Barron H Lerner
Biographic Data
| ID | 2324243 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Barron H Lerner |
| GIVEN NAMES | Barron H |
| FAMILY NAME | Lerner |
| SIGNATURE | LERNER B H |
| AFFILIATIONS | Columbia University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5119-6734 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 49 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1993 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2018 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
The Fielding H. Garrison Lecture
For decades, physicians wrote much of the history of medicine, often "great man" histories that celebrated their colleagues' accomplishments as part of a celebratory historical narrative. Beginning in the 1970s, social historians challenged this type of scholarship, arguing that it was Whiggish, omitted the flaws of the medical profession, left patients out of the story, and ignored issues of gender, race, and class. This Garrison Lecture revisit…
Climate Change
Climate Change?The Environment, Physicians, and Historians Barron H. Lerner (bio) Of the many images I share with my history of medicine students, one always generates animated discussion: those of young children, wearing shorts and no shirts, sitting at desks in an outdoor classroom. The season is winter and the children were believed to be at risk for tuberculosis. The image is from the early 1930s, before antibiotics were available to treat th…
When Public Health Becomes Politicized
Perhaps nothing symbolizes the current polarized political climate in the United States more than the world of public health. Public health schools and health departments are full of “true believers,” people willing to crusade for any program designed to reduce morbidity and mortality. But in the “real world,” proven programs and strategies—such as gun‐control measures, universal vaccination, and improved traffic safety—are routinely thwarted. Wh…
A History of Haematology
Reviewed by: A History of Haematology: From Herodotus to HIV by John C. Burnham Barron H. Lerner John C. Burnham. Health Care in America: A History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015. xiv + 596 pp. Ill. $34.95 ( 978-1-4214-1608-3). I often get asked to recommend survey books on the history of medicine, and there are many good ones, including Jacalyn Duffin's History of Medicine: A Scandalously Short Introduction and William Bynum's …
Moving Past Individual and “Pure” Autonomy
Over the past half-century, the central relationship in Western medicine-between patient and physician-has shifted from paternalism, in which the doctor decides what is in the patient's best interest, to patient-centered care, in which decisions that support an individual patient's needs, goals, and values are made in partnership.Now, a familycentered approach is contributing to the emergence of what might be called "postautonomy" medicine.The go…
Moving Past Individual and “Pure” Autonomy
Over the past half-century, the central relationship in Western medicine-between patient and physician-has shifted from paternalism, in which the doctor decides what is in the patient's best interest, to patient-centered care, in which decisions that support an individual patient's needs, goals, and values are made in partnership. Now, a familycentered approach is contributing to the emergence of what might be called "postautonomy" medicine. The …
Golden Holocaust
Kissing can be dangerous
Kissing can be dangerous: The public health campaigns to prevent and control tuberculosis in Western Australia, 1900–1960, by Criena Fitzgerald, University of Western Australia Press (Crawley), 200
False Hope
Reviewed by: False Hope: Bone Marrow Transplantation for Breast Cancer Barron H. Lerner Richard A. Rettig, Peter D. Jacobson, Cynthia M. Farquhar, and Wade M. Aubry. False Hope: Bone Marrow Transplantation for Breast Cancer. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. ix + 355 pp. Ill. $29.95 (978-0-19-518776-2). Critics now routinely cite stem cell transplantation for advanced breast cancer as the quintessential example of the misuse of an insufficie…
Dr. Golem
Reviewed by: Dr. Golem: How to Think about Medicine Barron H. Lerner Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch . Dr. Golem: How to Think about Medicine. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. xii + 246 pp. Ill. $25.00, £17.50 (0-226 11366-3). There is one thing that Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch did not need to worry about as they completed their interesting and perceptive book on medical practice: that someone would steal their title. Dr. Golem is on…
Crafting Medical History
