Keynote speaker nominee: Margaret Humphreys

Another possible good keynote speaker for our “Two Cultures” symposium would be Margaret Humphreys, Josiah Charles Trent Professor in the History of Medicine & Associate Clinical Professor of Medicine.  Professor Humphreys was affiliated with the USP in its early days and is exemplary in her approach to interdisciplinarity.  She describes her research interests as:

My major research interest is the history of disease in America, especially in the South. Until the last half of the twentieth century diseases such as malaria, yellow fever, pellagra, and hookworm marked the south as tropical, impoverished, and strikingly different from the rest of the United States. My recent work concerns the history of medicine in the American Civil war. I teach and read broadly in the history of public health, medicine, race, biology, and infectious diseases.

Professor Humphreys has numerous publications, including books and articles.  Among her books are Yellow Fever and the South, (Rutgers University Press, 1992), Malaria: Poverty, Race and Public Health in the United States (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001) and most recently a book called Intensely Human: The Health of the Black Soldier in the American Civil War, (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).

She teaches at the undergraduate, graduate and professional school level with undergraduate courses in History, including through the Focus program; graduate courses through History and the graduate certificate program on History and Philosophy of Science Technology and Medicine; and in the School of Medicine.

For more on Professor Humphreys, see her bio on the history website at:

http://fds.duke.edu/db/aas/history/meh

Tori