Elena Conis
Biographic Data
| ID | 1528705 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Elena Conis |
| GIVEN NAMES | Elena |
| FAMILY NAME | Conis |
| SIGNATURE | CONIS E |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Berkeley |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3189-4591 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 14 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 5 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 14 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Kim Tolley, Vaccine Wars
Experimenting with Humans and Animals
Journal Article Anita Guerrini, Experimenting with Humans and Animals: From Aristotle to CRISPR Get access Anita GuerriniExperimenting with Humans and Animals: From Aristotle to CRISPR2nd edition. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022. 216 pp. Elena Conis Elena Conis University of California, Berkeley, USA [email protected] https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3189-4591 Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Sc…
Measles, Media and Memory
Language used to describe measles in the press has altered significantly over the last sixty years, a shift that reflects changing perceptions of the disease within the medical community as well as broader changes in public health discourse. California, one of the most populous U.S. states and seat of the 2015 measles outbreak originating at Disneyland, presents an opportunity for observing these changes. This article offers a longitudinal case s…
Of Mumps and Men
This article, based on an analysis of English language medical literature on mumps’ manifestation in men, women and children from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century, examines the role of gender in shaping conceptualisations of mumps’ severity and medical significance. Over time, gendered social roles undermined the medical notion of mumps as a severe disease of women while elevating mumps’ reputation as a severe and significant di…
Michael Bennett. War against Smallpox
Michael Bennett’s War against Smallpox: Edward Jenner and the Global Spread of Vaccination is an exhaustive, ambitious, and comprehensive work that promises to be a useful starting point for the many historical inquiries into vaccination that our present moment is likely to inspire. As the title suggests, the narrative follows the world’s first vaccine, against smallpox, from its documented discovery by Edward Jenner in the 1790s through its spre…
Historical Origins of the Personal Belief Exemption to Vaccination Mandates
A number of states, starting with California, have recently removed all non-medical exemptions from their laws requiring vaccinations for schoolchildren. California was also one of the earliest states to include a broad non-medical, or personal, belief exemption in its modern immunization law, which it did with a 1961 law mandating polio vaccination for school enrollment, Assembly Bill 1940 (AB 1940). This paper examines the history of AB 1940’s …
Rashes to Research
Rashes to ResearchScientists and Parents Confront the 1964 Rubella Epidemic Elena Conis Rashes to Research: Scientists and Parents Confront the 1964 Rubella Epidemic U.S. National Library of Medicine https://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/rashestoresearch/index.html Between 1964 and 1965, roughly 20,000 children who had been exposed to rubella in utero were born with heart, hearing, and vision problems, known collectively as Collective Rubella Syndro…
Yellow Fever, Race, and Ecology in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans
One of the worst infectious disease epidemics of the late-nineteenth century United States, the yellow fever epidemic of 1878 had far-reaching implications for public health. Congress authorized experts to investigate and enforce disease prevention in the South, gave one agency new powers of quarantine, and created a commission to study the disease, which would ultimately help clarify the theory of its transmission. But, as the author of this pow…
Polio, DDT, and Disease Risk in the United States after World War II
Between the end of World War II and the early 1950s, researchers, municipal officials, and individuals from Georgia to California employed DDT to stop polio by killing flies, a suspected but debated actor in the disease’s transmission. Despite the prominent place of both polio and DDT in postwar US history, this episode has received scant attention from historians. This essay argues that this little-examined moment captures the tensions between s…
The Antivaccine Heresy
In 1902 the Cambridge, Massachusetts, pastor Henning Jacobson refused to comply with a health department order requiring his vaccination against smallpox. His refusal set in motion a series of legal battles that culminated in the 1905 Supreme Court decision in Jacobson v. Massachusetts, which affirmed states' power to compel citizens to submit to medical procedures to protect public health. Jacobson and the 1905 decision are frequently referenced…
