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About Claire Clark

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

NBN Episodes hosted by Claire:

Medicine December 5, 2023

William James, MD

Philosopher, Psychologist, Physician

Emma K. Sutton

Hosted by Claire Clark
Emma K. Sutton's William James, MD: Philosopher, Psychologist, Physician (U Chicago Press, 2023) is the first book to map William James's preoccupation with medical ideas, concerns, and values across the …
Medicine October 14, 2023

Working the Difference

Science, Spirit, and the Spread of Motivational Interviewing

E. Summerson Carr

Hosted by Claire Clark
Motivational interviewing (MI) is a professional practice, a behavioral therapy, and a self-professed conversation style that encourages clients to talk themselves into change. Originally developed to treat alcoholics, MI quickly …
General History September 4, 2023

The Sullivanians

Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune

Alexander Stille

Hosted by Claire Clark
In the middle of the Ozzie and Harriet 1950s, the birth control pill was introduced and a maverick psychoanalytic institute, the Sullivan Institute for Research in Psychoanalysis, opened its doors …
Medicine August 9, 2023

Besides, Who Would Believe a Prisoner?

Indiana Women's Carceral Institutions, 1848-1920

Michelle Daniel Jones and Elizabeth A. Nelson

Hosted by Claire Clark
Listen:
What if prisoners were to write the history of their own prison? What might that tell them--and all of us--about the roots of the system that incarcerates so many millions …
Medicine July 8, 2023

Black Health

The Social, Political, and Cultural Determinants of Black People's Health

Keisha Ray

Hosted by Claire Clark
Listen:
Why do American Black people generally have worse health than American White people? To answer this question, Keisha Ray's book Black Health: The Social, Political, and Cultural Determinants of Black People's …
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

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 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 …