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. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context.

Claire's website

NBN Episodes hosted by Claire:

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 …
Medicine December 29, 2020

Pure America

Eugenics and the Making of Modern Virginia

Elizabeth Catte

Hosted by Claire Clark
Between 1927 and 1979, more than 8,000 people were involuntarily sterilized in five hospitals across the state of Virginia. From this plain and terrible fact springs Elizabeth Catte's Pure America …
Medicine December 18, 2020

Common Phantoms

An American History of Psychic Science

Alicia Puglionesi

Hosted by Claire Clark
Séances, clairvoyance, and telepathy captivated public imagination in the United States from the 1850s well into the twentieth century. Though skeptics dismissed these experiences as delusions, a new kind of …
Medicine December 17, 2020

Unraveling

Remaking Personhood in a Neurodiverse Age

Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer

Hosted by Claire Clark
Twentieth-century neuroscience fixed the brain as the basis of consciousness, the self, identity, individuality, even life itself, obscuring the fundamental relationships between bodies and the worlds that they inhabit. In Unraveling …
Medicine December 8, 2020

Divided Bodies

Lyme Disease, Contested Illness, and Evidence-Based Medicine

Abigail A. Dumes

Hosted by Claire Clark
While many doctors claim that Lyme disease--a tick-borne bacterial infection--is easily diagnosed and treated, other doctors and the patients they care for argue that it can persist beyond standard antibiotic …
Medicine December 1, 2020

Exploiting Hope

How the Promise of New Medical Interventions Sustains Us--and Makes Us Vulnerable

Jeremy Snyder

Hosted by Claire Clark
We often hear stories of people in terrible and seemingly intractable situations who are preyed upon by someone offering promises of help. Frequently these cases are condemned in terms of …
Medicine November 23, 2020

The Trusted Doctor

Medical Ethics and Professionalism

Rosamond Rhodes

Hosted by Claire Clark
Common morality has been the touchstone of medical ethics since the publication of Beauchamp and Childress's Principles of Biomedical Ethics in 1979. Rosamond Rhodes challenges this dominant view by presenting …
Medicine November 16, 2020

Bedeviled

A Shadow History of Demons in Science

Jimena Canales

Hosted by Claire Clark
Science may be known for banishing the demons of superstition from the modern world. Yet just as the demon-haunted world was being exorcized by the enlightening power of reason, a …
Medicine November 10, 2020

Feeling Medicine

How the Pelvic Exam Shapes Medical Training

Kelly Underman

Hosted by Claire Clark
The pelvic exam is considered a fundamental procedure for medical students to learn; it is also often the one of the first times where medical students are required to touch …
Medicine October 21, 2020

To Make the Wounded Whole

The African American Struggle Against HIV/AIDS

Dan Royles

Hosted by Claire Clark
In the decades since it was identified in 1981, HIV/AIDS has devastated African American communities. Members of those communities mobilized to fight the epidemic and its consequences from the beginning …
History October 12, 2020

Strange Blood

The Rise and Fall of Lamb Blood Transfusion in 19th-Century Medicine and Beyond

Boel Berner

Hosted by Claire Clark
In the mid-1870s, the experimental therapy of lamb blood transfusion spread like an epidemic across Europe and the USA. Doctors tried it as a cure for tuberculosis, pellagra and anemia …
Public Policy October 8, 2020

The Alchemy of Disease

How Chemicals and Toxins Cause Cancer and Other Illnesses

John Whysner

Hosted by Claire Clark
Since the dawn of the industrial age, we have unleashed a bewildering number of potentially harmful chemicals. But out of this vast array, how do we identify the actual threats …
American Studies October 5, 2020

Exhibiting Health

Public Health Displays in the Progressive Era

Jennifer Lisa Koslow

Hosted by Claire Clark
In the early twentieth century, public health reformers approached the task of ameliorating unsanitary conditions and preventing epidemic diseases with optimism. Using exhibits, they believed they could make systemic issues …
American Studies September 24, 2020

Atomic Doctors

Conscience and Complicity at the Dawn of the Nuclear Age

James L. Nolan, Jr.

Hosted by Claire Clark
After his father died, James L. Nolan, Jr., took possession of a box of private family materials. To his surprise, the small secret archive contained a treasure trove of information …
Drugs, Addiction and Recovery September 18, 2020

Chemically Imbalanced

Everyday Suffering, Medication, and Our Troubled Quest for Self-Mastery

Joseph E. Davis

Hosted by Claire Clark
Everyday suffering—those conditions or feelings brought on by trying circumstances that arise in everyone’s lives—is something that humans have grappled with for millennia. But the last decades have seen a …
American Studies September 4, 2020

Diseased States

Epidemic Control in Britain and the United States

Charles Allan McCoy

Hosted by Claire Clark
Outbreaks of Ebola, SARS, MERS, and pandemic influenza are brutal reminders of the dangers of infectious disease. Comparing the development of disease control in Britain and the United States, from …
World Affairs August 31, 2020

Global Health Impact

Expanding Access to Essential Medicines

Nicole Hassoun

Hosted by Claire Clark
Every year nine million people are diagnosed with tuberculosis, every day over 13,400 people are infected with AIDs, and every thirty seconds malaria kills a child. For most of the …
Architecture August 21, 2020

The Architecture of Good Behavior

Psychology and Modern Institutional Design in Postwar America

Joy Knoblauch

Hosted by Claire Clark
Inspired by the rise of environmental psychology and increasing support for behavioral research after the Second World War, new initiatives at the federal, state, and local levels looked to influence …
American Studies August 12, 2020

Adverse Events

Race, Inequality, and the Testing of New Pharmaceuticals

Jill A. Fisher

Hosted by Claire Clark
Imagine that you volunteer for the clinical trial of an experimental drug. The only direct benefit of participating is that you will receive up to $5,175. You must spend twenty …
Education August 7, 2020

Afflicted

How Vulnerability Can Heal Medical Education and Practice

NIcole Piemonte

Hosted by Claire Clark
In Afflicted: How Vulnerability Can Heal Medical Education and Practice (The MIT Press), Nicole Piemonte examines the preoccupation in medicine with cure over care, arguing that the traditional focus on …
Law August 5, 2020

Pastoral Aesthetics

A Theological Perspective on Principlist Bioethics

Nathan Carlin

Hosted by Claire Clark
It is often said that bioethics emerged from theology in the 1960s, and that since then it has grown into a secular enterprise, yielding to other disciplines and professions such …