Nancy Tomes
Biographic Data
| ID | 255809 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Nancy Tomes |
| GIVEN NAMES | Nancy |
| FAMILY NAME | Tomes |
| SIGNATURE | TOMES N |
| AFFILIATIONS | Stony Brook University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5146-162X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 46 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 31 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 46 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1978 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Troubled by Faith
Re-imagining the virus
This article tracks new conceptualizations of viruses both as a scientific object of study and a cultural object of fear and fascination. After World War II, the scientific study of viruses took on greater significance. The discovery of viral DNA and RNA revolutionized the understanding of microbial and human evolution. Technological innovations (electron microscopy, x-ray crystallography) and improvements in vaccine development gave scientists g…
A “Creation of the Media”
This article revisits 1980s media coverage about the AIDS epidemic in the United States. Using insights from feminist media and affect theory, I examine the widespread perception that both science and journalism failed in their responsibility to report accurately about AIDS. The AIDS crisis intensified deep debates within both fields: about how scientists should translate complicated scientific issues into clear messaging about risk, and how repo…
Anne Hanley, Jessica Meyer, Patient Voices in Britain, 1840–1948
Of the many writings of Roy Porter, perhaps no single work has generated more productive scholarship than his 1985 article ‘The Patient’s View: Doing Medical History From Below’. This collection of papers, first presented in 2017 at a conference at New College, University of Oxford, takes up his challenge to write more patient-centred histories of disease, health and health care. As editors Anne Hanley and Jessica Meyer suggest in their excellent…
Not Just for Doctors Anymore”
The transformation of the Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy from a "doctors-only" reference into a consumer health bible illuminates a critical era in the history of the twentieth-century medical book. Merck and Company restricted sales of its Merck Manual, first published in 1899 to offer up-to-date information for the busy practitioner, to physicians and other health care professionals until the 1970s. As more laypeople sought to get involv…
Courtney E. Thompson, An Organ of Murder
For a compelling introduction to what a new generation of scholars is discovering about the perennially interesting topic of phrenology, Courtney E. Thompson’s An Organ of Murder comes highly recommended. This sophisticated, well-written history explores an aspect of phrenology that deserves more attention: its influence on both elite and popular conceptions of criminality. As Thompson persuasively argues, phrenology’s promise to predict, prevent…
An American Jeremiad
Previous articleNext article FreeSpecial Section: Second LookAn American Jeremiad: John C. Burnham and the History of Science PopularizationNancy TomesNancy TomesStony Brook University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThirty years ago, How Superstition Won and Science Lost broke important g…
Nature’s Path
Reviewed by: Nature’s Path: A History of Naturopathic Healing in America by Susan E. Cayleff Nancy Tomes Susan E. Cayleff. Nature’s Path: A History of Naturopathic Healing in America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016. x + 397 pp. Ill. $39.95 (978-1-4214-1903-9). Susan Cayleff’s Nature’s Path is the first substantial history to be written about naturopathy, an eclectic, often radical approach to natural healing that emerged in the l…
Scott H. Podolsky, The Antibiotic Era
In the past decade, the history of the modern prescription drug has undergone a remarkable renaissance. While historians may scoff at the idea of a ‘golden age of medicine’, they surely must admit that a ‘golden age’ of pharmaceutical history is underway in the UK and the USA. Scott Podolsky’s latest book is a welcome addition to that bounty. Readers unfamiliar with the new pharma history will find The Antibiotic Era an excellent introduction to …
Histories of Medicine in the Household
Introducing the essays in this special issue on medicine in the household, Bivins, Marland and Tomes briefly sketch the existing historiography and argue for the enduring importance of the household as a site of medical decision making and practice. The household as explored by this collection also offers a valuable space within which to test new methodologies addressing the challenges that face historians and other scholars seeking to trace the …
The History of Medicine in the Digital Age
