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About Claire Clark

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine.

Claire's website

NBN Episodes hosted by Claire:

Drugs, Addiction and Recovery April 2, 2023

Psychonauts

Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind

Mike Jay

Hosted by Claire Clark
Mike Jay's Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind (Yale UP, 2023) is a provocative and original history of the scientists and writers, artists and philosophers who took drugs …
Medicine March 24, 2023

Dr. Nurse

Science, Politics, and the Transformation of American Nursing

Dominique A. Tobbell

Hosted by Claire Clark
An analysis of the efforts of American nurses to establish nursing as an academic discipline and nurses as valued researchers in the decades after World War II. Nurses represent the …
Medicine February 28, 2023

Whiteout

How Racial Capitalism Changed the Color of Opioids in America

Helena Hansen, Jules Netherland, and David Herzberg

Hosted by Claire Clark
In the past two decades, media images of the surprisingly white “new face” of the US opioid crisis abounded. But why was the crisis so white? Some argued that skyrocketing …
Medicine January 10, 2023

The First Resort

The History of Social Psychiatry in the United States

Matthew Smith

Hosted by Claire Clark
Social psychiatry was a mid-twentieth-century approach to mental health that stressed the prevention of mental illness rather than its treatment. Its proponents developed environmental explanations of mental health, arguing that …
Medicine November 24, 2022

Masters of Health

Racial Science and Slavery in US Medical Schools

Christopher Willoughby

Hosted by Claire Clark
Medical science in antebellum America was organized around a paradox: it presumed African Americans to be less than human yet still human enough to be viable as experimental subjects, as …
Medicine November 9, 2022

All That Was Not Her

Todd Meyers

Hosted by Claire Clark
While studying caregiving and chronic illness in families living in situations of economic and social insecurity in Baltimore, anthropologist Todd Meyers met a woman named Beverly. In All That Was …
Medicine August 30, 2022

All Health Politics Is Local

Community Battles for Medical Care and Environmental Health

Merlin Chowkwanyun

Hosted by Claire Clark
Health care is political. It entails fierce battles over the allocation of resources, arguments over the imposition of regulations, and the mediation of dueling public sentiments—all conflicts that are often …
Medicine August 30, 2022

How the Clinic Made Gender

The Medical History of a Transformative Idea

Sandra Eder

Hosted by Claire Clark
An eye-opening exploration of the medical origins of gender in modern US history. Today, a world without "gender" is hard to imagine. Gender is at the center of contentious political …
Medicine July 13, 2022

How to Sell a Poison

The Rise, Fall, and Toxic Return of DDT

Elena Conis

Hosted by Claire Clark
The story of DDT as you’ve never heard it before: a fresh look at the much-maligned chemical compound as a cautionary tale of how powerful corporations have stoked the flames …
Medicine February 14, 2022

Acupuncture as Revolution

Suffering, Liberation, and Love

Rachel Pagones

Hosted by Claire Clark
Many in the global West have heard something about acupuncture as a treatment for pain relief; they may even have learned of its use in treating opioid addiction. But few …
Medicine February 9, 2022

Dangerous Medicine

The Story Behind Human Experiments with Hepatitis

Sydney A. Halpern

Hosted by Claire Clark
From 1942 through 1972, American biomedical researchers deliberately infected people with hepatitis. Government-sponsored researchers were attempting to discover the basic features of the disease and the viruses causing it, and …
Medicine February 8, 2022

Medical Jurisprudence and Rules of the Medical Profession

Translated and Introduced by Melvin Wayne Cooper

Rudolf Ramm

Hosted by Claire Clark
This is the first translation in English of Rudolf Ramm’s textbook Ärztliche Rechts- und Standeskunde: Der Arzt als Gesundheitserzieher, translated and introduced by Melvin Wayne Cooper. Medical Jurisprudence and Rules …
Drugs, Addiction and Recovery January 7, 2022

Opioid Reckoning

Love, Loss, and Redemption in the Rehab State

Amy C. Sullivan

Hosted by Claire Clark
Amy C. Sullivan explores the complexity of America’s opioid epidemic through firsthand accounts of people grappling with the reverberating effects of stigma, treatment, and recovery. Taking a clear-eyed, nonjudgmental perspective …
Medicine December 15, 2021

Main Street

How a City's Heart Connects Us All

Mindy Thompson Fullilove

Hosted by Claire Clark
Mindy Thompson Fullilove traverses the central thoroughfares of our cities to uncover the ways they bring together our communities After an 11-year study of Main Streets in 178 cities and …
Drugs, Addiction and Recovery December 7, 2021

Smashing the Liquor Machine

A Global History of Prohibition

Mark Lawrence Schrad

Hosted by Claire Clark
Smashing the Liquor Machine: A Global History of Prohibition (Oxford UP, 2021) is a unique retelling of the history of temperance and prohibition. Rather than focusing on white, rural, conservative …
Medicine October 11, 2021

Sickening

Anti-Black Racism and Health Disparities in the United States

Anne Pollock

Hosted by Claire Clark
An event-by-event look at how institutionalized racism harms the health of African Americans in the twenty-first century A crucial component of anti-Black racism is the unconscionable disparity in health outcomes …
Medicine September 30, 2021

The Contagion Next Time

Sandro Galea

Hosted by Claire Clark
How can we create a healthier world and prevent the crisis next time? In a few short months, COVID-19 devastated the world and, in particular, the United States. It infected …
Medicine August 31, 2021

Scripting Death

Stories of Assisted Dying in America

Mara Buchbinder

Hosted by Claire Clark
Over the past five years, medical aid-in-dying (also known as assisted suicide) has expanded rapidly in the United States, and is now legally available to one in five Americans. This …
Medicine July 7, 2021

Madness in the City of Magnificent Intentions

Martin Summers

Hosted by Claire Clark
From the mid-nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries, Saint Elizabeths Hospital was one of the United States' most important institutions for the care and treatment of the mentally ill. Founded …
Medicine June 30, 2021

Trans Medicine

The Emergence and Practice of Treating Gender

stef m. shuster

Hosted by Claire Clark
A rich examination of the history of trans medicine and current day practice Surfacing in the mid-twentieth century, yet shrouded in social stigma, transgender medicine is now a rapidly growing …
Medicine June 15, 2021

Challenging Choices

Canada's Population Control in the 1970s

Erika Dyck and Maureen Lux

Hosted by Claire Clark
Between the decriminalization of contraception in 1969 and the introduction of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982, a landmark decade in the struggle for women's rights, public discourse …
Medicine June 11, 2021

American Health Crisis

One Hundred Years of Panic, Planning, and Politics

Martin Halliwell

Hosted by Claire Clark
Despite enormous advances in medical science and public health education over the last century, access to health care remains a dominant issue in American life. U.S. health care is often …
Medicine June 2, 2021

Humane Professions

The Defence of Experimental Medicine, 1876-1914

Rob Boddice

Hosted by Claire Clark
In this compelling history of the co-ordinated, transnational defence of medical experimentation in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Rob Boddice explores the experience of vivisection as humanitarian practice. He …
Medicine May 25, 2021

At What Cost

Modern Capitalism and the Future of Health

Nicholas Freudenberg

Hosted by Claire Clark
Freedom of choice lies at the heart of American society. Every day, individuals decide what to eat, which doctors to see, who to connect with online, and where to educate …