Jacob Steere‐william
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 4877304 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Jacob Steere‐william |
| PRENOMES | Jacob |
| SOBRENOME | Steere‐william |
| ASSINATURA | WILLIAM J S |
| AFILIAÇÕES | College of Charleston |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5109-5546 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 25 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 4 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 25 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2010 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 1 |
Epistemic preparedness
Preparedness strategies for emergent infectious diseases have focused on microbial surveillance, medical stockpiling and healthcare infrastructure resilience. But what does it mean to be epistemically or cognitively prepared for the next disease outbreak? Taking stock of lessons for data practices and statistical modelling in the wake of COVID-19, we propose a reconceptualising of preparedness in global health, focusing on ecological and sociolog…
American Disgust
Essay review
In 1820 two French scientists – Pierre Joseph Pelletier and Jean Bienaimé Caventou – discovered and named the active alkaloid substance extracted from cinchona bark: quinine. The bark from the ‘wondrous’ fever tree, and its antimalarial properties, however, had long been known to both colonial scientists and indigenous Peruvians. From the mid-seventeenth century, cinchona bark, taken from trees that grow on the eastern slopes of the Andes, was pa…
The general practitioner as epidemiologist in Britain, 1930–1960
European and North American epidemiology changed in critical ways in the first half of the 20 th century, as experts increasingly turned to quantitative modelling and experimentation to answer key questions about virulence, endemicity, and immunity. As this article explores, however, British epidemiologists remained wedded to and advanced field-based epidemiological methods, developing these far beyond their origins in Victorian era outbreak inve…
Re-Writing Pandemic Histories
The COVID-19 pandemic, much like the generation-defining HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s, has generated renewed public interest in the history of pandemics, especially their beginnings and endings. Indeed, over the past few years there has been an avalanche of reflection pieces on what past pandemics can offer as mediating devices between past and present, and what clues they offer about the effectiveness of public health measures and cont…
Carbolic Colonialism
Industrial capitalism has engendered human and animal bodies toxic in myriad and uneven ways—internal, external, environmental, ecological. This article examines the entanglements of public health, technology, coal, and the body through a singular chemical: carbolic acid (also known as phenol). Derived from coal tar production in British factories, carbolic acid exploded in use from the 1870s in Europe and across colonial environments. Though her…
Vaccine Hesitancy
Reviewed by: Vaccine Hesitancy: Public Trust, Expertise, and the War on Science by Maya J. Goldenberg Jacob Steere-Williams Maya J. Goldenberg. Vaccine Hesitancy: Public Trust, Expertise, and the War on Science. Science, Values, and the Public. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021. xii + 251 pp. Ill. $32.00 (978-0-8229-6690-6). In December of 2020 the United States Food and Drug Administration authorized two mRNA vaccinations for emer…
Seeing germs, selling germs
The germ theory of infectious disease, which developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is often considered a pivotal breakthrough in modern science, medicine, biology, and public health. The germ theory provided a new way to study disease in laboratory, clinical, and community settings, and a new rationale for public health intervention. This article explores two important facets of the germ theory; how the physical techniqu…
Rethinking “Herd” Mentalities and Rethinking the Value of the History of Public Health
Rethinking “Herd” Mentalities and Rethinking the Value of the History of Public Health Jacob Steere-Williams PhD Affiliation Jacob Steere-Williams is an associate professor of history and director of medical humanities at the College of Charleston in Charleston, SC. He also is the president of the Waring Library Society at the Medical University of South Carolina and associate editor of The Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences. …
Remaking the Case for History in Medical Education
A Slow Disaster Historical Experiment
Looking at the pandemic in the long historical view of “slow disasters” shows how it is a continuation of previous health emergencies rather than a discrete event. The tendency of politicians to prematurely declare an end to the pandemic has not helped improve public trust in health policy
