Africans had contaminated the environment. “These islands were so healthy at first that lepers who went there were healed, but now they are so unhealthy that even men in good health fall ill,” he lamented. “I believe it is because the blacks [negros] who have come there have poisoned the air.”^[14] European fear of pathogenic African bodies was a common trope of the Atlantic slave trade. Still, there is a particular irony to the fact that enslaved West Africans – the very source of the knowledge and labor that had made Cabo Verde a therapeutic destination in the first place – were now being blamed for, as Fernandes put it, “poison[ing] the air.”

At the same time, changing European views of the islands may reflect some degree of actual ecological change. As sea travel to Cabo Verde increased, native animal populations were displaced in favor of domesticated cattle, in particular goats, to provide salt meat for passing ships. Sea turtles were particularly susceptible to the heavy marine traffic that disturbed nearby reefs and nesting areas on beaches. Some native animals, including fish, large seabirds, and sea turtles, were also heavily hunted for their meat, shells, and eggs.^[15] The impact on the Cabo Verdean landscape would have been dramatic, amounting to what some scholars of environmental history have termed “ecocide.”^[16] Where early travelers had observed an archipelago of forested islands supporting diverse animal life, sixty years later they were instead greeted by empty beaches and arid, denuded hills.

European fears over the influx of supposedly-pestilential enslaved peoples coupled with ecological damage caused by increased traffic to the island seem to have spelled Cabo Verde’s demise as a medical tourism destination. By the mid-sixteenth century, Cabo Verde islands were better known for their “unhealthy and pestilential airs,” which caused “great fevers and hot ailments to those who remain there,” than they were for the treatment of leprosy.^[17] There is even some evidence that a leprosarium for indigent sufferers may have existed on Cabo Verde by the 1530s, bringing the islands full circle from a destination for the healing of wealthy medical tourists to one for the ailing poor.^[18]

Five centuries have passed since the rise and fall of leprous medical tourism to Cabo Verde. Even so, this unusual case reveals something troubling about medical tourism today. In the fifteenth century, Cabo Verdean sea turtle therapy was available exclusively to those with the social, legal, and financial resources to circumvent the stigma of a leprosy diagnosis and fund their passage to the islands. Medical tourism today is lauded as cost-saving and efficient, but it has the potential to create or exacerbate a two-tier system of healthcare in both tourism destinations and places of origin. As we are already seeing with the overturn of Roe v. Wade, the wealthy can often find ways to overcome social stigma and even legal hurdles to access the healthcare they need, whether at home or abroad. It is those already at the margins of society, whether due to poverty or minority status, who suffer most from restrictive health policies.

1. Bartolomé de las Casas, Las Casas On Columbus: The Third Voyage, ed. Geoffrey Symcox and Jesús Carrillo, trans. Michael Hammer and Blair Sullivan (Turnhout: Brepols, 2001), 23. This account comes from Las Casas’s monumental Historia de las Indias (1527-1561), which contains the earliest extant account of Columbus’s third voyage. Las Casas likely relied on Columbus’ own writings about the voyage, which have not survived. For commentary on the sources of Las Casas’s text, see Geoffrey Symcox, “Historical Introduction,” in Las Casas On Columbus, 5-6. ↑
2. Luke Demaitre, Leprosy in Premodern Medicine: A Malady of the Whole Body (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2007), 248-270; Carole Rawcliffe, Leprosy in Medieval England (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2006), chapter 5. ↑
3. Carole Rawcliffe, Leprosy in Medieval England (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2006), 43. ↑
4. Even mendicant lepers were typically confined to designated urban areas where they could legally seek alms. In Portugal, for example, D. Pedro I (r. 1357-1367) granted mendicant lepers the right to beg, but only in certain cities. Such measures fit into a broader pattern of late medieval and early modern legislation that increasingly sought to police certain categories of mobile persons believed to pose a social threat, such as vagrants. See Robert Jütte, Poverty and deviance in early modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994); and Laurinda Abreu, The Political and Social Dynamics of Poverty, Poor Relief and Health Care in Early-Modern Portugal (London: Taylor and Francis, 2016), 15-21. ↑
5. André Thevet, “Cap. XIV. Des tortues, et d’une herbe qu’ils appellant Orseille,” in Les singularitez de la France antarctique autrement nommee Amerique, & de plusieurs terres et isles decouvertes de nostre temps (Paris, 1557), 63-69. ↑
6. M.M. F. Torrão, “Rotas Comerciais, Agentes Económicos, Meios de Pagamento,” in L. Albuquerque and M. E. M. Santos (eds.), História Geral de Cabo Verde, vol. II (Lisbon: IICT, 1991), 117-123. ↑
7. Eustache de la Fosse, “L’Île des Lépreux” in Voyage d’Eustache Delafosse sur la côte de Guinée, au Portugal et en Espagne: 1479-1481, ed. Théodore Monod (Paris: Editions Chandeigne, 1992), 41-45; Thevet, “Cap. XIV. Des tortues,” 63-69. Louis XI commissioned two ships to make the journey to Cabo Verde to procure the healing turtle blood for his use back in France. The ultimate outcome of the voyage, if it came to fruition, is unknown, as Louis XI died three weeks before the ships left port. It is possible that the voyage was abandoned when his son, Charles VIII, took the throne in August of 1483. Pierre Champion, Louis XI, vol. II, (Paris, 1927-28), 352-53. ↑
8. Luke Demaitre, “The Relevance of Futility: Jordanus de Turre (fl. 1313–1335) on the Treatment of Leprosy,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 70, no. 1 (1996): 25-61. ↑
9. It was common practice in the early modern period for passing ships to hire local pilots short-term to help navigate particularly challenging coastal areas and ports. See references to these crew members hunting and cooking sea turtles aboard ship in Cà da Mosto, “The Voyages of Cadamosto,” in The Voyages of Cadamosto and Other Documents on Western Africa in the Second Half of the Fifteenth Century, ed. G.R. Crone (Farnham: Routledge, 2011), 64-65; and Fosse, “L’Île des Lépreux,” 41-45. ↑
10. “Une fois le sang asséché, elles se trouvent pendant deux ou trois jours se engourdies qu’il faut les nourrir à la becquée comme des oiselets.” Fosse, “L’Île des Lépreux,” 44-45. ↑
11. Las Casas, Las Casas On Columbus, 23; and Thevet, “Cap. XIV. Des tortues,” 66-67. ↑
12. Research by conservationists and anthropologists has shown that preparations of sea turtle flesh, blood, fat, organs, and bones are used as traditional medicine along the Senegal and Guinea coasts. See, for example, J. Fretey, G.H. Segniagbeto, and M. Soumah, “Présence des tortues marines dans la pharmacopée traditionnelle et les croyances en Afrique Occidentale,” Proceed. IIe Congrès Conserv. 4, (Dakar, 2006): 204-207 (republished in translation as: “Presence of Sea Turtles in Traditional Pharmacopeia and Beliefs of West Africa,” Marine Turtle Newsletter 116 (2007): 23-25). Historical studies of late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Inquisition cases and Jesuit correspondence similarly reveal that zootherapy was widely practiced on Cabo Verde (to the great alarm of religious authorities), although these accounts do not specifically address the use of sea turtles. Philip J. Havik, “Hybridising Medicine: Illness, Healing and the Dynamics of Reciprocal Exchange on the Upper Guinea Coast (West Africa),” Med. Hist. 60, no. 2 (2016): 181–205; Timothy Insoll, “Shrines, substances and medicine in sub-Saharan Africa: archaeological, anthropological, and historical perspectives,” Anthro. & Med. 18, no. 2 (2011): 145-166. ↑
13. T. Bentley Duncan, Atlantic Islands: Madeira, The Azores, and the Cape Verdes in seventeenth-century commerce and navigation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 206-207; see also Table 30 on 210. ↑
14. “Esta ylhas erã de primeyro tã sadias q quãtos gaffos alli vinhã sarauã. Mas agora sõ tã doẽtias q a gẽte saã adoeçe. Creo q despois q os Negros trousserõ a ellas corrõperõ ho aar como ẽ sua terra he doẽtia.” Valentim Fernandes, Description de la Côte Occidentale d’Afrique (Sénégal au Cap de Monte, Archipels), eds. T. Monod, A. Teixeira da Mota, and R. Mauny (Bissau, 1951), 110 [f. 184r]. ↑
15. Cristina Brito and Nina Vieira, “A Sea-Change in the Sea? Perceptions and Practices Towards Sea Turtles and Manatees in Portugal’s Atlantic Ocean Legacy,” in Perspectives on Oceans Past (Dordrecht: Springer, 2016), 175-191; N.S. Loureiro and M.M.F. Torrão, “Homens e tartarugas marinhas: Seis séculos de história e histórias nas ilhas de Cabo Verde,” Anais de História de Além-Mar 9 (2008): 37–78. ↑
16. Per A. Lindskog and Benoît Delaite, “Degrading Land: An Environmental History Perspective of the Cape Verde Islands,” Environ. and Hist. 2, no. 3 (1996): 271-90; and Stefan Halikowski Smith, “The mid-Atlantic islands: A theatre of early modern ecocide?” Internat. Rev. Soc. Hist 55, no. S18 (2010): 51-77. ↑
17. “L’air y est mal sain & pestilentieux, causant de grande fiebures & chauds maux à ceux qui s’y arrestent.” Thevet, “Cap. XIV. Des tortues,” 69. ↑
18. Royal charters dating to 1531 and 1597 appointed a “caretaker of orphans, chapels, monasteries and leprosaria [gafarias]” on the island of Santiago. Henrique Lubrano de Santa-Rita Vieira, História da medicina em Cabo Verde (Praia: Instituto Caboverdiano do Livro e do Disco, 1987), 23. An actual structure to house leprosy sufferers dates from the mid-eighteenth century. A. Loretti and D. Garbellini, “Leprosy in the Cape Verde Islands,” Leprosy Rev. 52, no. 3 (1981): 337-348, esp. 338. ↑

Since 2012, Nursing Clio has been at the forefront of sharing histories of gender, medicine, and disability with a wide audience. The blog has published the work of over 500 writers, from undergraduates to professional historians, independent scholars to medical professionals. Now, Nursing Clio is seeking 2-3 writers to join our new Writers-in-Residence program.

Writers-in-Residence will become a part of the Nursing Clio team by joining us as a regular writer for one year. As a Writer-in-Residence, you will commit to writing either 4 or 6 essays for Nursing Clio over a 12-month period. Essays will be based on your own expertise and interests. You can draw on traditional historical research, respond to issues in the news, or offer scholarly takes on media such as movies or video games – anything that aligns with Nursing Clio’s ethos and standards of writing. While essays make up the majority of our work, our editors are also open to other forms of expression, such as creative writing, videos, or comics. Writers-in-Residence will set flexible deadlines to submit work throughout the year in collaboration with our managing editors. All essays will be supported by our usual editing process, conducted by our editing collective.

This is a paid position. Writers who commit to writing four essays will be paid a one-time $200 stipend, and writers who commit to six essays will receive a one-time $300 stipend.

