I teach the history of medicine and public health in the Department of History & Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania.  I went to graduate school at U.C. Berkeley in the mid-1980s to study French history, social history, and urban history.  Those interests eventually led me to a dissertation on tuberculosis as a social problem in 19th-century France, which in turn started me on a path that led to the history of medicine.   

After my Ph.D., I completed a two-year postdoctoral fellowship in History of Health Sciences at U.C. San Francisco, then taught for a year at Emory’s Institute for Liberal Arts and for seven years in the History of Science Department at Harvard.  At Penn,  I am director of the interdisciplinary Health & Societies major (except when I’m on leave, as in 2008-2009).

My research so far has reflected a longstanding preoccupation with nineteenth-century France (the time and place that made me fall in love with history) and an inexplicable fascination with germs and disgusting things.  My first book, The Making of a Social Disease: Tuberculosis in Nineteenth-Century France (University of California Press, 1995), explores the social transformations and anxieties which colored and constrained responses to the industrializing world's leading killer. My second book, The Great Stink of Paris and the Nineteenth-Century Struggle against Filth and Germs (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), investigates how scientific developments, political imperatives, and shifting cultural mores combined to reshape perceptions of health, disease, and bodily substances during the Bacteriological Revolution.

Update 2008-2009: I am writing a history of the Lazaretto quarantine station (1801-1893) on the Delaware River outside Philadelphia—the oldest physically intact quarantine station in the Western Hemisphere (and, as far as I’ve been able to determine, one of the five or six oldest in the world).  Other ongoing research projects incluse the politics of international disease control programs in the twentieth century (does trying to eradicate a single disease benefit the health of a population?) and the history of disgust.