Communicating the History of Medicine
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has thrust many historians of medicine, myself included, into popular conversations about public health, the cultural framing of disease, and the social determinants of health. At no other time in recent memory, save perhaps for the response historians mounted to contextualize the early years of the HIV/AIDS crisis, and the work of historians as expert witnesses for tobacco companies in the 1980s and 1990s, respectiv…
Proteins, Pathologies, and Politics
Reviewed by: Proteins, Pathologies, and Politics: Dietary Innovation and Disease from the Nineteenth Century ed. by David Gentilcore and Matthew Smith Jacob Steere-Williams David Gentilcore and Matthew Smith, eds. Proteins, Pathologies, and Politics: Dietary Innovation and Disease from the Nineteenth Century. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. x + 254 pp. Ill. $114.00 (978-1-350-05686-2). [Erratum] In a legislative attempt to curb what many nutri…
A "Menace" or a Martyr to the Public's Health
Previous articleNext article FreeA “Menace” or a Martyr to the Public’s Health?Jacob Steere-WilliamsJacob Steere-WilliamsCollege of Charleston Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreAs a historian of public health, it strikes me that the concept of uncertainty is key to understanding pandemics. M…
Edward Ballard and the Practice of Epidemiology in the 19th-Century United Kingdom
This article recovers the history of Victorian epidemiology through the career of British physician Edward Ballard (1820–1897). Ballard’s career provides a useful window into the practices of epidemiology in the 19th century because he held notable public health posts as medical officer of health for Islington and inspector at the Medical Department of the Local Government Board. By the time of his death, in 1897, he typified the transition towar…
Museum Review
Museum Review:Dittrick Medical History Center Jacob Steere-Williams and Cara Delay http://artsci.case.edu/dittrick/museum/ Readers of the Bulletin will need no introduction to the Dittrick Medical History Center at Case Western University in Cleveland, a leading medical history museum and archive. Those who were at the 2009 Annual Meeting of the American Association for the History of Medicine will no doubt recall their splendid microscope collec…
Bill Luckin, Death and Survival in Urban Britain, 1800–1950
Bill Luckin has left an indelible mark on the history of medicine, stubbornly insisting for the past 40 years that urban studies and environmental history are key frames for studying public health, disease and medicine. What a pleasure it is then, to have in one volume the central body of his work. Death and Survival in Urban Britain is a collection of eight previously published articles and book chapters that represent the core of Luckin’s schol…
Anne Hardy. Salmonella Infections, Networks of Knowledge, and Public Health in Britain, 1880–1975
“A large family ... with a beautiful name but most unpleasant habits.” Such is a forceful description of the bacterial genus, Salmonella, the subject of Anne Hardy's new monograph. The group was confounded in the late nineteenth century by the nebulous monikers enteric fever, typhoid, and summer diarrhea, yet a century later, microbiologists recognized over two thousand and five hundred specific zoonotic serotypes of Salmonella, the most virulent…
Performing State Medicine During its 'Frustrating' Years
This article is about the performance—referring to the projection and reception—of state medicine in late Victorian Britain. Moving away from the lens of the ideas and policies historians have previously explored, I focus on epidemiological and bacteriological investigations of typhoid fever as they were conducted through the Medical Department of the Local Government Board, during the period historian Roy MacLeod characterised as a ‘frustrating’…
Women Travelers in Egypt
Book Review| October 01 2014 Women Travelers in Egypt: From the Eighteenth to the Twenty-First Century Women Travelers in Egypt: From the Eighteenth to the Twenty-First Century, edited by Deborah Manley Cairo: American University of Cairo Press, 2012; pp. xi +216. $24.95 cloth. Jacob Steere-Williams Jacob Steere-Williams The College of Charleston Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Northeast African Studies (2014) 14 (2): 1…
Pratik Chakrabarti, Bacteriology in British India
Pratik Chakrabarti's Bacteriology in British India asks how Pasteurism, thought to be a uniquely French preoccupation, was practised and institutionalised by British bacteriologists in colonial India. In seeking the answer to such a fascinating historical question, Chakrabarti fundamentally reinterprets the story of European medical science in the tropics. The book is partly a much-needed institutional history. Chakrabarti details the complex net…