Candidates should submit a short CV and brief letter of interest (no more than 1 page) explaining your interest in the residency and what topics you might choose to write about. Please also include a writing sample of no more than 2,000 words. Show us a piece of your writing that is representative of your work. This doesn’t need to be an academic writing sample – it can be a blog post, a Twitter thread, a creative piece, a class assignment, an op-ed, a book review, etc. We aren’t looking for something that necessarily already matches the NC style, but we are looking for a representative example of the kind of writing you value.

Please submit all materials (in Word or PDF format) to nursingclio@gmail.com by March 1, 2023. Successful candidates will be notified in April 2023 with the goal of getting started by June 2023.

On our hiring practices

The editorial staff of Nursing Clio is currently made up primarily of white scholars with expertise in modern US history. As the blog grows, we are seeking to expand our collective knowledge, decenter whiteness in our scholarly community, and explore histories outside of our own temporal and geographic foci. Individuals with expertise in histories of gender and/or medicine before the nineteenth century and/or in Africa, Asia, Latin America, or Oceania are especially encouraged to apply. We gladly accept applications from those at all career levels, but will prioritize applications from those off the tenure track and outside of the traditional bounds of academia.

“I had a succession of Trustees who treated me vaguely but graciously in a Victorian way, even though they could not understand how it happened that a woman could be interested in books.” (MBS LAH xii)

Margaret Bingham Stillwell (1887-1984) began her career at the John Carter Brown Library in Providence, Rhode Island when she was still a student at Pembroke College (now part of Brown University). Her prominent father and the JCB’s eminent Librarian had discussed her prospects and set her up for the experience; this was surely the last time two men engineered her life and work so thoroughly. Forging her own path with tenacity, Stillwell went on to lead another Brown library focused on incunabula and medieval and early modern art and artifacts (the Annmary Brown Memorial Library) and to be the first woman full professor at Brown (in Bibliography).

Stillwell’s long life and prolific work–and her frank assessment of both–struck a chord with us, the first woman directors of our respective libraries at Brown University (Karin at the John Carter Brown Library, Amanda at the John Hay Library). We bonded over our mutual admiration for the acerbic and vivacious Stillwell. She pulled up a chair at the very male table of rare books and librarianship – a table with sharp edges that has routinely left bruises on generations of women and people of color. A pioneer, she left a significant imprint on our libraries. And she thought deeply both about individual books as well as how books can grow into meaningful collections.^[1] Our conversations about Margaret Stillwell also contributed to our sense of urgency about generous and necessary interdisciplinary and cross-institutional collaboration, especially for addressing exclusions and silences inherent to libraries and collections.

John Carter Brown Library, Brown University. (Wikimedia Commons

Through Stillwell, we have talked about the practical work of archives and libraries and also the intellectual and theoretical framework for their development and practice. What has astonished and concerned us is how often two exciting and essential, fully sympathetic literatures about the practice of archive-making and their use have remained parallel rather than symbiotic and mutually informed. In the wry dedication to her autobiography, Stillwell harkens “with affection and amusement to my many friends in the rare book world and a handful of subtle enemies.” While we choose to interpret generously the professional dissonance that we observe, we worry about a heightened discourse of “subtle enemies” rather than engaged collaborators. In the spirit of the latter, even while we recognize the fractious and tender dynamics that may have produced the former, we offer a starting point.

We begin with the necessity to put into explicit conversation the scholarship of archivists working in the critical archives studies mode and scholars engaged with what has been called the “archival turn.” Twenty years ago, Dr. Terry Cook was one of the first to offer an alternative to the waning but still tenacious notion of archival neutrality. He published essays that would permanently reshape the archival literature: “Archival Science and Postmodernism: New Formulations for Old Concepts” and “Archives, Records, and Power: The Making of Modern Memory.” By introducing a fresh theoretical framework, he ushered in a newly expansive era for archivists.

By the early 2010s, another formative wave of archival scholarship emerged — the social justice turn. In Archives and Justice Verne Harris of the Nelson Mandela foundation urged archivists to “heed the call of justice,” to “refuse insularity and to embrace archival hospitality.” The long list of influential work that urged the field to embrace its influence with a purposeful, justice-driven agenda and firmly placed archivists in the U.S. in a global conversation includes scholarship by David Wallace, Michelle Caswell, and Joel Blanco-Rivera. Spreading as a restorative burn through the profession, this work paved the way for subfields such as community archives, collective memory, and human rights archives urging archivists to engage thoughtfully and respectfully with living communities. Critical archival theory intersects with the ethics of care, memory studies, indigeneity, liberation, and a reckoning with racism and colonialism. The latter in particular represents a stark departure from the field’s origins in which archival record-keeping was regularly an arm of colonial and state power. What had seemed radical only a decade ago is now a foundation that continues to be examined, renamed, and excavated.

Meanwhile, literary scholars, historians, scholars of language and area studies, and others who use archival records in their research are asking key questions about “the archive.” Some of this work, it must be acknowledged, infuriates trained archivists and highlights the legacy of professional siloing and hierarchy. Yet scholarship investigating the historical origins and structure of western archival institutions and record-keeping has illuminated specific forms of colonialism and Eurocentrism and framed our understanding of the partial nature of the archival record. It has also created critical processes for reading the fragments as well as the corpus of that record. The result is a more richly informed scholarship taking more careful account of the material on which scholarly analysis rests, and the context in which it was produced, saved, and made available for research.

Robinson Hall reading room, Brown University. (Picaryl)

For many, Haitian scholar Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995) was a landmark in pointing to how historical narratives are shaped by the archival record that is itself shaped by the powers that created it. His work contributed to scholarship on questions of archival and consequent “historical silences,” showing how Haiti’s revolution and national foundation was sidelined in the story of democratic revolutions; the very archival records of Haiti’s successful revolution against slavery cast the formerly enslaved as rebels against the French, rather than as patriots in their own revolutionary right.

How to read the materials of an archive so shaped by power is a question any number of scholars have been addressing or begun to address. Ann Laura Stoler’s account of the Dutch East Indies in Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense centered archival production as an act of empire. Reading along the grain responded to a volume of postcolonial writing about reading against the grain, or reading and thinking in a resistant mode. By reading a full archive along the grain, Stoler asserted, we can learn more about the structure and operations of colonial power. Marisa Fuentes has been a leader in the analysis of particular archival materials and the implications of their origins. In Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive, Fuentes examined the fragmentary archive of slavery in Barbados, demonstrating how the records reproduce the violence they document.

What brings these disciplinary, professional perspectives together is a focus on the context (over text) that informs practice. Our respective professional colleagues writing and teaching about “archives” have been working in parallel to outline an imperative for closely reading and working with sources, not as distinct objects that seemingly emerged from the ether, but as purposefully placed, ephemeral evidence of the past that reveals larger networks and structures. This context matters because it helps us to better see the contours of the past and the present in which we are interpreting. The two clearly complementary perspectives on archives we have sketched here are immeasurably enriched when considered together.

Thinking about this necessary entwining brings us back to Margaret Stillwell, who fully inhabited the entwined worlds of librarianship and scholarship that over her lifetime became more professionally separated but which we know are actually inseparable. But while Stillwell seems to us a prescient harbinger of a renewed appreciation for this inseparability, she was also a woman of her time. In her autobiography, her papers held at the John Hay Library, and her bibliographic scholarship, she was only sometimes a vigorous commenter on the injustices of the profession to which she had dedicated herself. She participated in what she described as Women’s Rights and described herself as a Feminist– by which she meant the 19th Amendment, and her own and her friends’ right to vote. Only briefly did she address more glaring exclusions. She recounted a story of a visitor making racist and classist assumptions about Eugene Rhodes, the custodian at the Annmary Brown Memorial Library during World War II (and after she retired, within Stillwell’s home). A “Southern gentleman,” she explained that Rhodes’s Chinese and Fiji Islands heritage made him think about a book he had been reading about “aborigines.” Rhodes responded that “he knew the author [of the book] and had read that book and others.” This sent the other man “out of the door like a shot.” Stillwell left the story there, as testament to, but without much more explicit commentary on, this or other exclusions intrinsic to the world in which she lived and worked.

This incident, which was surely not an anomaly, reminds us that we collaborate precisely to better understand and then to confront the exclusions and archival silences that Stillwell and other founding librarians permitted. Those silences and exclusions are a key part of what shaped our institutions and the research they supported, and now must inform our work to address them– together.

As a teenager, I loved the film When Harry Met Sally and would watch it whenever I was home sick from school. Most kids long to be adults, but Generation X expressed a specific affinity for the trappings of adulthood. In true Gen X fashion, what I pined for in adulthood was the friendship at the center of the film between Harry Burns (Billy Crystal) and Sally Albright (Meg Ryan), which blossoms into a romantic relationship in spite of the film’s premise that “men and women can’t be friends, because the sex part always gets in the way.”^[1] The film follows the progression of the two characters from college graduation into their thirties. The audience sees Harry transform from a buffoonish nihilist into an empathetic womanizer. Sally, on the other hand, remains steadfast in her “high maintenance” independence, hesitant to start something with Harry because of his insensitivity toward the women he sleeps with. At eighteen, all I wanted was to have the conversational banter and indelible chemistry shared by Harry and Sally. Sure, I saw the inherent sexism in Harry’s conviction that heterosexual men cannot control their sexual whims and will always have ulterior motives when it comes to women. But as a high maintenance teen girl, I longed for the day I would have a best friend who would eventually realize that my insatiable desire to compete with everyone around me was adorable, and not a major character flaw.

Courtesy Wikimedia and MGM.

Now, as a forty-something married, professional woman attempting to navigate the male-dominated world of academia, I see a new version of “men and women can’t be friends” framed by the assertion that it is the “work part” that gets in the way. It should come as no surprise that academia is an individual enterprise in which teamwork is devalued. Especially within the humanities, professors encourage students to operate in isolation from one another, which can promote unhealthy competition. Because of this, I have had to train myself to reject the inclination to compete with colleagues. On the other end of the spectrum, I hear colleagues joke about their platonic relationships with “work husbands” and “work wives,” which feels cringey to me. While not a universal reaction, mine is based on the suggestive nature of a spousal relationship within the context of the workplace that appears to confirm the “men and women can’t be friends” logic. Its suggestion takes away from the development of a foundational partnership that can benefit both colleagues regardless of sex. Male-female professional partnerships are the key to workplace equality and one of the only ways women will be taken seriously.

The question, “can men and women be friends?” is a twentieth-century concept rooted in the proliferation of women within previously male-dominated spaces. Women have always participated in the labor force, especially poor women and women of color, and experienced varied challenges of harassment, discrimination, and sexism well before the twentieth century. Women entered the professional workplace in droves following the passage of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act in 1967, at a time when women comprised only twenty-nine percent of the civilian workforce. Women’s presence in the U.S. labor force substantially grew between the 1960s and 1990s, reaching a peak of sixty percent in 1999. Susan Faludi and Betty Friedan both reckoned with the transformation brought about by women’s entrance into the workforce en masse and their continued inequality at work and in the family.^[2] Second wave feminists’ drive for economic equality, according to Faludi and Friedan, placed men and women in direct competition for jobs and financial security, leaving men unsatisfied and emasculated, and both sexes without work/life balance. It is difficult to talk about dissatisfaction between the sexes without acknowledging sexual harassment and a lack of women in positions of higher management. The solution posed at the turn of the turn of the twenty-first century was neoliberal feminism, which focuses on capitalist achievement as the antidote to patriarchy.

