Category: MHL Fellows

If you’re looking for something for a little brain jumpstart after a long weekend (in the States, anyway), why not try our YouTube channel? We have all the sessions from our Spring Speaker Series and our tenth anniversary conference!

For example, you can catch up on Aja Lans’s great session on Uncovering the Roots of Racism in Medicine.

Hello! My name is Genie Yoo and I’m excited to be an Educational Resources Fellow (alongside my colleague Lorna Ebner) at the Medical Heritage Library this summer. In collaboration with librarians
and curators, faculty and fellows, I will be curating a new collection on the theme of climate change and medicine. My goal is to create an accessible collection for students, educators, and the general public, highlighting the rich digitized resources available through the Medical Heritage Library’s archive.

By way of a quick introduction, I am a historian of early modern and modern island Southeast Asia,
working at the intersection of history of science, medicine, environment, and religion. My dissertation, titled Mediating Islands: Ambon Across the Ages, explores the history of colonial and indigenous knowledge-making about the natural world of the spice islands, particularly the island of Ambon in present-day Indonesia. I demonstrate how imperial and indigenous knowledge production about nature, medicine, and the environment was inextricably tied to the archipelago’s inter-island Islamic networks.

My interest in climate change has everything to do with the past, present, and the uncertain futures of the islands I study, touching on natural resource extraction, colonialism, environmental degradation, and natural disasters. And as the World Health Organization announced in 2021, climate change poses the gravest health threat to society on a global scale. It is estimated to affect over 930 million people worldwide, especially the most vulnerable. In order to understand the link between climate change and health inequities, I plan to curate a collection that highlights, among other things, the historical connections between climate, medicine, and empire, and the development of different scientific and medical fields, from medical climatology and minerology to tropicalmedicine and hydrology.

Upon defending my dissertation this summer, I will continue to explore these themes using indigenous manuscripts as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow for the ERC-funded project, “Textual Microcosms: A New Approach in Translation Studies,” at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. If you would like to chat further, you can reach me by email at jhyoo@princeton.edu or find me on Twitter @genieyoo818. For samples of my public writing, feel free to check out my blogposts at Environmental History Now and The Recipes Project:

• “Birds in Life and in Ink: An Errant Tracing,” Environmental History Now:
  https://envhistnow.com/2021/09/07/birds-in-life-and-in-ink-an-errant-tracing/
• “Drinking the Ink of Prayer,” The Recipes Project:
  https://recipes.hypotheses.org/17556
  I’m excited to learn from this fellowship and look forward to sharing the collection with you at the
  end of the summer!

Well hello, my name is Lorna Ebner, I am a Ph.D. candidate at Stony Brook University.  This summer I’ll be working to curate an online dataset for the Medical Heritage Library that highlights LGBTQ+ resource materials. Over the course of the next few months, I’ll be sifting through the over 300,000 available resources to create a narrated shelf of materials that focus on the LGBTQ+ community as it intersects with and around the history of medicine.

My experience with the LGBTQ+ community in an academic capacity began as a graduate student at Rutgers-Newark, where I had the privilege to work closely with the Queer Newark Oral History Project. QNOHP is an oral history collection focusing on LGBTQ+ Newarkers and allies. This inspiring organization highlights over 70 local voices and creates a space for these voices that is accessible to a wide audience while honoring the local community in Newark. Check out their website by clicking on the image below.

My plans for the summer fellowship with the Medical Heritage Library are threefold:

·  To create a curated shelf that highlights the incredible and numerous resources the Medical Heritage Library has to offer, which will serve as a gateway for future researchers interested in the intersection of medical and LGBTQ+ history.

·  To narrate the resources in such a way that it broadens the scope of understanding about how the LGBTQ+ community evolved and transformed over time in the United States.

·  Most importantly, to highlight the diversity and agency within the source material in regards to the LGBTQ+ community and create a widely accessible range of resource materials.

I’m looking forward to sharing not only my findings, but also my research and creative process with you in the coming months.

My current academic endeavor is my dissertation, or as I refer to it, that pesky little project. Tentatively titled “Burning Contagion,” though in my head I call it “We didn’t start the fire,” the dissertation analyzes five cases of arson against healthcare facilities, from 1774-1901. It attempts to understand how medical facilities became a focal point for political unrest, and in doing so, questions the idea of the “mindless mob” by replacing the moniker “mindless” with “minded” in order to show arson was enacted through contemporary knowledge rather than ignorance. As one of my professor’s at Stony Brook used to say “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme,” and the ongoing pandemic has taught me a lot, so much so that I almost thought of it as a form of ethnographic research. (Ha!)

A brief follow-up: In the midst of writing this blog post the Supreme Court rescinded Roe v. Wade. As someone who recently moved from a state where the right to bodily autonomy is protected to one of the most restrictive states in the country, I am enraged and terrified. More than ever, I feel the importance of the Medical Heritage Library and this project to highlight marginalized voices and the history, good and bad, that haunts the United States and informs present ideologies and actions.