Virginia Berridge, Martin Gorsky and Alex Mold, Public Health in History
Journal Article Virginia Berridge, Martin Gorsky and Alex Mold, Public Health in History Get access Virginia Berridge, Martin Gorsky and Alex Mold, Public Health in History, Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2011. Pp. 229. £22.99. ISBN 978 03352 4264 1. Jacob Steere-Williams Jacob Steere-Williams College of Charleston [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Social History of Medici…
Amanda J. Thomas, The Lambeth Cholera Outbreak of 1848-1849
We have long known in the history of medicine that cholera played an important role in catalysing public health reform and challenging aetiological views on the causation and transmission of epidemic disease in the nineteenth century. Amanda Thomas' new book The Lambeth Cholera Outbreak of 1848–1849, however, attempts to convince us that we have missed a crucial episode in the history of nineteenth-century cholera, the 1848–49 outbreak in Lambeth…
The Sanitary City
Journal Article The Sanitary City: Environmental Services in Urban America from Colonial Times to the Present, Abridged Edition Get access Martin V. Melosi. The Sanitary City: Environmental Services in Urban America from Colonial Times to the Present, Abridged Edition. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008. 354 pp. $27.95 (paper). Jacob Steere-Williams Jacob Steere-Williams University of Minnesota, Program in the History …
The Perfect Food and the Filth Disease
This article explores the initial set of epidemiological investigations in Victorian Britain that linked typhoid fever to milk from dairy cattle. Because Victorian epidemiologists first recognized the milk-borne route in outbreaks of typhoid fever, these investigations served as a model for later studies of milk-borne scarlet fever, diphtheria, and perhaps tuberculosis. By focusing on epidemiological practices conducted by Medical Inspectors at t…
The Perfect Food and the Filth Disease
This article explores the initial set of epidemiological investigations in Victorian Britain that linked typhoid fever to milk from dairy cattle. Because Victorian epidemiologists first recognized the milk-borne route in outbreaks of typhoid fever, these investigations served as a model for later studies of milk-borne scarlet fever, diphtheria, and perhaps tuberculosis. By focusing on epidemiological practices conducted by Medical Inspectors at t…
Performing State Medicine During its 'Frustrating' Years
This article is about the performance—referring to the projection and reception—of state medicine in late Victorian Britain. Moving away from the lens of the ideas and policies historians have previously explored, I focus on epidemiological and bacteriological investigations of typhoid fever as they were conducted through the Medical Department of the Local Government Board, during the period historian Roy MacLeod characterised as a ‘frustrating’…
The Perfect Food and the Filth Disease
This article explores the initial set of epidemiological investigations in Victorian Britain that linked typhoid fever to milk from dairy cattle. Because Victorian epidemiologists first recognized the milk-borne route in outbreaks of typhoid fever, these investigations served as a model for later studies of milk-borne scarlet fever, diphtheria, and perhaps tuberculosis. By focusing on epidemiological practices conducted by Medical Inspectors at t…
Amanda J. Thomas, The Lambeth Cholera Outbreak of 1848-1849
We have long known in the history of medicine that cholera played an important role in catalysing public health reform and challenging aetiological views on the causation and transmission of epidemic disease in the nineteenth century. Amanda Thomas' new book The Lambeth Cholera Outbreak of 1848–1849, however, attempts to convince us that we have missed a crucial episode in the history of nineteenth-century cholera, the 1848–49 outbreak in Lambeth…
The Sanitary City
Journal Article The Sanitary City: Environmental Services in Urban America from Colonial Times to the Present, Abridged Edition Get access Martin V. Melosi. The Sanitary City: Environmental Services in Urban America from Colonial Times to the Present, Abridged Edition. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008. 354 pp. $27.95 (paper). Jacob Steere-Williams Jacob Steere-Williams University of Minnesota, Program in the History …
Virginia Berridge, Martin Gorsky and Alex Mold, Public Health in History
Journal Article Virginia Berridge, Martin Gorsky and Alex Mold, Public Health in History Get access Virginia Berridge, Martin Gorsky and Alex Mold, Public Health in History, Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2011. Pp. 229. £22.99. ISBN 978 03352 4264 1. Jacob Steere-Williams Jacob Steere-Williams College of Charleston [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Social History of Medici…