Even before the #MeToo movement addressed the ever-present issue of sexual harassment, the question of whether male-female friendships could truly be platonic persisted. “Can men and women be, essentially, adults who value each other without throwing the complications of “other messy stuff” into it?” Jen Doll asked in a 2012 piece in the Atlantic. Doll published the essay on the heels of William Deresiewicz’s critical position in the New York Times that, no, nonsexual male-female relationships are an impossibility. Both politics and popular culture, according to Deresiewicz, reinforce the argument that men and women still live in separate spheres despite feminist goals of equal rights across all facets of society. Yet platonic male-female friendships that benefit both individuals are prevalent in reality and popular culture. Think about Don Draper and Peggy Olsen on Mad Men, or Ron Swanson and Leslie Knope on Parks and Recreation. Following #MeToo, Newsweek, The Washington Post, and other publications suggested that the very existence of women in the modern workplace presented too much of a liability for men. If women must be included, men should follow “the Mike Pence Rule”’ by avoiding all interactions that place them alone with a woman who is not their spouse. When Fox News senior analyst Brit Hume tweeted “Mike Pence’s policy of avoiding being alone with women other than his wife looking better every day,” he was largely ridiculed by journalists from left-leaning publications. Still, a New York Times poll found that men and women across America were wary of one-on-one interactions that did not involve respective partners. This line of reasoning presents a troublesome conclusion: if men and women cannot be friends within the context of the workplace, women will systematically be denied a seat at the table.

Over thirteen years I have built a unique partnership with my department colleague and dear friend Dr. Justin Gollob, who, like me, sees immense value in our work as a male-female team. Justin was hired at our university two years before me and served on my hiring committee. Because of this, I have always viewed him as a valued mentor and slightly above me in the academic hierarchy. Throughout our careers, we have had several lengthy conversations about power and gender dynamics. These conversations would have occurred regardless of sex; same-sex relationships within the context of work share their own set of challenges that often mirror male-female issues. Justin and I have come to recognize we share a bond that transcends the sexist structures intended to divide us. In conversation, we identified shared values that make our partnership work:

Empathy for students and common ground with colleagues

Both of us were raised in similar circumstances: in small(ish), conservative towns in middle-class families who assumed we would attend college and made sacrifices to help us achieve our degrees. We both recognize how the advantages we were given paid off and strive to provide similar opportunities for our students. The motivation and empathy we instill in our students, colleagues, and each other is time well-spent. We view this as a shared endeavor that gives us a sense of purpose and helps forge a strong professional relationship.

Work ethic, dedication, and ambition

Aside from our shared sense of humor, we first saw a similar drive and ambition in one another. These common values allow us to not only connect professionally, but also to feel comfortable promoting each other’s work and value to the institution. This is not to suggest that we do not have our differences (it would be strange if we did not), but we respect how the other approaches their job, and trust that effort will be appreciated and reciprocated. We also value differences in opinion and see the danger in using those differences against one another in challenging moments.

Open, honest communication

Trust can be fickle. One day you feel like you have it, but the next day you fear it is lost. The best advice we have given each other is just to be honest. Mutual respect and a desire to maintain trust means that we can rely on each other to provide healthy – sometimes hard – advice that elevates agency. Pulling punches, we have learned, can be more harmful than brutal honesty. This has been a difficult lesson to learn, but once learned, it has built confidence. We also involve our spouses in our relationship by seeking their advice on how to navigate potential miscommunication with each other.

Our relationship is built on profound admiration and respect. In the world of academia, traditions die hard. Institutions still operate around seniority, traditions, and hierarchy. Defining a work relationship that challenges these attributes has been an effective way to appreciate the value each of us brings to the job. This does not mean we are ignorant to these gendered dynamics. Instead, we choose to devalue them as much as possible in our relationship. If one is more elevated (for a time) within the institutional hierarchy, there is a shared understanding that it does not change our perspectives or shake the values practiced. This helps us navigate the tricky landscape of academia. Being complicit to gendered divisions of labor is not our answer. Rather, it is understanding our place in these structures while staying optimistic that teamwork like ours will help to bridge those gaps. We share in and celebrate each other’s accomplishments, and value our friendship and teamwork more than any position or work opportunity.

There are few things more precious to Buffalonians than their football team. Not only do we love football, but we very specifically – and very fiercely – love the individuals who make up the current roster of the Buffalo Bills. So when safety Damar Hamlin collapsed on the field during a Monday Night Football game in January, many of my friends and neighbors here in Buffalo were terrified. But one particular thing seemed to horrify us most, coming up over and over again in my conversations with fellow fans: the stricken looks on the faces of our beloved team. Josh Allen’s thousand-yard stare. Stefon Diggs’ tear-streaked cheeks.

In the tense days after Hamlin’s cardiac arrest, the team made clear they took the emotional toll of the event on the Bills players very seriously. Never did they express shame for shedding tears or needing help, nor did they play down the trauma the event had inflicted on this group of men. In a press conference, neither quarterback Josh Allen nor coach Sean McDermott tried to hide their emotions. Over and over, they emphasized the steps the players had taken to support one another, having group counseling sessions, talking, and hugging. “It sounds weird,” Allen said, “but [we’ve had] unbelievable embraces as men, just hugging somebody and actually leaning into them. There’s been a lot of that going around.”

Football is an inherently violent sport that has garnered comparisons to warfare from its earliest days in the late-nineteenth century. The game’s parallels to the Civil War served an important cultural function, helping to reassure Americans that the nation’s boys still had a way to harden and hone their masculinity. The sport, Century Magazine declared in 1887, “is doing for our college-bred men, in a more peaceful way, what the experiences of war did for so many of their predecessors in 1861-1865.” The parallels between war and football were regularly invoked – University of California president Benjamin Ide Wheeler described the game as “rampart lines” through which a “missile” is launched. Football required leadership, teamwork, and physicality, and also introduced young men to violence. (The parallel is still used – see, for example, the dogfight football scene in Top Gun: Maverick.) Not only did the game make young men stronger, wounded Union veteran Francis Walker argued that it honed their character, even helping them develop “something akin to patriotism and public spirit.” The violence of the scrum – like the violence of the battlefield – turned boys into men.

Civil War wounded being carried off field. (Elbridge/Flickr | Public Domain)

But when I saw the anguished looks on those players’ faces and heard about how they turned to one another to process their trauma, I thought about the Civil War in a different way. Civil War combat may have sharpened some aspects of masculinity, but it also helped to broaden it. Men watched as comrades were blown to pieces and friends slowly died from diseases, as the bodies were stacked up like cordwood. The trauma these scenes inflicted by necessity made men emotional. Regardless of what society found acceptable masculine behavior, as Drew Gilpin Faust has written, “men wept.” She recounts the words of Virginian soldier John Casler, who admitted: “it does not look well for a soldier to cry, but I could not help it.” Another soldier, recalling the sights of the Gettysburg battlefield, wrote, “I found my head reeling, the tears flowing and my stomach sick at the sight.” Like us, nineteenth-century Americans had strict codes for masculine behavior – but trauma took no notice. Men wept.

While there have been some debates among Civil War historians about the extent to which the conflict was traumatizing for those who fought, all agree that it left deep emotional scars. I’ve written about soldiers and veterans who could not cope with that trauma. But many, many other soldiers turned to one another to manage the lasting impact of their shared traumatic experiences. No one could understand what they had been through but each other. Former military units had reunions, and groups of veterans not infrequently marked the anniversary of battles together on the former fields of battle. Veterans associations like the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) and the Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States (MOLLUS) made regular local meetings as well as annual national encampments.

When veterans gathered, they were open about the power of their comradeship and the emotion that went along with it. The shared experience allowed men to connect emotionally in ways otherwise restricted by gender codes. Veterans of Colonel Dan McCook’s brigade traveled from Chicago to Kennesaw Mountain. When they arrived at their former battleground, they stood together and wept.^[1] When Harvey Trimble was honored for his service to the GAR with speeches and a silver tea set, his acceptance speech was openly emotional with his brothers-in-arms: “My eyes are dazzled, my thoughts are whirling in circles like a cyclone, a volcano of emotion is vainly struggling to find words adequate to tell my thanks and express my high appreciation of your loving comradeship.” In 1949, at one of the final gatherings of aged Union veterans, “memories, like the tears, flowed freely,” as historian Brian Jordan described it. James Hard, then 107 years old, declared to his comrades: “I love the Grand Army. I love all of you, my comrades.”^[2] His comrades were the only ones who could understand him, and soon, they would all be gone.

While veterans could turn to each other for support, we know mental health care for traumatized Civil War soldiers was virtually nonexistent. And while we know that the players on the field are in the capable hands of dozens of skilled doctors and counselors, we also must reckon with the NFL’s problem with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) and other injuries, as well as the poor health outcomes of its players in the long term.

Despite the very serious problems inherent in the game, I still think there’s a glimmer of hope. Football is not war; war is not football. But in response to the sudden and shocking near-death of a comrade, teammates responded not unlike soldiers – turning to each other and sharing their pain with the ones who could understand it best. In a society poisoned by toxic masculinity and in a sport known for hyper-manhood, in this instance, instead of “manning up,” the Buffalo Bills have normalized men weeping openly, seeking therapy, and turning to each other for solace.

Ann Leary’s 2022 novel The Foundling follows a young white woman, Mary Engle, who in the 1930s lands a job as secretary to Dr. Agnes Vogel. The fictional Dr. Vogel is the founder and director of the Nettleton State Village for Feebleminded Women of Childbearing Age, an institution based on many real-life institutions, including one where Leary’s grandmother once worked. Nettleton State Village is meant to incarcerate “feebleminded” girls and women from puberty to menopause in order to prevent “defective” offspring. The Foundling offers a sharp critique of Nettleton State Village and by implication, its real-life counterparts. As the novel shows, many of the women locked up in eugenics institutions were not actually intellectually disabled, and Leary alerts readers to this ahead of time in her author’s note. The novel ascribes the presence of nondisabled women in the institution to three causes: the sexism, racism, and corruption of eugenic practice.

Leary uses the character of Lillian, a childhood friend of Mary’s, to demonstrate eugenics’ intertwined racism and sexism. Lillian—whom Mary grew up with in a Catholic orphanage—is incarcerated at Nettleton because she had a baby out of wedlock with a Black lover and refused to pretend that he had raped her. The sexism of eugenics meant that it categorized women as “morons” or “moral imbeciles” if they strayed from classed notions of sexual purity. And the racism of eugenics meant that if a white woman bore a mixed-race child, that in itself was evidence that she was “mentally defective.” In the novel, Lillian’s “immoral behavior” is taken as proof of her “moron” status. The director, Dr. Vogel, is also a corrupt administrator: she knowingly acquires “normal” girls and women from local jails to increase the number of workers at the institution, and thereby her profits and her reputation. The novel further condemns eugenics institutions for the poor conditions in which the women live and work, especially if they have shown any resistance.