The History of Medicine in the Digital Age Heidi Knoblauch and Nancy Tomes Digital forms of communication are rapidly changing the landscape of humanities research in the United States. As little as five years ago, that research circulated primarily as static print texts—chiefly journals, articles, and books—access to which required the privileges of a university library. While this traditional print scholarship continues to be extremely importan…
The Patient as Consumer Watchdog
The U. S. health care system encourages patients to take more responsibility for their own treatment decisions and expects their doctors to cooperate in that effort. But the guidelines for exercising that responsibility remain very murky indeed
Marc A. Rodwin, Conflicts of Interest and the Future of Medicine
Journal Article Marc A. Rodwin, Conflicts of Interest and the Future of Medicine: The United States, France and Japan Get access Marc A. Rodwin, Conflicts of Interest and the Future of Medicine: The United States, France and Japan, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Pp. ix-375. £29.95. ISBN 978 0 19 975548 6. Nancy Tomes Nancy Tomes Stony Brook University [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed …
Is There a Rosenberg School
Since his first book The Cholera Years appeared in 1962, Charles Rosenberg has had an enormous influence on the history of medicine. Not the least of that influence has been exercised through his role as a graduate teacher, advisor, and mentor. This article compares Rosenberg's work with that of his students, to see if there is such a historiographic identity as the "Rosenberg School." The authors, two Rosenberg students from different generation…
Continuity and Contingency
Few American historians of medicine and health care are as well known as Charles E. Rosenberg. Since his first book, The Cholera Years, appeared in 1962, the conceptual frameworks Charles (as everyone calls him) developed and refined in his many publications have formed the historiographic backbone of our field. His interests in history have been so catholic, and his personal support of individuals so wide-ranging, that several generations of sch…
Selling Sickness (review)
Reviewed by: Selling Sickness Nancy Tomes Selling Sickness. Directed by Catherine Scott; produced by Pat Fiske; cowritten by Ray Moynihan. First Run/Icarus Films, 2004. Videocassette, 52 min., color. $390, rental $75. Based on the 2004 book by the same name, Selling Sickness is a thought-provoking film about the mass marketing of SSRI antidepressants. Although its critical intent is apparent throughout, it provides a complex account. The film inc…
The Great American Medicine Show Revisited
Since the late 1800s, changes in the advertising and marketing of medicinal drugs have produced heated debates in the United States. With the emergence of the modern prescription drug between 1938 and 1951, concerns that once focused primarily on patients' use of over-the-counter drugs were broadened to include physicians and their "doctors' drugs" as well. The medical profession's growing control over their patients' drug choices inevitably heig…
The History of Shit
Journal Article The History of Shit: An Essay Review Get access NANCY TOMES NANCY TOMES Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Volume 56, Issue 4, October 2001, Pages 400–404, https://doi.org/10.1093/jhmas/56.4.400 Published: 01 October 2001
Merchants of Health
Over the last one hundred years, Americans have lived longer, received better medical care, and pursued more single-mindedly than ever before. medicine has risen from a position of relative mediocrity to world dominance in research and a privileged place in modern culture. As a consequence, some scholars have argued, the American might well be termed the health century. Yet within the last three decades, unsettling change has swept through the ca…
The Gospel of Germs
Journal Article The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women, and the Microbe in American Life. By Nancy Tomes. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998. xvi, 351 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-674-35707-8.) Get access Jacalyn Duffin Jacalyn Duffin Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 87, Issue 4, March 2001, Page 1531, https://doi.org/10.2307/2674834 Published…
Beyond the "Two Psychiatries"
After Jack Pressman's death in June 1997, friends and colleagues sought various ways to honor his memory. With the help of Guenter Risse, Jack's colleague at the University of California at San Francisco, I organized one such event for the 1998 annual meeting of the American Association for the History of Medicine in Toronto, Canada: a lunchtime symposium titled "Beyond the 'Two Psychiatries': A Roundtable Discussion of the History of Twentieth-C…
The Gospel of Germs
Fevered Lives
