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On November 11, 1938, Mary Mallon, the woman known to the papers and to all of history ever after as Typhoid Mary, passed away on North Brother Island, where she had been lodged by the New York City Department of Health for the previous 23 years to safeguard the general population from the disease which she carried. Her life’s course since 1907 had been entirely determined by the persistence in her body of an illness that, to her dying day, she insisted she never had, but whi

To be a poor immigrant in mid-nineteenth century New York was to be a creature almost entirely at the mercy of mammoth social forces and fickle chance. Immigration from Ireland in the wake of the Potato Famine and from Germany following the unrest of 1848 had packed the city with more men and women than there were jobs or apartments to sustain them, a positive boon for industrialists who found that they could reduce wages to near starvation levels and still have plenty of wil

On August 29, 1971, a 59 year old Greek woman who was beloved throughout Athens for the lengths she had gone to during World War II to aid the Resistance against the Nazis and protect Jews, foreign officers, and conscientious objectors from prison and execution, was arrested by her own country’s government and accused of treason against the state. It was not her first time being arrested - the Nazis had kept her in prison for six months in 1944 with the constant threat of exe

For most, their pantheon of nursing reformers from the 19th century is a list containing precisely two people: Florence Nightingale, whose superhuman efforts during the Crimean War translated into a drive in England to make nursing a respectable occupation for middle class women, and Clara Barton, whose equally driven work during the American Civil War ultimately culminated in the creation of the American Red Cross. And certainly, these figures are both foundational, but the

The American West in the mid 19th century made profound demands on all those fated to experience it. The cost for even momentary lapses of vigilance was often death, and the people raised under the intense pressures and expectations of this time and place were a hard lot - self-sufficient almost to a fault, capable of feats of endurance and application that beggar belief today. Competence and self-reliance on that scale, however, usually comes at a steep cost. Having done so

In 1947, the partition of India carved out a theoretically Muslim-majority territory out of the Indian state, sparking a bloody era of desperate migration as members of religious minorities in the new Indian and Pakistani nations left ancestral homes and sought safety within the boundaries of their co-religionists. That same year, a Muslim woman from northern India whose parents had recently passed away boarded a boat, seeking medical training in England, entirely unsure as t

When Dr. Mary Babcock first arrived in Montana in 1891 to take up her unprecedented position as company doctor to the gold miners there,...

In the mid 2000s, a small patch of ground in the middle of a country torn apart by the marauding violence of warring clans and religions...

One of the greatest revolutions of the Twentieth Century in the relief of the intense pains of childbirth came under the most unassuming...

America in the 1920s. The Jazz Age - flappers and motorcars, talkies and speak-easies - it is difficult to reflect on this time without...

The story of the women’s medical movement in India is, when told at all, generally centered upon its British founding figures - Ida...

Sex after menopause. Drug addiction. Abortion. In the early to mid-twentieth century, to be seen as casting an understanding eye on any...

Though we think of her as the Lady With the Lamp, tirelessly patrolling the sick wards of the Crimean War offering solace and healing to...

The years of the Second World War gifted to American feminism one of its most enduring icons in the form of Rosie the Riveter.  She was...

The lack of regulation in American industry during the early Twentieth Century is the stuff of horrific legend - from the grotesqueries...

Over the course of the last two decades, humanity has taken its first quiet steps from being the blind victims of genetic-molecular...

In 1849, Elizabeth Blackwell became the first woman to earn a medical degree in the United States; within half a century 7,000 American...

Clara Barton resided on this planet for nine decades, and spent roughly seven of those locked in institutional struggles that would have...

Telomerase is one of those enzymes which just won’t let you come to a settled opinion. When it runs wild, it promotes cancer. But it...

One of the exciting and daunting things about doing science in the Twenty-First century is the sheer number of competencies it demands. ...