The Foundling cover art. (©Simon and Schuster)

The Foundling, in other words, laments the fact that eugenics ended up targeting the wrong people. Positive reviews of the novel in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post endorse and reiterate this critique. They tie the novel to current-day concerns about women’s reproductive autonomy, noting, for example, that “fear of wombs is nothing new,” and explain the novel’s central problem: “Lillian Faust…now finds herself milking cows on Vogel’s model farm not because she is feebleminded—she’s the opposite of that—but because she bore a child with a Black man.”^[1] But this protest on behalf of those who were not actually disabled implicitly endorses eugenics as long as it accurately identifies disabled people. That is, while rightly criticizing eugenics for sweeping up the wrong people, Leary, along with her reviewers and other contemporary writers, neglects the fact that eugenics was also wrong when it got it right.

Leary’s narrative demonstrates very little interest in or sympathy for the women at the institution who are disabled. Among a nameless mass of disabled women whom Mary sees in the dairy and dining hall, there is only one named disabled character: Elsie is a young, nonspeaking savant, whose head “loll[s] from side to side,” and who is classed by Dr. Vogel as a “profound idiot.” She plays the piano with extraordinary talent. The narrative does show sympathy for her when she is mistreated by the staff, but there is no mention of an alternative living situation for her. Moreover, because she is the only disabled character given even this amount of textual sympathy, the novel implies that Elsie deserves it only because of her compensatory talent, her identity as a “supercrip”: a disabled person with a superability, viewed in popular culture as inspiring and by disability activists as problematic.^[2] After Elsie plays at a concert designed by Mary to showcase Lillian’s intelligence, the narrative does not mention her again.

The Foundling has a mostly happy ending in that Mary is able to rescue Lillian from the institution and help reunite her with her lover and child. Dr. Vogel’s corruption is exposed and she is removed from the leadership of the asylum, although she soon becomes the head of the Pennsylvania Department of Health and Welfare. The worst conditions at Nettleton are remedied and the worst staff removed. Mary still has regrets that she was not able to do more to expose Nettleton and “other, similar asylums.” However, the novel’s repeated objections to the incarceration of “normal” women at the institution, its emphasis on the fact that Lillian does not “belong” there, and its lack of interest in disabled women make clear that its main criticism of eugenics is that it rounded up the wrong people. Actually disabled women such as Elsie, the novel implies, do belong in institutions. The novel gives the impression that if only the conditions and staff were decent, the doctor honorable, and the right women incarcerated—if eugenic ideology were cleared of its racism, sexism, and classism, and institutions of their financial corruption—eugenic institutionalization would have been acceptable.

Leary is not alone in giving this impression. Many contemporary popular and academic writers similarly fail to attack the ableism at the heart of eugenics. In his otherwise engaging and informative book Imbeciles (2017), for example, Adam Cohen tells readers three times in the introduction alone that Carrie Buck, who was at the center of the 1927 Supreme Court case that legalized involuntary sterilization, was not in fact an imbecile, but was of “perfectly normal intelligence.” In presenting the number of people forcibly sterilized in the United States, Cohen remarks, “Many of the victims were, like Carrie, perfectly normal both mentally and physically—and they desperately wanted to have children.” Cohen does not say that people who were actually disabled should have been sterilized, of course; but he does not make clear that many disabled victims of eugenic sterilization also “desperately wanted”—and had a right—to have children.

A more subtle example can be found in Philippa Levine’s Eugenics: A Very Short Introduction (2017), which is packed full of excellent information and analysis. Levine does mention disability activists in her chapter about eugenics after 1945. But in her chapter about “the inequalities of eugenics,” she explains that at its most utopian, eugenics was meant to “help eradicate disease and disability” without commenting on the value of that goal or on the fact that eugenic methods abrogated the rights of existing disabled people. Instead, Levine goes on to detail the ways that eugenics reinforced other existing prejudices. She includes sections on nation, race, gender, class, racial mixing, and immigration. By setting up an opposition between the utopian dreams of eugenics, where she mentions the eradication of disability, and its real-world injustices, where she neglects the assaults on the freedoms of disabled people, Levine falls into the same conceptual trap of seeing eugenics as wrong only when it got it wrong—when it mistook race, class, gender, or nationality for disability.

None of the reviews of The Foundling linked above points out this problematic aspect of the novel. In fact, in her Los Angeles Times review, Lorraine Berry notes of the institution where Leary’s grandmother worked that “[a]s Leary discovered, it was not a benevolent group home for women with intellectual disabilities. Instead, it was a dumping ground for those deemed morally unworthy of giving birth.”^[3] This opposition between an assumed benevolence toward disabled people and a dramatically overreaching sexism clearly recapitulates the novel’s suggestion that eugenics was wrong only because it incarcerated people who were not truly disabled.

By focusing on how eugenics mistakenly conflated disability with socially constructed categories such as race, class, nation, or gender, these critics ignore the fact that disability too is socially constructed. More importantly, they ignore the fact that disabled people also have rights. We have rights to self-determination, bodily integrity, and reproductive autonomy that eugenics—even once it leaves aside all of the prejudices people acknowledge as prejudices—denies. As Alice Wong explains in her essay “The Olmstead Decision and Me,” many disabled people are still pushed into institutions even though it is less expensive for states to provide assistance for them to live in their communities. This institutional bias stems from ableist beliefs that disabled people “don’t deserve the same freedoms and rights as other people, such as opportunities for marriage, employment, and education.”^[4]

Criticizing eugenics for everything except its ableism reproduces eugenic evaluations of fitness and of human value. To counter this eugenic devaluation of disabled people, we need more voices like those of Wong and of Molly McCully Brown, whose poetry collection The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded offers an arresting rebuttal to these inadequate critiques. In this collection set in a eugenics institution, the poems’ speakers help readers grasp the sweeping damage of eugenic incarceration; as one character muses, “Whatever it is you were born to do sweetheart there’s no doing it here.”^[5] In Brown’s work, disabled women have names, they have histories, and they speak to us in powerful lyrics that leave no doubt that eugenics was wrong even when it got it right.

“I am a survivor of childhood sexual abuse,” are words that lend themselves to whispers in the night, a disclosure between friends over a glass of wine. But these are not words that are meant to be spoken by a professional woman working in academia, for they break a social contract – the life of the mind – and raise the specter of the body, its misuses and betrayals.

Clara Louisa Stone, wife of John Hay (1849-1914), 1877. J. Hanson Walker (British, 1844-1933), oil on canvas. (Courtesy John Hay Library)

I found myself over the past two years in the unexpected position of disclosing this personal and painful part of my history at work because I am the director of a special collections library – The John Hay Library at Brown University – that has quietly begun collecting material on childhood sexual abuse advocacy in the 1980s through the early 2000s.^[1] The personal is political, and the historical is personal, and never have I felt these words more clearly than in the collision of my own identity and history with the careful work of curating archival collections. I carry within me a scared, traumatized girl that poet and friend DaMaris Hill so beautifully describes about herself: “the Black girl self I carry on my shoulders.”^[2] This girl, or fragments of her, are spread through my veins, under my colorful blazers and vibrant dresses, red lipstick, and what my aunt lovingly refers to as my “Rachel Maddow” hair. Her voice quakes within my self-assured tone and pitches low at the bottom of my laugh.

At work, I cultivated my femme self in a hyper-masculine space that scratched my skin because I could feel in the architecture and the founding collections a denial of anything other than the (male) life of the mind. I brought myself into the space in ways large and small, from replacing the director’s desk chair that was so large that my feet couldn’t quite touch the ground to working with a fantastic team to reimagine the modes and content of our publicly accessible collections.

The collecting initiative on childhood sexual abuse (CSA) advocacy and survivors began early in my tenure, perhaps four months in, before my father died and before I allowed myself to know a truth that had been resting in my bones since I was a girl. It was cold by then, the New England winter demanding layers of down and wool. I agreed to move forward with this collection, and with my body on full alert, I spoke with the University Librarian, gathered advice from trusted colleagues, wrote memorandums, and consulted with senior administration. The University was ready, the Hay was ready, and I thought that I was ready.

The sudden onset of COVID derailed this collecting initiative and set me on a course to confront my own history. As we took to our attics and dining room tables and held our colleagues’ hands through Zoom screens, the personal and professional spheres collapsed. We bore witness to the messy detritus of life that usually held no place in the workplace; unfolded laundry, lunches, outdoor spaces, wall art, mental health struggles, and more. My world shrank from an 87,500-square-foot marble library on one of the most beautiful campuses in the country to my much more modest home. The schedule was crazed; I offset my work from 5:00 am – 2:00 pm so my husband could work in the afternoon and one of us could pretend to parent our then three-year-old son. This collision and collapse blurred the lines I had carefully constructed between my work and myself, and it was in my work from home that I finally confronted my past.

Recto and verso of a handwritten note scribbled in desperation in April 2020, trying to capture the unrelenting rhythm of “work from home.” Photo by Amanda Strauss.

He died. In late August 2020, my father and abuser died at the age of 94. I felt him depart this world with a great wrenching in my body. Minutes before the call, I already knew he had left. And then, as Toni Cade Bombara recounts in the gentle cadence of her grandmother’s question, “What are you pretending not to know today, Sweetheart?”^[3] A firm, gentle voice from deep in my body – my firm gentle voice – asked me the same question, and I could no longer pretend not to know. And what happened inside of me, what continues to happen as I reckon with this most fundamental, brain-altering betrayal and trauma is an earthquake, but a quiet one that only a few of those who look past my carefully poised eyes can see. Though the world has regained some equilibrium from the early days of COVID, for me, time has ceased to have the same rhythm or meaning; weeks, hours, minutes, months, and years blur. Trauma affects the way memories are stored and retrieved in the brain; instead of being linear, time is like a puzzle that has been scattered on the floor. For me, trauma feels like its own special type of time travel. Washing the dishes and humming to music becomes laying on the ground shaking, a little girl trying to keep herself safe. Heart racing and cold sweats. Time and space bend at will as smells, sounds, heat, and cold wake the body’s memories and the body screams, “Now, now you will know. Now you will remember.”

But as we know too well, time does not stop. It continues, and the days roll forward and with them our lives and responsibilities. In the middling days of COVID, I returned to my mahogany desk and the walls of the library stopped being silent and soon echoed with laughter, the bumpity-bump of rolling carts and the distant voices of classroom conversation. The collecting initiative returned, expanded by the fortuitous connection between a precocious student, the life’s work of a faculty member, and the Hay. The groundwork had been laid on his initiative, but now I tread it with a new awareness. I disclosed my truth – “I am a childhood sexual abuse survivor” – one by one to the colleagues and students working most closely on the collections. I led discussions on ethics and spoke with the voice of a well-trained archivist, a confident leader, and that of a survivor. It was the practice of years that kept me going during these conversations as my vision tunneled and the room began to tilt. As during the early months of COVID, the careful boundaries and personas I created to partition my past from the present and my personal from the professional evaporated, and the ground shifted under my feet. I would later learn the clinical word for this phenomena – integration. I like to think of it as healing.

