Nancy J. Tomes to present Heberden Society Lecture October 2, 2014

Nancy J. Tomes, PhD, Professor of History, State University of New York, Stony Brook, will present the first Heberden Society Lecture of the 2014-15 academic year onThursday, October 2, 2014, at The New York Academy of Medicine.

What Ever Became of Good Old Doc? A Portfolio of Physicians Past

Thursday, October 2. 6:00 PM (Light refreshments at 5:30)

The New York Academy of Medicine, 1216 Fifth Avenue

The lecture will be co-sponsored by NYAM'S Center for the History of Medicine and Public Health and is open to the public. Please register for this event at Tomes, Good Old Doc.

Nancy Tomes explores the widespread sense that American medicine was suffering from an "image crisis" in the decades from 1945 to 1965. Focusing on commentaries about the demise of "good old doc," Dr. Tomes looks at how that perception reflected broader postwar debates over political authority, personal service, and the status anxieties of the middle class male. Her talk explores why medical leaders, social scientists, editors, and journalists came to agree that there was trouble in the doctor's office and how they understood the nature of those troubles. In so doing, she challenges the conventional view that the modern era of patients' rights dates from the 1970s, as well as provides useful insights into today's perception of medicine as a "troubled calling."

Nancy J. Tomes, PhD (University of Pennsylvania), is Professor of History at Stony Brook University. She is the author of A Generous Confidence: Thomas Story Kirkbride and the Art of Asylum Keeping (Cambridge, 1984); Madness in America: Cultural and Medical Perceptions of Mental Illness Before 1914, with Lynn Gamwell (Cornell, 1995); and The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women and the Microbe in American Life (Harvard, 1998); two edited collections: Medicine's Moving Pictures, with Leslie Reagan and Paula Treichler (Rochester, 2007) and Patients as Policy Actors with Beatrix Hoffman, Rachel Grob, and Mark Schlesinger (Rutgers, 2011); and "Medicine and Madison Avenue," a website on the history of health related advertising. Her book Shopping for Health: Medicine, Consumer Culture, and the Making of the Modern Patient is forthcoming from the University of North Carolina Press in Fall 2015. Dr. Tomes won both the AAHM's Welch medal and the History of Science Society's Davis prize for Gospel of Germs; in 2011, she won the APHA's Viseltear Award "in recognition of her distinguished body of scholarship in the history of public health." She just completed a two year term as President of the American Association for the History of Medicine.

The Heberden Society, which seeks to promote an interest in the history of medicine, was founded at the medical center in 1975. With funding from the WCMC Office of the Dean, the society sponsors a series of lectures during each academic year.

Please register for this event at Tomes, Good Old Doc. The event is free but registration is required.