While revisionist historians have challenged many standard interpretations of events in the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, one account has remained virtually unscathed: an article about Roosevelt's terminal illness and death written by one of his physicians, Howard G. Bruenn. Yet this article, like all historical documents, was not "objective" but rather a reflection of social and political forces—both from the 1940s, when Roosevelt became …
Ill Patient, Public Activist
In 1984 the noted breast cancer activist Rose Kushner published a controversial article, "Is Aggressive Adjuvant Chemotherapy the Halsted Radical of the '80s?" In it, she argued that chemotherapy was being used as indiscriminately as the radical mastectomy had been, before she and others had successfully discredited the disfiguring operation. As with all of Kushner's writings, this article raised valid points in an informed and provocative style,…
Bittersweet
Chris Feudtner. Bittersweet: Diabetes, Insulin, and the Transformation of Illness. Studies in Social Medicine. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2003. xxiv + 290 pp. $29.95 (cloth, 0-8078-2791-6)
Beyond Informed Consent
The group feels... that the patient will need a hemiglossectomy with excision of floor of mouth... for control of his disease. —MD note, 1956 Why didn't the head nurse tell me I was going to have my breast off, she knew, she could have told me so I could have gotten myself prepared for the thing. —Breast cancer patient, 1954 Historians have debated the degree to which past patients have provided meaningful consent prior to medical interventions. …
Bathsheba's Breast
Only recently have historians begun to address the history of breast and other cancers. Bathsheba's Breast is one of the latest additions to this growing historiography. James S. Olson, a professor of history at Sam Houston State University and himself a cancer survivor, tells the story of breast cancer from antiquity to the present, often focusing on notable women with the disease. These range from Anne of Austria, the mother of Louis XIV of Fra…
Doing Good
A reporter called the scene a "carnival of death" (p. 157). The local hospital received injured persons as anxious friends and family descended upon its doors. Many of the unfortunate were burned from "head to foot" and subsequently died. The hospital issued daily reports as to the status of their admitted patients. Local citizens responded to the tragedy by organizing a relief fund for the victims' families
The Breast Cancer Wars
The writing of the history of medical achievements has a long tradition. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, social historians, cultural historians, and feminist theoreticians moved the focus of historical study more to the practice of medicine and to the object of medical practice—the patient. Though not inevitable, a tension has existed between these two strands of medical history. More recently, historians of medicine have endeavored…
A Darker Ribbon
The extent to which cultural history now pervades the history of medicine is well demonstrated by A Darker Ribbon. Dutifully citing Charles Rosenberg on the framing of disease, Ellen Leopold, a journalist, argues that cultural beliefs about medicine, women, and the breast have greatly influenced the treatment of breast cancer in the United States since 1900. This approach serves her well. In her opening chapter, she discusses how societal beliefs…
Contagion and Confinement
Journal Article Contagion and Confinement: Controlling Tuberculosis along the Skid Road. By Barron H. Lerner. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. xviii, 243 pp. $42.50, ISBN 0-8018-5898-4.) Get access Richard A. Meckel Richard A. Meckel Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 87, Issue 1, June 2000, Pages 294–295, https://…
Great expectations
Women who test positive for a genetic breast cancer marker may have more than a 50% chance of developing the disease. Although past screening technologies have sought to identify actual breast cancers, as opposed to predisposition, the history of screening may help predict the societal response to genetic testing. For decades, educational messages have encouraged women to find breast cancers as early as possible. Such messages have fostered the p…
From careless consumptives to recalcitrant patients
Thousands of articles on "noncompliance" have appeared since 1975. Yet the term has been criticized as paternalistic--as wrongly implying that patients should necessarily follow doctors' orders. This paper, which reviews how noncompliance has been constructed historically, argues that the problem with noncompliance is more than just one of terminology. Changing social and cultural factors during the 20th century have influenced the way in which u…
Temporarily detained
Repeatedly noncompliant tuberculosis patients (who are often homeless or substance users) are once again being forcibly detained. Health officials intend that confinement be used only when "less restrictive alternatives" have failed. Past programs of detention can inform current efforts. In 1949, Seattle's Firland Sanatorium established a locked ward. Although initially intended only for active public health threats, the ward was eventually used …