This essay does not have a satisfying end or resolution because grappling with my survivorship will be the work of decades. The collections will open to research soon, and we hold space for more collections that are yet to come. Survivors and advocates will have a voice in my library, nestled with rare books and contemporary ephemera, housed in acid-free boxes and folders that are neatly labeled in a careful hand. There will be redacted copies and some closed materials, shepherded by long-established archival practice around third-party privacy and sensitive topics. Researchers will visit, and some of them will probably be survivors or advocates. Maybe they will sit in the reading room with time collapsing inside them as the past and present collide in the words on the neatly stacked documents.

But here is what I have learned so far. There is space for my trauma in the archives and for my full, complete, and painful history at work. Shame is the handmaiden of trauma, and it serves a very useful and protective purpose. So I will hold shame’s hand and clutch courage in the other as I continue to navigate my work. Leader. Director. Survivor. Mother. Child. Friend. Let us be open in the spaces where we walk to the full stories of those we see every day. COVID has laid bare our physical health and vulnerabilities. Let us too be able to choose what to show of our internal lives. It is brave work and painful work, but it is necessarily transformative work – for us as individuals and for the physical and intellectual spaces we inhabit.

1. Lana Lawrence papers, 1986-2014. Mary Anne Reilly papers, 1970-2011. Open for research January 2023. ↑
2. DaMaris B. Hill, Breath Better Spent: Living Black Girlhood. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022, xiii. ↑
3. “The Education of a Storyteller,” 246-7 in Bambara, Toni Cade. Deep Sightings & Rescue Missions: Fiction, Essays, and Conversations. 1st Vintage Contemporaries Ed edition. New York: Vintage, 1999. ↑

In Fall 2022, conservative pundits condemned Senator-elect John Fetterman (D-PA), who had survived a stroke the previous spring, using discriminatory rhetoric. They claimed that because he was communicating using closed-caption technology, he was unfit for office. In addition, they suggested that his disability would render him unfit to perform the duties of his office. Evidently, such critics assume that the multifarious workplace responsibilities of an elected official cannot be performed using closed captioning, even though most public servants’ duties occur behind the scenes and do not require public speaking.

Moreover, even those responsibilities that do require public speaking, such as political rallies to communicate with supporters and constituents, actually benefit from closed captioning. This adaptive technology makes the message accessible to more voters, including non-English speakers, people who could not afford to take off from work and travel to attend live events, and home-bound older constituents, as well as folks with sensory and/or physical disabilities. All of these individuals can use recorded, transcribed, and translated versions of speeches more easily than in-person, audio-only, and English-only versions. So what I came to think of as the Fetterman fiasco was about anti-immigrant, anti-poor, and anti-elderly discrimination, as well as anti-disability rhetoric.

I am not an expert on disability, past or present. However, if “the personal is historical,” as the Nursing Clio tagline puts it, surely I have something to offer as an historian currently suffering from a significant disability that mimics the symptoms of a politician under fire for using adaptive technology and techniques – the same adaptations I used to produce this article while suffering from memory loss, brain fog, dyslexia, and dysgraphia.

The Fetterman fiasco erupted during my research leave from my academic home, the University of Montana. The purpose of my leave is to work on a book about Progressive-era social reformer and sex researcher Katharine Bement Davis – who herself has a few ableist skeletons in her closet as a one-time advocate of eugenics.

John Fetterman at the 2019 inauguration. (Governor Tom Wolf/Wikimedia Commons)

In late September and early October, as Fetterman’s campaign gained momentum and his critics intensified their crusade against him, I found myself with some spare time on my hands during a week-long stay in a hospital in Poughkeepsie, New York, far away from my research notes and laptop computer, as I recovered from a serious case of pneumonia – specifically, an uncommon form of the infection more commonly known as Legionnaires’ Disease.

Unlike most victims of Legionnaires’ Disease, first identified in the 1970s, I was not part of a large-scale outbreak. Indeed, public health authorities remain baffled about how I contracted a disease usually transmitted via contaminated water in hotel and hospital HVAC systems, given that I was nowhere near the New York City nursing home where a series of infections coincided with my own illness. While I could have been exposed in Montana or en route to New York, my symptoms revealed themselves – dramatically – in downtown Poughkeepsie, at a celebratory retirement dinner for Vassar College Professor Emerita Miriam Cohen.

I had met Miriam at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association in January 2020, and we subsequently corresponded about our shared interest in Progressive-era reformers. When she arranged for me to give a lecture on Davis, who had graduated from Vassar in 1892, I was thrilled not only to get insights from Miriam and her colleagues but also to conduct research in Vassar’s Archives and Special Collections.

After a night in Vassar’s historic Alumnae House, I spent a productive day in Vassar’s library, happily snapping pictures of students’ photo albums and scrapbooks. The next day, when the archives were closed, I toured the campus, visiting the Dome Room in the former Astronomical Observatory, where Davis lived during her final year at Vassar. All in all, I was having a great visit. I was ready to enjoy the reception, lecture, and dinner in Miriam’s honor before resuming my research the following day.

Then disaster struck. I had felt unwell since my arrival, but I chalked it up to exhaustion, nerves, and hunger. I had recently had shoulder surgery, which caused me to tire easily, and due to feeling unwell, had barely touched food during my visit. I was 99.9 percent sure I didn’t have COVID or Flu A or B as I had been vaccinated in Missoula before traveling. I also had taken a home COVID test, which was negative. Therefore, I decided to soldier on. I was confident that despite my general queasiness, severe migraine, and possible fever, my thorough preparation – and sheer stubbornness – would carry me through.

So, I delivered the lecture. I think it went fine, although I have very little memory of it. As I later learned, while Legionnaires’ Disease initially manifests like food poisoning or stomach flu and eventually leads to breathing problems and liver damage, it also causes significant cognitive impairment.

Over the next several days and weeks, I would suffer from memory loss and brain fog. In addition, I experienced both dyslexia and dysgraphia. Once I got over fearing I was going to die from liver failure or lung damage, I started worrying about how I could pursue my calling as an historian – a reader, researcher, writer, editor, speaker, and teacher – if I could not type, write, or read – and sometimes, not even think?

As it turns out, the solution is simple, if not easy:

1. Rest and recover. I’ve seen a lot of healthcare professionals since returning to Missoula, both allopathic and naturopathic practitioners, and they all agree on one thing: I should anticipate a lengthy recovery, anywhere from six months to two years. More than two months out from the initial onset of symptoms, I still tire easily. I also must limit both physical and mental exertion – and avoid emotional distress – to prevent a racking cough that results in violent vomiting. Having said that, my most troubling “Long Legionella” symptoms, such as memory loss and brain fog, persisted only for a couple of weeks. I’m convinced that allowing myself to rest completely – no TV, no reading, no computer time – helped me to recover quickly.
2. Use adaptive technology. I already was familiar with dictation software due to an earlier bout of carpal tunnel syndrome, which prevented me from typing for a full year. Thanks to the demands of teaching in the COVID era, I also had become reasonably competent at using Zoom. Because one of the new classes I taught during the first year of the pandemic was devoted to collecting oral histories of the ongoing public health crisis – using Zoom – I knew that Zoom produced auto-generated transcripts. Familiarity with these adaptive technologies came in handy as I grappled with a new set of challenges. On days I cannot type or write, I use dictation software (available on both Google Docs and Microsoft Word) or set up a Zoom session to create an auto-generated transcript.
3. Ask for help. I’m fortunate enough to have been able to hire research assistants to help me organize my notes, transform my handwritten notes into typed text, and continue research at Vassar. Not everybody is able to hire a research assistant, of course, but there are other options, such as offering academic credit in lieu of cash. Friends and family also provided needed assistance with day-to-day tasks. One friend simply showed up, day after day, to take my dog hiking when I was too unwell to walk. Others took turns driving me to and from medical appointments when brain fog made it unsafe for me to drive. Finally, my partner took on the lion’s share of domestic responsibilities for many weeks.

As far as I can tell from news coverage about Fetterman, these are exactly the steps he’s taken, although not, of course, in the exact same way, since his disabilities are not exactly the same as mine, as far as I know. (Given the negative responses I’ve gotten when I’ve come clean about experiencing brain fog and memory loss, I imagine Fetterman also might be reluctant to share all his personal medical details with the public and the press!)

And here’s the thing: They all work! By managing my time and energy carefully and relying on these general guidelines, I’ve been able to return to research and writing for several hours each day. Research assistants near and far have allowed me to work many more hours by proxy. Since my release from the hospital, I’ve not only collected, organized, and transcribed additional primary research material, but also written a mini-memoir of my experience with Legionnaires’ Disease and submitted a major grant proposal to support my current project – as well as authored this piece. And this is only ten weeks out from the initial onset of symptoms!

So, Fetterman – and his supporters and critics – can rest easy in the sure knowledge that there is no reason a significant disability, whether temporary or permanent, should disqualify anybody from a job that they are otherwise qualified to do.

Content warning: This piece discusses parent-child sexual abuse, coercion, and addiction.

Nobody likes getting a colonoscopy. It’s not just the procedure, but the “prep” of taking a laxative and knowing your bathroom needs to be within easy reach for the next thirty-six hours or so.

But what I call “Dad’s Playbook” — his instructions for life and especially how to be a woman — raised the tension much higher as my age seventy colonoscopy came into play.

My father arrived in America on April 30, 1948, at age twenty-three. He’d already been an immigrant once before, when his well-to-do German Jewish parents moved him from Hamburg, Germany, when Hitler became Chancellor. They placed him and his brother first with a nanny in Cornwall for about a year to polish their English, which had been a second language in their home. The brothers needed to rid themselves of an accent in order to survive their education at a British boarding school. After I watched TV programs showing the hazing and torture given out at many such schools, I asked Dad several times whether he had been beaten there (picturing, from television shows, the little German Jewish boy cornered among the upper-class British ones); he denied it, saying that his older brother did the fighting for the two of them.

But Dad, it turned out, was a classic unreliable narrator. As far as I can figure out now, he said what was emotionally safest for himself, then adapted to fill the role described. He claimed to have a pair of college degrees, for instance. Years after his death, I discovered he’d failed out of high school.

So in America, despite the absence of an actual certificate of higher education, Dad presented himself as a highly educated man, an elegant European connoisseur of arts and classical music, as well as a credentialed engineer on his way to management. His British accent and pipe added allure for women his age, and also mine.

Dad’s bookshelves and magazine collections reflected his concept of a sophisticated man of the world, ranging from the latest politics and anthropology to the new sociology of sex. When I was almost ten, he challenged me to develop a “catalog” — in reality, a metal box of file cards — listing all of his books. One section had “adult content.” I had permission to read them if I “really wanted to.” Meanwhile, he gave me mass-market illustrated publications to take to bed with me, creating a link between us: we two, unlike my mother (who’d never read such challenging books), could explore sensuality.