Reviewed by: Fevered Lives: Tuberculosis in American Culture since 1870 Nancy Tomes Katherine Ott. Fevered Lives: Tuberculosis in American Culture since 1870. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996. viii + 242 pp. Ill. $27.95. In the past five years, there have appeared a number of good histories of tuberculosis in the United States, including Barbara Bates’s Bargaining for Life (1992), Sheila Rothman’s Living in the Shadow of Death (1994), an…
Architecture in the Family Way
Reviewed by: Architecture in the Family Way: Doctors, Houses, and Women, 1870–1900 Nancy Tomes Annmarie Adams. Architecture in the Family Way: Doctors, Houses, and Women, 1870–1900. McGill-Queen’s/Hannah Institute Studies in the History of Medicine, Health, and Society. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996. xii + 227 pp. Ill. $39.95. Historians of medicine have traditionally shown little interest in the history of domestic architecture…
All the Modern Conveniences
Merchants of Health
Over the last one hundred years, Americans have lived longer, received better medical care, and pursued more single-mindedly than ever before. medicine has risen from a position of relative mediocrity to world dominance in research and a privileged place in modern culture. As a consequence, some scholars have argued, the American might well be termed the health century. Yet within the last three decades, unsettling change has swept through the ca…
Women in the Professions
American Attitudes toward the Germ Theory of Disease
La theorie bacteriologique a l'origine de la maladie, defendue par Richmond (P.A.), laisse les Americains sceptiques, car aucune recherche experimentale ne confirme ou infirme sa theorie
Is There a Rosenberg School
Since his first book The Cholera Years appeared in 1962, Charles Rosenberg has had an enormous influence on the history of medicine. Not the least of that influence has been exercised through his role as a graduate teacher, advisor, and mentor. This article compares Rosenberg's work with that of his students, to see if there is such a historiographic identity as the "Rosenberg School." The authors, two Rosenberg students from different generation…
Oral History in the History of Medicine
Journal Article Oral History in the History of Medicine Get access Nancy Tomes Nancy Tomes associate professor of history State University of New York, Stony Brook Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 78, Issue 2, September 1991, Pages 607–617, https://doi.org/10.2307/2079538 Published: 01 September 1991
From Useful to Useless
Able-Bodied Womanhood
The Anatomy of Madness
After decades of being one of the most polemical fields in medical history, the history of psychiatry has entered a peaceful and productive maturity. The long vexatious debates over the 'treatment-incarceration' dichotomy have subsided, to be replaced with more complex considerations of psychiatry and psychiatric institutions. In contrast to the sharply divided camps of proand anti-psychiatry that dominated historical discourse in the 1960s and 1…
Little World of Our Own’
Journal Article ‘Little World of Our Own’: The Pennsylvania Hospital Training School for Nurses, 1895–1907 Get access NANCY TOMES NANCY TOMES History Department, University of Pennsylvania Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Volume XXXIII, Issue 4, October 1978, Pages 507–530, https://doi.org/10.1093/jhmas/XXXIII.4.507 Published: 01 October 1978
Little World of Our Own’
Journal Article ‘Little World of Our Own’: The Pennsylvania Hospital Training School for Nurses, 1895–1907 Get access NANCY TOMES NANCY TOMES History Department, University of Pennsylvania Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Volume XXXIII, Issue 4, October 1978, Pages 507–530, https://doi.org/10.1093/jhmas/XXXIII.4.507 Published: 01 October 1978
Women in the Professions
Clifford W. Beers
Madness and Healing in Nineteenth-Century America
One morning in October 1849, a former patient at the Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane returned surreptitiously to the asylum from which he had twice escaped in the previous year. Wiley Williams had been an uncooperative patient from the beginning, and although he had defeated his relatives' attempts to confine him, he had formed a settled hatred of the hospital's superintendent, Thomas Story Kirkbride. He climbed a tree near the hospital's ma…
The social transformation of American medicine
From Useful to Useless
The Anatomy of Madness
After decades of being one of the most polemical fields in medical history, the history of psychiatry has entered a peaceful and productive maturity. The long vexatious debates over the 'treatment-incarceration' dichotomy have subsided, to be replaced with more complex considerations of psychiatry and psychiatric institutions. In contrast to the sharply divided camps of proand anti-psychiatry that dominated historical discourse in the 1960s and 1…
Wash and Be Healed