Nancy Tomes. Remaking the American Patient
The introduction to Nancy Tomes’s Remaking the American Patient: How Madison Avenue and Modern Medicine Turned Patients into Consumers promises a work of scholarship that reveals just how and why American patients of the twentieth century evolved into consumers—that is to say, “shoppers” in search of value, quality, and service while on guard against the hazards of an unevenly regulated, profit-seeking medical industry—and why this evolution did …
A Mother’s Responsibility
Federal efforts to expand childhood immunization coverage in the United States in the 1970s relied heavily on the cooperation of mothers and were concurrent with a major social movement of the past century: the women’s movement. This article examines popular and scientific immunization rhetoric of the 1970s and 1980s through a feminist lens, to demonstrate how changing ideas about the social and economic roles of women in this period shaped, on t…
Vaccine
Reviewed by: Vaccine: The Debate in Modern America by Mark A. Largent Elena Conis Mark A. Largent. Vaccine: The Debate in Modern America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012. 222 pp. $34.95 (978-1-4214-0607-7). One of the most prominent vaccine-safety concerns in the United States today is the distinctly modern worry that vaccines may cause or contribute to autism. Debate about the existence of this link has dominated media, policy, a…
Do We Really Need Hepatitis B on the Second Day of Life?” Vaccination Mandates and Shifting Representations of Hepatitis B
In the decade following hepatitis B vaccine's 1981 approval, U.S. health officials issued evolving guidelines on who should receive the vaccine: first, gay men, injection drug users, and healthcare workers; later, hepatitis B-positive women's children; and later still, all newborns. States laws that mandated the vaccine for all children were quietly accepted in the 1990s; in the 2000s, however, popular anti-vaccine sentiment targeted the shot as …
Polio, DDT, and Disease Risk in the United States after World War II
Between the end of World War II and the early 1950s, researchers, municipal officials, and individuals from Georgia to California employed DDT to stop polio by killing flies, a suspected but debated actor in the disease’s transmission. Despite the prominent place of both polio and DDT in postwar US history, this episode has received scant attention from historians. This essay argues that this little-examined moment captures the tensions between s…
Historical Origins of the Personal Belief Exemption to Vaccination Mandates
A number of states, starting with California, have recently removed all non-medical exemptions from their laws requiring vaccinations for schoolchildren. California was also one of the earliest states to include a broad non-medical, or personal, belief exemption in its modern immunization law, which it did with a 1961 law mandating polio vaccination for school enrollment, Assembly Bill 1940 (AB 1940). This paper examines the history of AB 1940’s …
Do We Really Need Hepatitis B on the Second Day of Life?” Vaccination Mandates and Shifting Representations of Hepatitis B
In the decade following hepatitis B vaccine's 1981 approval, U.S. health officials issued evolving guidelines on who should receive the vaccine: first, gay men, injection drug users, and healthcare workers; later, hepatitis B-positive women's children; and later still, all newborns. States laws that mandated the vaccine for all children were quietly accepted in the 1990s; in the 2000s, however, popular anti-vaccine sentiment targeted the shot as …
A Mother’s Responsibility
Federal efforts to expand childhood immunization coverage in the United States in the 1970s relied heavily on the cooperation of mothers and were concurrent with a major social movement of the past century: the women’s movement. This article examines popular and scientific immunization rhetoric of the 1970s and 1980s through a feminist lens, to demonstrate how changing ideas about the social and economic roles of women in this period shaped, on t…
Vaccine
Reviewed by: Vaccine: The Debate in Modern America by Mark A. Largent Elena Conis Mark A. Largent. Vaccine: The Debate in Modern America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012. 222 pp. $34.95 (978-1-4214-0607-7). One of the most prominent vaccine-safety concerns in the United States today is the distinctly modern worry that vaccines may cause or contribute to autism. Debate about the existence of this link has dominated media, policy, a…
Nancy Tomes. Remaking the American Patient
The introduction to Nancy Tomes’s Remaking the American Patient: How Madison Avenue and Modern Medicine Turned Patients into Consumers promises a work of scholarship that reveals just how and why American patients of the twentieth century evolved into consumers—that is to say, “shoppers” in search of value, quality, and service while on guard against the hazards of an unevenly regulated, profit-seeking medical industry—and why this evolution did …