The magazines Dad shared with me at that age and onward were “men’s magazines” like Playboy and Esquire (“I read them for the articles,” men would say with a wink). They explained in both fiction and nonfiction what women did when partnering with sophisticated, intelligent men: not only eager consensual sex at any moment and in any location, but also sex that took place in any location of a woman’s body. The women in the magazines were turned on by submitting to penetration in different ways — including using objects or animals — and the men desired them for their willingness, adventurousness, and passion.

Coming of age during the Sexual Revolution, I accepted Dad’s publications as authorities and how-to manuals for my adult life. For me, that began shortly before my seventeenth birthday, when I boarded an airplane to begin college. My mother gave me a “note to the doctor” to take to the health center, giving parental permission for birth control pills — “when you’re ready.” My father assured me there was nothing wrong with abundant sex, “as long as you don’t get pregnant or catch a disease.” And, laughing, he advised me that “if rape is inevitable, lie back and enjoy it.”

I don’t know how many other young women of the time were given similar risky advice by their parents. Still, I used to think I was the only one. Now, I realize there’s hardly anything unique in people’s experiences … and I’m guessing there are plenty of others, including those who joined communes in the 1970s, who worked from a Playbook like the one Dad provided through his teaching, sharing, and examples. When I was nineteen, he developed a sexual relationship with my college roommate. Later, he “bedded” my best friend in Vermont.

For some years, I blunted the effects of this upbringing with Dad’s own smoothing substance: alcohol, preferably neat Scotch. When in 1990 I walked determinedly away from that usage and embraced the twelve-step program of Alcoholics Anonymous, I began to face how many choices I’d made on the basis of my father’s instructions. Until then, high risks and embarrassment while naked or cornered had been routine. Because such situations were considered normal within the substance-abusing social groups, I didn’t realize there were other choices until I began to learn the new-to-me patterns of a sober life.

Not long after that, I got back into a pattern of regular dental checkups. With the hygienist’s fingers on and under my tongue, and an insistence on an open and accepting mouth for almost an hour, I asked one time, “Is this hard for women who’ve been sexually abused?” I have no memory of being physically forced to take something into my mouth (other than tongue depressors, which I only recently learned are a problem for many others), but I had followed Dad’s long-term tutoring, and had ignored my own unwillingness on many occasions, including repressing a gag reflex and sometimes choking.

The hygienist nodded. “It can be.” She wasn’t interested in saying more — she focused on plaque around my molars. I squelched an urge to spit her fingers out.

Since then, when I’ve sat in a dental chair I’ve been swept by compassion for other sexual abuse victims who need to get their teeth cleaned or cavities repaired. Fingers in my mouth remain a trigger for vivid and humiliating memories for me, and I identify viscerally with those who’ve repeatedly opened their bodies to insertions that hurt and damage even further. When I was about twelve, my dentist regularly used a “dental dam,” a latex contraption that fastened at the back of the patient’s mouth to prevent bits of tooth or filling from dropping into the throat — but all on its own, the rubber odor and contact with my tongue triggered a gag reflex for me. Dentists I visited later used an assistant with a suction device instead, to vacuum up bits and scraps when they drilled, a better process for me to handle. If a dentist offered a dental dam now, cavity or not, I’d get up and leave the room.

Even as I enter my seventies, in a time when sexuality is brought into conversation more often than when I was twenty, I’ve found it’s more acceptable to talk about oral sex than about penetrations of other non-genital parts of the body. There were years when I almost never said no to anything as long as the partnering was consensual and mostly pleasant. Later, struggling with diagnoses around my intestines and anus, I believed some significant disorders of my body resulted from those forms of “play.” They’re directly connected to what my doctors now want explored during the colonoscopy.

I can’t look at a container of Vaseline without seeing the glans-shaped impression I noted in the jar that one partner kept beside the bed. I recall saying aloud, during painful anal penetration, “This proves I really love you, doesn’t it?” Whether or not the man heard my words, he never answered. He must not have read the articles or learned the obligatory next lines in Dad’s stories, which often included conversation like “Yes, and now you’ll submit to this every time I want it, won’t you? Doesn’t my insistence, my pushing into you, make you wet? Tell me you want more.”

My primary care physician insisted on this year’s colonoscopy. His threat to otherwise not treat the related issues infuriated me. Leaning on advice from a counselor, the one who’d told me firmly that Dad’s literary seduction (I wasn’t even ten years old!) qualified today as sexual abuse — even though he’d penetrated the bodies of my best friends, not mine — I sought out a specialist at a well-known medical center. “This would be my second colonoscopy and probably my last,” I told him. I detailed the infections I’d had, ones that my primary doctor minimized. The specialist listened intently and explained quietly; he kept his hands to himself and shared his notes, which reflected exactly what I’d said. At last, the specialist and I made an agreement to get this done, because he too was concerned. I spent a year in sometimes agitated discussions with his team before deciding I’d follow through.

But the term “submit” is on the tip of my tongue: that I’d “submit to the procedure.” And it upsets me. In the week before the appointment, knowing I’d be drugged and lying nearly naked under hospital lights as someone penetrated my body with medical objects, my stomach clenched with each view of the calendar. I could easily lose my temper over small things that week, or make mistakes in work. I had to keep reminding myself of my reasoning: This is health care, I decided, and it may extend my life. (My late and much-loved husband DK died of colon cancer. Not pretty.) Most importantly: I chose for myself a medical center where I’ve been impressed with the care and professionalism. I planned every minute of that procedure’s date, reassuring myself that after I woke from the “active anesthesia” (so I could cooperate, but not remember details), there’d be a friend at my side. We would ride back to my own secure, safe, and private little home. Agency, not submission. Choice, not following Dad’s Playbook.

The only people who knew the shadow conversations, the presence of those stories from my father’s years of instruction, have been me and my counselor. The flinching and gagging? I try to keep them out of my doctor’s office and the dentist’s chair. In the shower each evening, naked and vulnerable, I sing familiar, “safe” songs to keep from replaying parts of those early magazine stories. I can’t forget them, but I’m learning to look away.

Just don’t ask me what it took to schedule my dental appointment.

I first went to a medium for the same reason probably everyone does: I hoped to speak to the dead. My brother had recently and unexpectedly died, and our family was in crushing grief. Perhaps a medium, we hoped, could give us some reassurance that he was safe on the “other side.”

That’s what first brought my mom and me to the intentional Spiritualist community of Lily Dale, located about an hour south of Buffalo, which one journalist dubbed “the town that talks to the dead.” Since it was founded in 1879, the town has been dedicated to the study and practice of American Spiritualism, the religion founded by mediums Leah, Kate, and Maggie Fox in the mid-nineteenth century. Lily Dale is a cute little village nestled between a thick, old-growth forest and Cassadaga Lake, full of tiny, eclectic houses, fairy gardens, and old-fashioned meeting houses. Every summer during “camp season,” the village hosts thousands of visitors, all hoping – like my mom and I did – to hear from dead loved ones, commune with spirits, and explore New Age religion. Now, about a decade after I first visited, I’ve been thinking about Lily Dale in a very different way: together with my colleagues from Dig: A History Podcast, I’m working on a book that explores the history of the community.

That project is what brought me to writer and comedian Jamie Loftus’s newest podcast, Ghost Church. In the limited run series, Loftus visits Lily Dale’s sister community, Cassadaga (named for the lake that Lily Dale sits on), located about half an hour from Orlando, Florida. The community was founded by a Lily Dale medium and continues to serve as a winter home for many of its residents. This is Loftus’s third solo podcast: previously, she discussed her experience in MENSA and then explored the history and legacy of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita. She’s also been a frequent guest host on You’re Wrong About.

In Ghost Church, writer and comedian Jamie Loftus investigates and interrogates American Spiritualism. (Courtesy Jamie Loftus, photo by Megan Lovallo)

I wasn’t sure what to expect from Ghost Church. Ok, fine – so part of me was nervous that Loftus was scooping us and getting the history of Spiritualist communities out into the world before we could. But more than that, I was a little worried about how Loftus would approach the subjects of mediumship, spirituality, and intentional community. Loftus is irreverent and genuinely very funny and uses her humor to make her critical approach sharper and more accessible.

But Spiritualism can be an easy mark. I mean, there’s a history of mediums emitting ghostly ectoplasm from their vaginas and using enormous trumpets to amplify spectral voices. I wasn’t worried because I hate laughing, but because it could be easy to make an entire podcast just poking fun at the silly or strange aspects of spiritualism and its history – and easy to forget that these are real religious communities made up of faithful adherents deserving of respect. I’m not an adherent, but like many, I’ve still gone to the faith in a time of need. And mediums are sensitive to being made fun of. Not only is there a long history of skeptics trying to prove Spiritualism a hoax, and ongoing campaigns to bust mediums, but spiritualist communities are also cautious about being mocked by the press. In Lily Dale, for instance, there’s real hurt and resentment from previous projects by outsiders that residents felt presented them in an unfair light.

It turned out I didn’t need to worry. Loftus did approach Cassadaga and Spiritualism with humor, but also real thoughtfulness. The podcast is organized around two concurrent threads: Loftus’s visit to Cassadaga and the history of Spiritualism in the United States. Her visit to Cassadaga felt familiar to my experiences in Lily Dale: they both have aging communities, are reliant on New Age gift shops and visitors for income, and are more than a little eclectic. Her constant struggle to find food (there are no restaurants or food shops inside Cassadaga!) made me grateful for the nice little restaurants in Lily Dale. I really enjoyed her desperate excursion to the volunteer-run library, which is packed with fun old books on spirituality but is also open only one night a week for two hours. This rang true with our experience doing research in Lily Dale, where the history museum and library are also open at the discretion of the volunteers who run them.

What Loftus finds is that while residents are a little wary of her as a writer and comedian (throughout the series, she’s still waiting for official approval from the board for her project), once they come to trust her, they are warm and interesting. In turn, she treats them all with respect. She dedicates one entire episode to listening to the experiences of four women who live in Cassadaga. In the final episode, after Loftus has used up all her time in the library, she’s invited to dinner by a resident who sees her wandering in the street thinking about how she’ll find some food. The ensuing conversation (over coffee and pie at Perkins) gives Loftus – and us – a delightful insight into real life in this unusual little town. Their conversations made me smile, reminding me of our relationship with Lily Dale historian Ron Nagy, who over time has become an unexpected friend.

Loftus also does a good job handling the history of Spiritualism, the other central thread of the series. Loftus spends most of this history recounting the very complicated story of the Fox sisters, who started the religion when they began to hear and interpret a series of knocking sounds in their home in Hydesville, New York. Loftus recounts the story through a very modern, feminist lens, always reminding listeners of the nineteenth-century context in which the girls heard their spirit rappings, became celebrities, and struggled in life. Just like Spiritualism can be an easy target for mockery, the Fox sisters are often discussed with a mix of derision and dismissal. For instance, Maggie Fox famously recanted her belief in Spiritualism and granted an interview in which she claimed all their experiences had been hoaxes. A lot of media takes this entirely at face value, but Loftus contextualizes Maggie’s decision-making, maybe not exactly how a scholar would, but in a way that’s accessible to a modern audience. She describes the letters that arctic explorer Elisha Kent Kane wrote to girlfriend Maggie Fox as “deeply negging,” as just one particularly great example.