Constructing Medical Indications
Journal Article Constructing Medical Indications: The Sterilization of Women with Heart Disease or Tuberculosis, 1905–1935 Get access BARRON H. LERNER BARRON H. LERNER Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Volume 49, Issue 3, July 1994, Pages 362–379, https://doi.org/10.1093/jhmas/49.3.362 Published: 01 July 1994
New York City's tuberculosis control efforts
New York City began America's first campaign to control tuberculosis in 1893, and the disease declined until the 1970s. Throughout the 20th century, New York relied on three control strategies: screening, supervised therapy, and detention of noncompliant persons. Officials consistently identified the persistent foci of tuberculosis to be minorities and the poor, and they concentrated efforts among these populations. Recently, however, in the sett…
From careless consumptives to recalcitrant patients
Thousands of articles on "noncompliance" have appeared since 1975. Yet the term has been criticized as paternalistic--as wrongly implying that patients should necessarily follow doctors' orders. This paper, which reviews how noncompliance has been constructed historically, argues that the problem with noncompliance is more than just one of terminology. Changing social and cultural factors during the 20th century have influenced the way in which u…
New York City's tuberculosis control efforts
New York City began America's first campaign to control tuberculosis in 1893, and the disease declined until the 1970s. Throughout the 20th century, New York relied on three control strategies: screening, supervised therapy, and detention of noncompliant persons. Officials consistently identified the persistent foci of tuberculosis to be minorities and the poor, and they concentrated efforts among these populations. Recently, however, in the sett…
Beyond Informed Consent
The group feels... that the patient will need a hemiglossectomy with excision of floor of mouth... for control of his disease. —MD note, 1956 Why didn't the head nurse tell me I was going to have my breast off, she knew, she could have told me so I could have gotten myself prepared for the thing. —Breast cancer patient, 1954 Historians have debated the degree to which past patients have provided meaningful consent prior to medical interventions. …
Great expectations
Women who test positive for a genetic breast cancer marker may have more than a 50% chance of developing the disease. Although past screening technologies have sought to identify actual breast cancers, as opposed to predisposition, the history of screening may help predict the societal response to genetic testing. For decades, educational messages have encouraged women to find breast cancers as early as possible. Such messages have fostered the p…
Constructing Medical Indications
Journal Article Constructing Medical Indications: The Sterilization of Women with Heart Disease or Tuberculosis, 1905–1935 Get access BARRON H. LERNER BARRON H. LERNER Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Volume 49, Issue 3, July 1994, Pages 362–379, https://doi.org/10.1093/jhmas/49.3.362 Published: 01 July 1994
Contagion and Confinement
Journal Article Contagion and Confinement: Controlling Tuberculosis along the Skid Road. By Barron H. Lerner. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. xviii, 243 pp. $42.50, ISBN 0-8018-5898-4.) Get access Richard A. Meckel Richard A. Meckel Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 87, Issue 1, June 2000, Pages 294–295, https://…
Temporarily detained
Repeatedly noncompliant tuberculosis patients (who are often homeless or substance users) are once again being forcibly detained. Health officials intend that confinement be used only when "less restrictive alternatives" have failed. Past programs of detention can inform current efforts. In 1949, Seattle's Firland Sanatorium established a locked ward. Although initially intended only for active public health threats, the ward was eventually used …
New York City's tuberculosis control efforts
New York City began America's first campaign to control tuberculosis in 1893, and the disease declined until the 1970s. Throughout the 20th century, New York relied on three control strategies: screening, supervised therapy, and detention of noncompliant persons. Officials consistently identified the persistent foci of tuberculosis to be minorities and the poor, and they concentrated efforts among these populations. Recently, however, in the sett…
Constructing Medical Indications
Journal Article Constructing Medical Indications: The Sterilization of Women with Heart Disease or Tuberculosis, 1905–1935 Get access BARRON H. LERNER BARRON H. LERNER Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Volume 49, Issue 3, July 1994, Pages 362–379, https://doi.org/10.1093/jhmas/49.3.362 Published: 01 July 1994