Pratik Chakrabarti, Bacteriology in British India
Pratik Chakrabarti's Bacteriology in British India asks how Pasteurism, thought to be a uniquely French preoccupation, was practised and institutionalised by British bacteriologists in colonial India. In seeking the answer to such a fascinating historical question, Chakrabarti fundamentally reinterprets the story of European medical science in the tropics. The book is partly a much-needed institutional history. Chakrabarti details the complex net…
Performing State Medicine During its 'Frustrating' Years
This article is about the performance—referring to the projection and reception—of state medicine in late Victorian Britain. Moving away from the lens of the ideas and policies historians have previously explored, I focus on epidemiological and bacteriological investigations of typhoid fever as they were conducted through the Medical Department of the Local Government Board, during the period historian Roy MacLeod characterised as a ‘frustrating’…
Women Travelers in Egypt
Book Review| October 01 2014 Women Travelers in Egypt: From the Eighteenth to the Twenty-First Century Women Travelers in Egypt: From the Eighteenth to the Twenty-First Century, edited by Deborah Manley Cairo: American University of Cairo Press, 2012; pp. xi +216. $24.95 cloth. Jacob Steere-Williams Jacob Steere-Williams The College of Charleston Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Northeast African Studies (2014) 14 (2): 1…
Museum Review
Museum Review:Dittrick Medical History Center Jacob Steere-Williams and Cara Delay http://artsci.case.edu/dittrick/museum/ Readers of the Bulletin will need no introduction to the Dittrick Medical History Center at Case Western University in Cleveland, a leading medical history museum and archive. Those who were at the 2009 Annual Meeting of the American Association for the History of Medicine will no doubt recall their splendid microscope collec…
Bill Luckin, Death and Survival in Urban Britain, 1800–1950
Bill Luckin has left an indelible mark on the history of medicine, stubbornly insisting for the past 40 years that urban studies and environmental history are key frames for studying public health, disease and medicine. What a pleasure it is then, to have in one volume the central body of his work. Death and Survival in Urban Britain is a collection of eight previously published articles and book chapters that represent the core of Luckin’s schol…
Anne Hardy. Salmonella Infections, Networks of Knowledge, and Public Health in Britain, 1880–1975
“A large family ... with a beautiful name but most unpleasant habits.” Such is a forceful description of the bacterial genus, Salmonella, the subject of Anne Hardy's new monograph. The group was confounded in the late nineteenth century by the nebulous monikers enteric fever, typhoid, and summer diarrhea, yet a century later, microbiologists recognized over two thousand and five hundred specific zoonotic serotypes of Salmonella, the most virulent…
Edward Ballard and the Practice of Epidemiology in the 19th-Century United Kingdom
This article recovers the history of Victorian epidemiology through the career of British physician Edward Ballard (1820–1897). Ballard’s career provides a useful window into the practices of epidemiology in the 19th century because he held notable public health posts as medical officer of health for Islington and inspector at the Medical Department of the Local Government Board. By the time of his death, in 1897, he typified the transition towar…
Proteins, Pathologies, and Politics
Reviewed by: Proteins, Pathologies, and Politics: Dietary Innovation and Disease from the Nineteenth Century ed. by David Gentilcore and Matthew Smith Jacob Steere-Williams David Gentilcore and Matthew Smith, eds. Proteins, Pathologies, and Politics: Dietary Innovation and Disease from the Nineteenth Century. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. x + 254 pp. Ill. $114.00 (978-1-350-05686-2). [Erratum] In a legislative attempt to curb what many nutri…
A "Menace" or a Martyr to the Public's Health
Previous articleNext article FreeA “Menace” or a Martyr to the Public’s Health?Jacob Steere-WilliamsJacob Steere-WilliamsCollege of Charleston Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreAs a historian of public health, it strikes me that the concept of uncertainty is key to understanding pandemics. M…
Communicating the History of Medicine
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has thrust many historians of medicine, myself included, into popular conversations about public health, the cultural framing of disease, and the social determinants of health. At no other time in recent memory, save perhaps for the response historians mounted to contextualize the early years of the HIV/AIDS crisis, and the work of historians as expert witnesses for tobacco companies in the 1980s and 1990s, respectiv…