There is one instance where Loftus lets a good story get in the way of history. In episode five, Loftus explains that Kate Fox sought help for her alcoholism from Dr. George Taylor, who diagnosed her with hysteria. Loftus then goes all in on the fully debunked theory that doctors used vibrators to give women patients therapeutic orgasms. It’s a reasonable mistake to make: the erroneous claim abounds, it’s very funny, and it does help paint the picture of inept misogynists underestimating and mistreating women in nineteenth-century America. But it’s still wrong, and it makes me wonder whether Loftus could have used a historian on the project, even just as a sounding board.

(If you need a podcast on the history of vibrators – and let’s face it, who doesn’t – check out Maintenance Phase for an episode on this discredited theory.)

The sign at the entrance to the Cassadaga Spiritualist Camp. (Courtesy Willy Volk)

Both Lily Dale and Cassadaga are overwhelmingly white, so I especially appreciated how Loftus pointedly analyzed race, exploring the ways that people of color appear – and do not appear – in the town. For example, Native Americans do appear, but only in spirit form. The town leans heavily on Indian “spirit guides” and indigenous imagery. Cassadaga was founded by George Colby, a medium from New York State, who said he felt led to Florida by his spirit guide, a Native American man named Seneca. Then, the village was built upon land stolen from the Seminole. Loftus considers this history but also gives the floor to Olivia Woodward (Caddo and Euchee) to talk about what the cultural appropriation of Native American spiritualities feels like to Indians. I’ll admit I especially focused on this episode because I’ve been working on New Age appropriation of Native American spirituality, but I would have liked to see Loftus engage more with the longer history of criticism of this by folks like Vine Deloria, Jr., Philip Deloria, and Ward Churchill. But this episode also showcases what Loftus is really good at: pointing out the direct connection between the history of the community and the people alive today. Spirit guides and dreamcatchers may seem a little corny on the surface, but as this episode also shows, they are products of a long history of American colonialism that has real effects on Native Americans living today.

Overall, Ghost Church was thoughtful, tender, and a total romp. Loftus is empathetic to grief-stricken sitters hoping to contact lost loved ones, respectful toward the faithful, open-minded, and curious about spiritual experiences – but also critical (sometimes skewering) when necessary. Call me parasocial, but after listening, I kind of want Jamie Loftus to be my friend? And in a way, that’s the vibe of the show – it’s like going on a weird adventure with a very funny, very smart friend and sitting down to unpack it all afterward. In this way, Loftus offers an example of how to blend scholarly engagement with humor and accessibility. With a topic as loaded with both weird history and deep emotion as Spiritualism, I think it’s particularly useful, and this is exactly what we hope to do with our own book on Lily Dale. But I also think this podcast series can be an example to historians more broadly. Ghost Church suggests that historians can be funny and smart at the same time – and catch the attention of the broader public by doing so.

Favorite book:

Eileen: By far, it was Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic. Spooky, weird, and gorgeously written. I’m counting down the days until winter break so I can spend an afternoon re-reading it.

Vicki: My reading habit has not been particularly good this year. One book I’m still thinking about, however, is Wayétu Moore’s She Would Be King. A mix of magical realism and historical fiction, it’s a novel that asks the reader to really pay attention. Moore explores the very personal experiences of her characters – loneliness, alienation – against the backdrop of the founding of Liberia and the tensions around colonization and enslavement in West Africa.

Kristin: S.A. Chakraborty’s Daevabad Trilogy stands out for me. Based on Islamic legends and story-telling, this fantasy saga centers on an Egyptian female con-artist who becomes an empowered healer defying family, racial, and gendered expectations to blaze her own path in a magical realm. Not only is the trilogy a quick read (despite each book’s increasing page length), but it’s also an inspiring and nuanced take on traditional fantasy.

Book cover of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. (©Penguin)

Laura: I always have to break this down into a few categories. My favorite general fiction book of the year is Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, a lovely book on friendship, collaboration, grief, and so much more, all set within the world of video game design. Like Sarah, I read a ton of romance. Of those, I have to highlight Heartbreaker by Sarah MacLean, Ship Wrecked by Olivia Dade, and Long Game by Rachel Reid. (The last was my most anticipated book of 2022 and it did not disappoint.)

Chelsea: Hands down my favorite book this year is David Sacks’ Letter Perfect, which traces the history of every letter in the English alphabet. If you’ve ever wondered why English pronunciation is so weird, this will explain why. Almost every alphabet system in the world is descended from a singular Semitic alphabet, which used borrowed Egyptian hieroglyphs, over three thousand years ago. Very cool.

Sarah: I read a lot, but I’m not particularly good at reading new releases or even venturing across genres – listen, romance novels remain a major coping mechanism. I’ve mostly been reading through Lisa Kleypas’s interconnected Wallflowers, Ravenels, and Hathaways series of historical romances. (Derek Craven! Sebastian St. Vincent! Rhys Winterbourne! West Ravenel! Swoon!) But I did finally read Hidden Valley Road by Robert Kolker, which was fascinating and as compelling as any novel.

Emily: Like Vicki, my reading habits were a bit different this year, but looking back, I enjoyed Michelle Zauner’s memoir Crying in H-Mart; like Sarah, romance was a welcome escape and I found it in Jen Comfort’s The Astronaut and the Star; and I’ve pre-ordered Natalia Mehlman Petrzela’s Fit Nation: The Pains and Gains of America’s Exercise Obsession, which comes out early in January and I can’t wait to read it.

Averill: I set out to read 100 books this year, about double my usual GoodReads challenge goal. As I write, I’m 13 away from succeeding! But that means I have a lot of book opinions this year. I’ll limit it to a few. I just finished Rivers Solomon’s Sorrowland, which left me haunted, and sad, and kind of hopeful? Which is how their writing usually leaves me. I read everything that Natasha Pulley reads, and The Half Life of Valery K was horrifying like HBO’s Chernobyl, but with all the tenderness and biting humor of any of Pulley’s novels. I discovered Emily Henry this year, and now I aspire to be her – Beach Read is maybe the best romance novel I’ve ever read. And I assigned new-to-me books in a couple of my classes which were a hit – my students (and I) loved Jen Manion’s Female Husbands, Wendy Lower’s The Ravine, and of course Jake Newsome’s Pink Triangle Legacies. We had really excellent conversations about all three.

Arkady Martine’s Hugo Award-winners. (Abebooks)

Anna: I had more time this year to catch up on some great new sci-fi books. I particularly enjoyed Arkady Martine’s enthralling imperial space thriller A Memory Called Empire and its sequel, A Desolation Called Peace. I also loved Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori – it’s creepy and atmospheric, with one of the strangest (but somehow completely relatable) protagonists I’ve ever encountered.

Natalie: These both came out toward the end of 2021, but I enjoyed Farah Jasmine Griffin’s Read Until You Understand: The Profound Wisdom of Black Life and Literature and Jim Downs’ Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine.

Cassandra: My absolute favorite novel that I read this year was the 2019 masterpiece and Booker Prize winner Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo. I was so upset when I finished it – I just did not want to say goodbye to the characters! I was also fascinated by Daisy Jones and the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid, which I was fooled into thinking was nonfiction for the first twenty pages or so.

Lizzie: For fiction, I also liked Laura’s pick: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. Plus The Latecomer: A Novel by Jean Hanff Korelitz and two new books by Akwaeke Emezi: You Made a Fool of Death by Your Beauty and The Death of Vivik Oji. Also Big Girl by Mecca Jamilah Sullivan and Pachinko by Min Jin Lee. I also thought that Recitatif: A Story by Toni Morrison was brilliant; it was recently re-issued with a great introduction by Zadie Smith.

Favorite album or song:

Eileen: Spotify Wrapped tells me it was the Encanto soundtrack, but that’s just a result of my four year old learning how to use Alexa. I continued on a totally predictable and totally enjoyable Jason Isbell kick all year, who is not only brilliant but, more importantly, one of my favorite Twitter personalities.

Kristin: I listened to so many albums while working in archives this year, but the one that I kept returning to was Regina Spektor’s Remember Us to Life. The songs “The Trapper and the Furrier” and “The One Who Stayed and the One Who Left” particularly stayed with me. Her newest single, “Back of a Truck,” also caught my ear to such an extent that it ended up on my Spotify Unwrapped.

Chelsea: The Mean Girls Broadway cast recording rocks.

R.E.: Orville Peck’s Bronco pretty much consumed my entire year. Spotify informs me that I listened to it for a solid week.

Album cover. (Wikimedia Commons)

Sarah: This year my Spotify Wrapped was mostly comfortable classics like Fleetwood Mac and Simon and Garfunkel, my backdrop for writing. My music taste is not particularly adventurous. But this fall I, like everyone else, fell hard for Taylor Swift’s Midnights. What an incredible, emotional, interesting album. Go listen if you haven’t yet!

Emily: Ha, I’m right with Sarah on Taylor Swift’s Midnights! And I’m currently gasping for air under a mountain of grading, and the Hans Zimmer channel of all things is helping me through, though it’s kind of startling to feel so uplifted by the main theme to Top Gun.

Laura: I’m always on the Taylor Swift train. Midnights.

Cassandra: My two-year-old only allows us to listen to “pirate music” in his presence, but he (thankfully!) accepts a very broad definition of the genre. Wading through endless sea shanties eventually led to the discovery of the Derina Harvey Band, a Celtic-rock group from Edmonton, and I can’t get enough of Derina’s growl!

Favorite TV show, movie, or live performance:

Eileen: I instantly became obsessed with Only Murders in the Building. Steve Martin and Martin Short are amazing, of course, but Selena Gomez is next-level funny.

Vicki: I have recently started to re-watch the BBC version of Ghosts. It is so delightful! Lots of hilarious throw-away lines but also sweet and charming. I also enjoyed the beauty of AppleTV’s adaptation of Pachinko, by Min Jin Lee.

Series poster. (IMDB)

Kristin: It’s a toss-up between Andor (Disney+) and The Great (Hulu). Both shows were gorgeously shot with casts that shined in the roles they played, even in each episode’s darkest moments!

Chelsea: I saw Hadestown on Broadway this year before any of the principal cast left. Incredible!

R.E.: I watched all three seasons of Barry in the space of about 72 hours. I can’t recommend that pacing, but the show itself is stellar.

Sarah: I really enjoyed Rings of Power. I had watched all the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit films, but they didn’t really click with me the way they did some folks. Rings of Power actually changed that, and I enjoyed rewatching the films feeling like I finally got the story. I saw a lot of movies in the theater with Averill this year, and I especially liked The Northman and Bullet Train. They were both super weird and memorable!

Lizzie: Fleishman Is in Trouble. I wish I could binge watch it, but they make you wait a week! I also liked Ozark but it wasn’t always easy to watch.