Temporarily detained
Repeatedly noncompliant tuberculosis patients (who are often homeless or substance users) are once again being forcibly detained. Health officials intend that confinement be used only when "less restrictive alternatives" have failed. Past programs of detention can inform current efforts. In 1949, Seattle's Firland Sanatorium established a locked ward. Although initially intended only for active public health threats, the ward was eventually used …
From careless consumptives to recalcitrant patients
Thousands of articles on "noncompliance" have appeared since 1975. Yet the term has been criticized as paternalistic--as wrongly implying that patients should necessarily follow doctors' orders. This paper, which reviews how noncompliance has been constructed historically, argues that the problem with noncompliance is more than just one of terminology. Changing social and cultural factors during the 20th century have influenced the way in which u…
Great expectations
Women who test positive for a genetic breast cancer marker may have more than a 50% chance of developing the disease. Although past screening technologies have sought to identify actual breast cancers, as opposed to predisposition, the history of screening may help predict the societal response to genetic testing. For decades, educational messages have encouraged women to find breast cancers as early as possible. Such messages have fostered the p…
A Darker Ribbon
The extent to which cultural history now pervades the history of medicine is well demonstrated by A Darker Ribbon. Dutifully citing Charles Rosenberg on the framing of disease, Ellen Leopold, a journalist, argues that cultural beliefs about medicine, women, and the breast have greatly influenced the treatment of breast cancer in the United States since 1900. This approach serves her well. In her opening chapter, she discusses how societal beliefs…
Contagion and Confinement
Journal Article Contagion and Confinement: Controlling Tuberculosis along the Skid Road. By Barron H. Lerner. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. xviii, 243 pp. $42.50, ISBN 0-8018-5898-4.) Get access Richard A. Meckel Richard A. Meckel Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 87, Issue 1, June 2000, Pages 294–295, https://…
Doing Good
A reporter called the scene a "carnival of death" (p. 157). The local hospital received injured persons as anxious friends and family descended upon its doors. Many of the unfortunate were burned from "head to foot" and subsequently died. The hospital issued daily reports as to the status of their admitted patients. Local citizens responded to the tragedy by organizing a relief fund for the victims' families
The Breast Cancer Wars
The writing of the history of medical achievements has a long tradition. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, social historians, cultural historians, and feminist theoreticians moved the focus of historical study more to the practice of medicine and to the object of medical practice—the patient. Though not inevitable, a tension has existed between these two strands of medical history. More recently, historians of medicine have endeavored…
Bathsheba's Breast
Only recently have historians begun to address the history of breast and other cancers. Bathsheba's Breast is one of the latest additions to this growing historiography. James S. Olson, a professor of history at Sam Houston State University and himself a cancer survivor, tells the story of breast cancer from antiquity to the present, often focusing on notable women with the disease. These range from Anne of Austria, the mother of Louis XIV of Fra…
Bittersweet
Chris Feudtner. Bittersweet: Diabetes, Insulin, and the Transformation of Illness. Studies in Social Medicine. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2003. xxiv + 290 pp. $29.95 (cloth, 0-8078-2791-6)
Beyond Informed Consent
The group feels... that the patient will need a hemiglossectomy with excision of floor of mouth... for control of his disease. —MD note, 1956 Why didn't the head nurse tell me I was going to have my breast off, she knew, she could have told me so I could have gotten myself prepared for the thing. —Breast cancer patient, 1954 Historians have debated the degree to which past patients have provided meaningful consent prior to medical interventions. …
Dr. Golem
Reviewed by: Dr. Golem: How to Think about Medicine Barron H. Lerner Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch . Dr. Golem: How to Think about Medicine. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. xii + 246 pp. Ill. $25.00, £17.50 (0-226 11366-3). There is one thing that Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch did not need to worry about as they completed their interesting and perceptive book on medical practice: that someone would steal their title. Dr. Golem is on…