Wash and Be Healed: The Hydropathic Alternative 2. Hydropathy, Woman' sPhysiology, and Her Role 3. Ideology in Practice: Water-Cure Establishments 4. Hydropathy and the Reform Movements 5. Women at the Cures: Rest for the Weary Activist Conclusion: Demise and Legacy of the Water-Cure Movement Notes An Essay on Sources Index
Able-Bodied Womanhood
Homes for the Mad
Black Women in White
Oral History in the History of Medicine
Journal Article Oral History in the History of Medicine Get access Nancy Tomes Nancy Tomes associate professor of history State University of New York, Stony Brook Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 78, Issue 2, September 1991, Pages 607–617, https://doi.org/10.2307/2079538 Published: 01 September 1991
Women in the Professions
The development of the modem professions has been at the center of historical analysis over the last two decades. Inspired no doubt by the interdisciplinary gospel of the new social historians have enthusiastically rediscovered the relationship between occupational groups and the social order, first marked out by Emile Durkheim in 1902.1 As a result, the study of the professions is no longer exclusively a sociological domain. Hardly a history of …
The Art of Asylum-Keeping
The Art of Asylum-Keeping is a social history of medical practice in a private nineteenth-century asylum, the Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane in Philadelphia. It recreates everyday life in the asylum and explores its social, as well as its scientific, legitimation
Madness in America
Hives of Sickness
An 1865 report on public health in New York painted a grim picture of high brick blocks and closely-packed houses ...literally hives of sickness propagating epidemics of cholera, smallpox, typhoid, typhus, and yellow fever, which swept through the whole city. In this stimulating collection of essays, nine historians of American medicine explore New York's responses to its public health crises from colonial times to the present. The essays illustr…
Madness in America
Journal Article Madness in America: Cultural and Medical Perceptions of Mental Illness before 1914. By Lynn Gamwell and Nancy Tomes. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995 and Voice for the Mad: The Life of Dorothea Dix. By David Gollaher. New York: Free Press, 1995 Get access Constance M. McGovern Constance M. McGovern Frostburg State University, Frostburg, Maryland Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal…
All the Modern Conveniences
Chasing Dirt
Reviewed by: Chasing Dirt: The American Pursuit of Cleanliness Nancy Tomes Suellen Hoy. Chasing Dirt: The American Pursuit of Cleanliness. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. xiv + 258 pp. Ill. $25.00. In what she calls the “first general history of cleanliness in the United States,” Suellen Hoy recounts how a people once described by European travelers as “dreadfully dirty” became a nation obsessed with keeping clean (p. xiv.) The book begins…
Approaching Hysteria
Reviewed by: Approaching Hysteria: Disease and Its Interpretations Nancy Tomes Mark S. Micale. Approaching Hysteria: Disease and Its Interpretations. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. xii + 327 pp. $29.95; £24.95. Reading the title of this book, historians of medicine may be tempted to say, “What, another book on hysteria?” But this superb set of essays by Mark Micale deserves their close attention, for he offers not only an invaluable…
Typhoid Mary
Bulletin of the History of Medicine - Volume 71, Number 3, Fall 1997
American Attitudes toward the Germ Theory of Disease
La theorie bacteriologique a l'origine de la maladie, defendue par Richmond (P.A.), laisse les Americains sceptiques, car aucune recherche experimentale ne confirme ou infirme sa theorie
Fevered Lives
Reviewed by: Fevered Lives: Tuberculosis in American Culture since 1870 Nancy Tomes Katherine Ott. Fevered Lives: Tuberculosis in American Culture since 1870. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996. viii + 242 pp. Ill. $27.95. In the past five years, there have appeared a number of good histories of tuberculosis in the United States, including Barbara Bates’s Bargaining for Life (1992), Sheila Rothman’s Living in the Shadow of Death (1994), an…
Architecture in the Family Way
Reviewed by: Architecture in the Family Way: Doctors, Houses, and Women, 1870–1900 Nancy Tomes Annmarie Adams. Architecture in the Family Way: Doctors, Houses, and Women, 1870–1900. McGill-Queen’s/Hannah Institute Studies in the History of Medicine, Health, and Society. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996. xii + 227 pp. Ill. $39.95. Historians of medicine have traditionally shown little interest in the history of domestic architecture…
The Gospel of Germs
Medicine (25 works) · Sociology (25 works) · History (24 works) · Political science (20 works) · Historical Psychiatry and Medical Practices (16 works) · Psychology (15 works) · History of Science and Medicine (14 works) · Law (13 works) · History (10 works) · Philosophy (10 works)