Listen to Owen Bennett-Jones discuss the future of opinion polls with Mark Pack

New Books Network

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:

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 …
Medicine May 17, 2021

Standpipe

Delivering Water in Flint

David Hardin

Hosted by Claire Clark
A brief, elegant memoir of the author's work as a Red Cross volunteer delivering emergency water to residents of Flint, Michigan, Standpipe sets the struggles of a city in crisis against …
Medicine May 10, 2021

More Than Medicine

Nurse Practitioners and the Problems They Solve for Patients, Health Care Organizations, and the State

LaTonya J. Trotter

Hosted by Claire Clark
In More Than Medicine: Nurse Practitioners and the Problems They Solve for Patients, Health Care Organizations, and the State (Cornell UP, 2020), LaTonya J. Trotter chronicles the everyday work of …
Medicine March 23, 2021

Medicine Is War

The Martial Metaphor in Victorian Literature and Culture

Lorenzo Servitje

Hosted by Claire Clark
Medicine is most often understood through the metaphor of war. We encounter phrases such as “the war against the coronavirus,” “the front lines of the Ebola crisis,” “a new weapon …
Medicine March 19, 2021

An Organ of Murder

Crime, Violence, and Phrenology in Nineteenth-Century America

Courtney E. Thompson

Hosted by Claire Clark
An Organ of Murder: Crime, Violence, and Phrenology in Nineteenth-Century America (Rutgers UP, 2021) explores the origins of both popular and elite theories of criminality in the nineteenth-century United States …
Medicine March 17, 2021

Humanist Reason

A History. An Argument. A Plan

Eric Hayot

Hosted by Claire Clark
Scientists have scientific reason and use the scientific method. Humanists have... Emotion? Close reading? Not so, argues Eric Hayot in Humanist Reason: A History. An Argument. A Plan (Columbia UP …
Medicine February 19, 2021

The Filth Disease

Typhoid Fever and the Practices of Epidemiology in Victorian England

Jacob Steere-Williams

Hosted by Claire Clark
Typhoid fever is a food- and water-borne infectious disease that was insidious and omnipresent in Victorian Britain. It was one of the most prolific diseases of the Industrial Revolution. There …
Medicine February 5, 2021

Abusive Policies

How the American Child Welfare System Lost Its Way

Mical Raz

Hosted by Claire Clark
In the early 1970s, a new wave of public service announcements urged parents to help end an American tradition of child abuse. The message, relayed repeatedly over television and radio …
Medicine January 19, 2021

Science Under Fire

Challenges to Scientific Authority in Modern America

Andrew Jewett

Hosted by Claire Clark
Americans today are often skeptical of scientific authority. Many conservatives dismiss climate change and Darwinism as liberal fictions, arguing that "tenured radicals" have coopted the sciences and other disciplines. Some …
Medicine January 6, 2021

The Structure of Moral Revolutions

Studies of Changes in the Morality of Abortion, Death, and the Bioethics Revolution

Robert Baker

Hosted by Claire Clark
We live in an age of moral revolutions in which the once morally outrageous has become morally acceptable, and the formerly acceptable is now regarded as reprehensible. Attitudes toward same-sex …