Crafting Medical History
While revisionist historians have challenged many standard interpretations of events in the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, one account has remained virtually unscathed: an article about Roosevelt's terminal illness and death written by one of his physicians, Howard G. Bruenn. Yet this article, like all historical documents, was not "objective" but rather a reflection of social and political forces—both from the 1940s, when Roosevelt became …
Ill Patient, Public Activist
In 1984 the noted breast cancer activist Rose Kushner published a controversial article, "Is Aggressive Adjuvant Chemotherapy the Halsted Radical of the '80s?" In it, she argued that chemotherapy was being used as indiscriminately as the radical mastectomy had been, before she and others had successfully discredited the disfiguring operation. As with all of Kushner's writings, this article raised valid points in an informed and provocative style,…
Kissing can be dangerous
Kissing can be dangerous: The public health campaigns to prevent and control tuberculosis in Western Australia, 1900–1960, by Criena Fitzgerald, University of Western Australia Press (Crawley), 200
False Hope
Reviewed by: False Hope: Bone Marrow Transplantation for Breast Cancer Barron H. Lerner Richard A. Rettig, Peter D. Jacobson, Cynthia M. Farquhar, and Wade M. Aubry. False Hope: Bone Marrow Transplantation for Breast Cancer. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. ix + 355 pp. Ill. $29.95 (978-0-19-518776-2). Critics now routinely cite stem cell transplantation for advanced breast cancer as the quintessential example of the misuse of an insufficie…
Golden Holocaust
Moving Past Individual and “Pure” Autonomy
Over the past half-century, the central relationship in Western medicine-between patient and physician-has shifted from paternalism, in which the doctor decides what is in the patient's best interest, to patient-centered care, in which decisions that support an individual patient's needs, goals, and values are made in partnership.Now, a familycentered approach is contributing to the emergence of what might be called "postautonomy" medicine.The go…
Moving Past Individual and “Pure” Autonomy
Over the past half-century, the central relationship in Western medicine-between patient and physician-has shifted from paternalism, in which the doctor decides what is in the patient's best interest, to patient-centered care, in which decisions that support an individual patient's needs, goals, and values are made in partnership. Now, a familycentered approach is contributing to the emergence of what might be called "postautonomy" medicine. The …
When Public Health Becomes Politicized
Perhaps nothing symbolizes the current polarized political climate in the United States more than the world of public health. Public health schools and health departments are full of “true believers,” people willing to crusade for any program designed to reduce morbidity and mortality. But in the “real world,” proven programs and strategies—such as gun‐control measures, universal vaccination, and improved traffic safety—are routinely thwarted. Wh…
A History of Haematology
Reviewed by: A History of Haematology: From Herodotus to HIV by John C. Burnham Barron H. Lerner John C. Burnham. Health Care in America: A History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015. xiv + 596 pp. Ill. $34.95 ( 978-1-4214-1608-3). I often get asked to recommend survey books on the history of medicine, and there are many good ones, including Jacalyn Duffin's History of Medicine: A Scandalously Short Introduction and William Bynum's …
The Fielding H. Garrison Lecture
For decades, physicians wrote much of the history of medicine, often "great man" histories that celebrated their colleagues' accomplishments as part of a celebratory historical narrative. Beginning in the 1970s, social historians challenged this type of scholarship, arguing that it was Whiggish, omitted the flaws of the medical profession, left patients out of the story, and ignored issues of gender, race, and class. This Garrison Lecture revisit…
Climate Change
Climate Change?The Environment, Physicians, and Historians Barron H. Lerner (bio) Of the many images I share with my history of medicine students, one always generates animated discussion: those of young children, wearing shorts and no shirts, sitting at desks in an outdoor classroom. The season is winter and the children were believed to be at risk for tuberculosis. The image is from the early 1930s, before antibiotics were available to treat th…
Medicine (21 works) · History (11 works) · Political science (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Internal Medicine (8 works) · Psychology (8 works) · Breast cancer (7 works) · Cancer (7 works) · Disease (7 works) · Family medicine (7 works)