Polio, DDT, and Disease Risk in the United States after World War II
Between the end of World War II and the early 1950s, researchers, municipal officials, and individuals from Georgia to California employed DDT to stop polio by killing flies, a suspected but debated actor in the disease’s transmission. Despite the prominent place of both polio and DDT in postwar US history, this episode has received scant attention from historians. This essay argues that this little-examined moment captures the tensions between s…
The Antivaccine Heresy
In 1902 the Cambridge, Massachusetts, pastor Henning Jacobson refused to comply with a health department order requiring his vaccination against smallpox. His refusal set in motion a series of legal battles that culminated in the 1905 Supreme Court decision in Jacobson v. Massachusetts, which affirmed states' power to compel citizens to submit to medical procedures to protect public health. Jacobson and the 1905 decision are frequently referenced…
Yellow Fever, Race, and Ecology in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans
One of the worst infectious disease epidemics of the late-nineteenth century United States, the yellow fever epidemic of 1878 had far-reaching implications for public health. Congress authorized experts to investigate and enforce disease prevention in the South, gave one agency new powers of quarantine, and created a commission to study the disease, which would ultimately help clarify the theory of its transmission. But, as the author of this pow…
Rashes to Research
Rashes to ResearchScientists and Parents Confront the 1964 Rubella Epidemic Elena Conis Rashes to Research: Scientists and Parents Confront the 1964 Rubella Epidemic U.S. National Library of Medicine https://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/rashestoresearch/index.html Between 1964 and 1965, roughly 20,000 children who had been exposed to rubella in utero were born with heart, hearing, and vision problems, known collectively as Collective Rubella Syndro…
Historical Origins of the Personal Belief Exemption to Vaccination Mandates
A number of states, starting with California, have recently removed all non-medical exemptions from their laws requiring vaccinations for schoolchildren. California was also one of the earliest states to include a broad non-medical, or personal, belief exemption in its modern immunization law, which it did with a 1961 law mandating polio vaccination for school enrollment, Assembly Bill 1940 (AB 1940). This paper examines the history of AB 1940’s …
Measles, Media and Memory
Language used to describe measles in the press has altered significantly over the last sixty years, a shift that reflects changing perceptions of the disease within the medical community as well as broader changes in public health discourse. California, one of the most populous U.S. states and seat of the 2015 measles outbreak originating at Disneyland, presents an opportunity for observing these changes. This article offers a longitudinal case s…
Of Mumps and Men
This article, based on an analysis of English language medical literature on mumps’ manifestation in men, women and children from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century, examines the role of gender in shaping conceptualisations of mumps’ severity and medical significance. Over time, gendered social roles undermined the medical notion of mumps as a severe disease of women while elevating mumps’ reputation as a severe and significant di…
Michael Bennett. War against Smallpox
Michael Bennett’s War against Smallpox: Edward Jenner and the Global Spread of Vaccination is an exhaustive, ambitious, and comprehensive work that promises to be a useful starting point for the many historical inquiries into vaccination that our present moment is likely to inspire. As the title suggests, the narrative follows the world’s first vaccine, against smallpox, from its documented discovery by Edward Jenner in the 1790s through its spre…
Experimenting with Humans and Animals
Journal Article Anita Guerrini, Experimenting with Humans and Animals: From Aristotle to CRISPR Get access Anita GuerriniExperimenting with Humans and Animals: From Aristotle to CRISPR2nd edition. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022. 216 pp. Elena Conis Elena Conis University of California, Berkeley, USA [email protected] https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3189-4591 Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Sc…
Kim Tolley, Vaccine Wars
Medicine (11 works) · Political science (9 works) · Law (8 works) · Vaccine Coverage and Hesitancy (8 works) · History (7 works) · Sociology (7 works) · Vaccination (7 works) · Politics (6 works) · History (5 works) · Virology (5 works)