A Slow Disaster Historical Experiment
Looking at the pandemic in the long historical view of “slow disasters” shows how it is a continuation of previous health emergencies rather than a discrete event. The tendency of politicians to prematurely declare an end to the pandemic has not helped improve public trust in health policy
Vaccine Hesitancy
Reviewed by: Vaccine Hesitancy: Public Trust, Expertise, and the War on Science by Maya J. Goldenberg Jacob Steere-Williams Maya J. Goldenberg. Vaccine Hesitancy: Public Trust, Expertise, and the War on Science. Science, Values, and the Public. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021. xii + 251 pp. Ill. $32.00 (978-0-8229-6690-6). In December of 2020 the United States Food and Drug Administration authorized two mRNA vaccinations for emer…
Seeing germs, selling germs
The germ theory of infectious disease, which developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is often considered a pivotal breakthrough in modern science, medicine, biology, and public health. The germ theory provided a new way to study disease in laboratory, clinical, and community settings, and a new rationale for public health intervention. This article explores two important facets of the germ theory; how the physical techniqu…
Rethinking “Herd” Mentalities and Rethinking the Value of the History of Public Health
Rethinking “Herd” Mentalities and Rethinking the Value of the History of Public Health Jacob Steere-Williams PhD Affiliation Jacob Steere-Williams is an associate professor of history and director of medical humanities at the College of Charleston in Charleston, SC. He also is the president of the Waring Library Society at the Medical University of South Carolina and associate editor of The Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences. …
Remaking the Case for History in Medical Education
Re-Writing Pandemic Histories
The COVID-19 pandemic, much like the generation-defining HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s, has generated renewed public interest in the history of pandemics, especially their beginnings and endings. Indeed, over the past few years there has been an avalanche of reflection pieces on what past pandemics can offer as mediating devices between past and present, and what clues they offer about the effectiveness of public health measures and cont…
Carbolic Colonialism
Industrial capitalism has engendered human and animal bodies toxic in myriad and uneven ways—internal, external, environmental, ecological. This article examines the entanglements of public health, technology, coal, and the body through a singular chemical: carbolic acid (also known as phenol). Derived from coal tar production in British factories, carbolic acid exploded in use from the 1870s in Europe and across colonial environments. Though her…
Epistemic preparedness
Preparedness strategies for emergent infectious diseases have focused on microbial surveillance, medical stockpiling and healthcare infrastructure resilience. But what does it mean to be epistemically or cognitively prepared for the next disease outbreak? Taking stock of lessons for data practices and statistical modelling in the wake of COVID-19, we propose a reconceptualising of preparedness in global health, focusing on ecological and sociolog…
American Disgust
Essay review
In 1820 two French scientists – Pierre Joseph Pelletier and Jean Bienaimé Caventou – discovered and named the active alkaloid substance extracted from cinchona bark: quinine. The bark from the ‘wondrous’ fever tree, and its antimalarial properties, however, had long been known to both colonial scientists and indigenous Peruvians. From the mid-seventeenth century, cinchona bark, taken from trees that grow on the eastern slopes of the Andes, was pa…
The general practitioner as epidemiologist in Britain, 1930–1960
European and North American epidemiology changed in critical ways in the first half of the 20 th century, as experts increasingly turned to quantitative modelling and experimentation to answer key questions about virulence, endemicity, and immunity. As this article explores, however, British epidemiologists remained wedded to and advanced field-based epidemiological methods, developing these far beyond their origins in Victorian era outbreak inve…
Medicine (17 obras) · History (13 obras) · Political science (12 obras) · Public health (12 obras) · History of Science and Medicine (11 obras) · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis (9 obras) · Pathology (7 obras) · History (6 obras) · Archaeology (5 obras) · Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies (5 obras)