Emily: For movies, I really liked Everything Everywhere All at Once, and I didn’t think I’d be listing an Adam Sandler basketball flick, but Hustle was a solid, feel-good watch. On TV, I binged the latest season of The Crown, even though it wasn’t a favorite compared to past ones, and we started watching Yellowstone, just to try and understand what the heck folks seem to like about it. So far I don’t get it, but I’m fascinated by how viewers seem to accept the over-the-top-soapiness of it all because of how masculinity is threaded through the show’s cowboy characters, and how the west still functions in the American imaginary, especially states like Montana, where I grew up.

Everything, Everywhere, All at Once movie poster. (Wikimedia Commons)

Averill: I watch all the movies and too many shows, so picking a favorite (or even remembering everything I’ve seen) is a challenge. In no particular order: Rings of Power, Andor, Abbott Elementary, and Interview with a Vampire. For movies, Everything Everywhere All At Once was probably the best film of the year, maybe only tied with Wakanda Forever, through which I just sort of quiet-sobbed from start till end. But also, why was Top Gun Maverick so good? And The Lost City! And I’m probably the only Jordan Peele fan who thought Nope was fantastic. Yes to Bullet Train and no to The Northman, Sarah

Laura: I don’t often rewatch TV, especially not in quick succession, but I watched Heartstopper on Netflix at least three times all the way through. A sweet, endlessly delightful tale of two British boys falling in love. Can’t recommend it enough.

Cassandra: I adored the show Bad Sisters, and I very much want all of the sisters to do more bad things. I was also blown away by Mo, a hilarious and heartbreaking Netflix dramedy about a Palestinian man seeking asylum – for years – in Houston. As for movies… I have no idea what I might recommend, as I don’t think I was able to stay awake for a full viewing of anything!

Favorite podcast:

Eileen: A few friends recommended Normal Gossip, and I have never in my life laughed so hard. The entire premise is just getting to hear some anonymous normal gossip—little petty dramas from the neighborhood dog park or some law school friends—and it is perfect.

Vicki: My podcast listening is all over the place this year. I finally listened to Dead Eyes, about actor Connor Ratliff’s rejection from Band of Brothers. What begins as a seemingly silly podcast with a limited premise ends up being a thoughtful meditation on resilience with a perfect ending. I also just got on the bandwagon with If Books Could Kill. I’m a true Michael Hobbes fan (a Hobbesian?) and I love his take-downs of these reads.

Chelsea: My favorite discovery this year is My Gothic Dissertation, a brilliant project from Anna Williams that weaves in her analysis of Gothic literature and her experience navigating the academic world. It’s quit lit with very good sound production. And if you’re not listening to the incredible reporting by Connie Walker in her podcast, Stolen, you’re also missing out.

Logo of If Books Could Kill. (Spotify)

Sarah: I’ve been listening to some book podcasts this year, and am really enjoying reading along. It’s like having so many book clubs! I discovered Just King Things, in which the two super smart literary critic hosts are working their way through the books of Stephen King in publication order. As a longtime King fan, it’s really fun to revisit some of my favorite books with a bit of critique. I am loving Michael Hobbes’ new series If Books Could Kill – there’s nothing better than Michael going full methodology queen. I also regularly read along with romance novel pods Fated Mates and Learning the Tropes. And another season of Cocaine and Rhinestones! (If you’re planning to watch George & Tammy, you really should listen to season 3 of this fantastic country music podcast first.)

Lizzie: I agree with Eileen’s pick, Normal Gossip. It’s so much fun and easy to listen to. I also liked Welcome to Provincetown. For something completely different, I’m listening to Anderson Cooper’s, All There Is, about grief. I have to be in the right mood for it, but when I am, it gives me a lot to think about.

Emily: I like You Are Good hosted by Sarah Marshall and Alex Steed. It started out under a different name analyzing film representations of fatherhood and masculinities, but has expanded to just feelings-forward discussions about movies that old millennials know and love and maybe feel conflicted about. Oh and I just started listening to Drafting the Past hosted by Kate Carpenter and love it, as it interviews historians not just about their books but also about the craft of writing.

Cassandra: As a historian of motherhood, I often find myself listening to The Birth Hour, a podcast in which individuals share their birth stories in great detail. It is both very modern – placenta encapsulation, birthing with Covid, elective C-sections, and more – and also part of a long tradition of birthing people recounting their experiences of pregnancy, labor, delivery, and postpartum recovery.

Favorite board, video, or online game:

Box art for Wingspan. (Board Game Geek)

Vicki: For my birthday this year, my husband bought me Wingspan. It quickly became an obsession! Beautifully-drawn illustrations on the cards, a million different ways to build your habitats, and just enough complexity to keep me focused.

Eileen: This is the year I finally succumbed to a Spelling Bee addiction, and I have no regrets.

Chelsea: If you’re not playing DND by now, you’re missing out.

R.E.: To no one’s surprise, I thoroughly enjoyed Stray.

Kristin: One of our friends introduced us to The Game. Who knew putting numbers in a line could be so addicting??

Emily: Beyond a silly puzzle app on my phone, I don’t play a lot of games, but I just picked up one of those pretty FAO Schwarz versions of Uno at Target and am hoping I can convince someone to play with me over the holiday break.

Averill: I’ve also been playing Wingspan a lot this year (and it’s adapted for BoardGameArena.com, in case you don’t like dealing with all the fiddly bits with a game like that). For lighter games we play So Clover and Pictures a ton in my game groups. For mid-weight games I will always play Flourish (co-op only) and 7 Wonders Architects. For heavier games it’s always Viticulture, Clank! (and I love the new Catacombs edition), or Castles of Tuscany. But let’s be honest… I’ll play anything (except a war game) at least once.

Laura: Our family has gotten into Rummikub at gatherings. First at my mother-in-law’s house, then I bought a set for my own mom, now we have our own. Easy to learn, quick games, and suddenly you find you’ve played eight rounds in an evening.

Cassandra: I truly despise most games, and they mostly fill me with dread and performance anxiety. That being said, I played a lot of Mermaid Island, a truly no-skills-required board game (with my 5-year-old), as well as the occasional Scrabble with my husband.

The unexpected little thing that brought you the most joy:

Vicki: I had a big group of family come to visit for Thanksgiving. My niece Sophia brought a bunch of very small, plastic ducks and secretly hid them all over the house. It took me a few days to start noticing them and now I’m still finding them in all the nooks and crannies! I loved the pure surprise of it and realized how much joy something small and silly could produce.

Sarah: I’m not typically a sports watcher, but my family has started religiously watching Buffalo Bills games, and I have grown to love sharing in the joy of a win and devastation of a loss along with my city. Sure, my husband and daughter have to explain all the lingo to me – I’m still not exactly sure what punting does? – but I’m really enjoying it. (Go Bills!)

Three of Sarah’s children with a Buffalo Bills display at Wegmans. (Courtesy of Sarah Handley-Cousins)

Eileen: These tiny little egg cups, which have allowed me to relive one of my favorite childhood breakfasts (eggs and soldiers!). My husband and kid were initially skeptical, but now they are 100% on board and we use them once a week.

Kristin: While doing research in Cape Town this spring, I went on early-morning hikes every Wednesday morning. My heart absolutely leapt every time I saw a flock of wild guinea-fowl pass by. Some people think their chirping is annoying and harsh, but I found it adorable to listen to as they gathered together and ran down paved streets and sandy paths with their little fluffed-out bodies. I have one of their beautiful spotted feathers in the pencil cup on my desk as a reminder.

Chelsea: We discovered this year that our cat, Mira, lives and dies for autumn leaves. She waits patiently for us to bring one in for her every time we arrive home.

Emily: I became my university’s faculty in residence in June, so it’s brought me lots of unexpected little joys, along with some not-joys, but maybe those should’ve been expected…

Averill: I started a new job this fall and moved to MN without my partner or dog as I feel out the new region and gig, and two colleagues have quickly become wonderful friends. Tuesday evenings watching Interview with a Vampire, Friendsgiving, movie nights, yelling at college-aged trick-or-treaters from the front porch while we sip hot cider and eat pizza fries . . . it has made a hard semester a lot easier. Oh, and I’ve continued (though more sporadically now) my Zoom paint nights with friends, and has made moving away a little better.

Averill and three friends show off attempts at snowflake watercolors. (Courtesy of Averill Earls)

Anna: I got sucked back into watching competitive figure skating this year for the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics. I’ve been a fan since the 90s, but hadn’t really followed the sport closely in the past two Olympic cycles. It’s been such a fun distraction to catch up on the currently-competing athletes and cheer for them!

Laura: As part of a childless couple, I’m not around kids very much, especially during an ongoing pandemic when most of my family/friends with kids live out of state. But we have a weekly Dungeons & Dragons game which meets both online and in person with friends who have a toddler. Getting to watch him develop this year – as he became more mobile, added sounds and words to his vocabulary, and began expressing his likes and dislikes – has been a delight.

R.E.: We moved to a new apartment at the start of the year, which was neither unexpected nor small (but has brought us a lot of joy). What we didn’t expect when we moved was to see our very shy cat Honey blossom and relax in his new larger digs. He particularly loves to roll around on our big new living room rug while we sit around in the evening.

R.E.’s cat napping. (Courtesy of R.E. Fulton)

Cassandra: I’ve finally started going to an in-person yoga class again, and I hadn’t realized quite how much I’d missed moving my body and being with others, in silence.

Lizzie: I know this won’t be for everyone, but my gym got a Hydrow rower, and I’m addicted! It’s a little like Peloton but it’s rowing instead of biking, and the athletes row on the water (not on the machine), all over the world. They are based in Cambridge, Mass., and so many of the workouts are on the Charles River, but they take trips everywhere. So I’ve recently seen Prague, Norway, and Alaska, all the while learning how to improve my rowing. It’s surprisingly fun!

The charity or philanthropic organization you’re supporting this year:

Eileen: I spent this year working with the faculty unionization campaign on my campus and in the process, got to know some incredible labor organizers in the Amazon and Starbucks campaign movements. You can support Starbucks Workers United and The Amazon Labor Union by buying merch, donating to their funds, and by letting those workers know that you see the hard work they’re doing.

Vicki: There are so many places to give but I support Planned Parenthood, the Greater Cleveland Food Bank, and ProPublica.

Chelsea: It’s always The Phelps Mansion Museum in Binghamton, NY. We need a new roof

R.E.: Local mutual aid groups and DonorsChoose.

Sarah: Lots of podcasts and independent artists on Patreon, and Planned ParenthoodPlanned Parenthood, now more than ever.

Kristin: Seconding Eileen’s unionization aid pitch! In addition to the more national movements, look up and support your local unionization efforts, and shop at unionized stores when possible.

Emily: Since our pup Raven was a rescue, we support a couple of animal charities, making a donation in February on her adoption day.

Averill: I have my Planned Parenthood monthly contributions, of course, and I’ve been trying to find local organizations that need more support, so I usually click around the Abortion Fund Network and donate at random.

Cassandra: Public radio, public schools, and organizations working against gun violence (like Everytown for Gun Safety).

Laura: Alongside some others already mentioned, the Nursing Clio Patreon, of course!

Lizzie: My favorites are interACT (intersex advocacy), Talia’s Voice: Projects for Patient Safety, and Pregnancy Justice (formerly National Advocates for Pregnant Women).