UC Interim Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs and Academic Programs

Vice Provost Emeritus for Academic Affairs and Academic Programs

Professor Emeritus of History

Professor Emeritus of African American Studies

Modern Britain, medicine and science in Europe and the United States in the 19th and 20th century

As a historian of modern Europe, I am particularly interested in understanding the relationship of medicine and science to imperialism. This broad theme animates my two books. Fit to Practice: Empire, Race, Gender, and the Making of British Medicine and Imperial Medicine: Patrick Medicine and the Conquest of Tropical Disease. Together these books have demonstrated the place of British imperialism and its after-life in shaping professional identities, directing the movement of medical labor across time and space, and enabling the rise of bio-medical expertise in the United Kingdom from the early 19th century to the late 20th century. This research program has also spurred my interest in understanding other national histories of medicine. I am currently completing a book on the American Historical Association, 1847-1900. Provisionally titled “A Question of Taste”, this project examines the centrality of racial and gender difference in constituting American medicine as a distinctive social formation of professional competency and expertise. My article entitled “Policing the Social Boundaries of the American Medical Association, 1847-1870” outlined this argument. Finally, my research interests extend to interrogating the place of the British past in the cultural landscape of the United States, ranging from television programming, historical fiction, to higher education.

UCI Medical Education Faculty Service Award

UCI Chancellor's Fellow for Research Excellence

Institutional Equity Award American Historical Association

University Distinguished Mid-Career Service Award

Visiting Professor, Ecole Des Hautes En Sciences Sociales, Paris, France

Distinguished Speaker, African American Lecture and Workshop Series, University of Oregon

Hixon Hour Lecture, University of Kansas Medical Center

Wood Institute Fellowship, College of Physicians, Philadelphia

Books:

Fit to Practice: Empire, Race, Gender, and the Making of British Medicine, 1850-1980 (Rochester Studies in Medical History: Rochester University Press, 2017).

Imperial Medicine: Patrick Manson and the Conquest of Tropical Disease, 1844-1923 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001).

Articles/Book Chapters:

'The Persistence of Privilege: British Medical Qualifications and the Practise of Medicine in he Empire' in Beyond Sovereignty, 1880-1950: Britain, Empire and Transnationalism, edited by Kevin Grant and Philippa Levine and Frank Trentmann (London: Palgrave, 2007).

'Victorian Imperialism in the Making of the British Medical Profession: An Argument' in Decentering Empire: Britain, India, and the Transcolonial World, edited by Dane Kennedy and Durba Ghosh (Longman Orient Press 2006)

'Policing the Social Boundaries of the American Medical Association', 1847-1870' Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences (April 2005).

'The Whiteness of Civilization: The Transatlantic Crisis of White Supremacy and British Television Programming in the United States in the 1970s', in Antoinette Burton, editor, After the Imperial Turn: Critical Approaches to 'National' Histories and Literatures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, Spring 2003).

'Still the Heart of Darkness: the Ebola Virus and the Metanarrative of Disease in The Hot Zone', Journal of Medical Humanities, Vol. 23, No. 2, (Summer 2002).

'Framing Tropical Disease in London, Patrick Manson, the Filaria Perstans and the Uganda Sleeping Sickness epidemic, 1893-1902,' Journal for the Social History of Medicine, Volume 13, Number 3 (2000).

'The Social Production of Metropolitan Expertise in Tropical Diseases: the Imperial State, Colonial Service and the Tropical Diseases Research Fund,' Science, Technology and Society, Volume 4, Number 2, (July-December 1999).

'Social Status and Imperial Service: Tropical Medicine and the British Medical Profession in the Nineteenth Century,' in David Arnold, editor, Warm Climates and Western Medicine: The Emergence of Tropical Medicine, 1500-1900 (Atlanta and Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996).

Essays:

'Always the Exception: Women and Women of Color Scientists in Historical Perspective,' Peer Review Special Issue Gender Equity in STEM (Spring 2014, Vol. 16, No.2).

'London and Freetown, 1847,' Special Forum: Beyond Britain, Victorian Review (Spring 2010).

"Teaching Twentieth Century Black Britain", Radical History Review: Special Issue on Transnational Black Studies, No. 87, (Fall 2003).

'British Medicine in the Early Nineteenth Century', in Lise Winer introduction, Warner Arundell (1838), (Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2001).

'White Lies: The British Past in Postwar America,' The History Teacher (Fall, 1997).

Book Reviews:

E. L. Jones and S. J. Snow, Against the Odds. Black and Minority Ethnic Clinicians and Manchester, 1948 to 2009, (Manchester: Manchester NHS Primary Care Trust in association with the CHSTM, Manchester University, 2010) for Journal of Social Medicine Vol. 24:2 (2011): 506-507.

Gregory D. Smithers, Science, Sexuality and Race in the United States and Australia, 1780s-1890s (Routledge Advances in American History, 2009) for Journal of Southern History, Vol. LXXXVII, No. 3. (August 2011): 687-688.

Benedikt Stuchtey, editor, Science Across the European Empires, 1800-1950 (German Historical Institute London: Oxford University Press, 5) for Bulletin of the Pacific Circle, April 2009, No. 22: 13-17.

Harvey Amani Whitfield, Blacks on the Border: The Black Refugees in British North American 1815-1860 (University of Vermont Press, 2006) for Journal of World History 19, I (March 2008): 117-119.

George Weisz, Divide and Conquer: A Comparative History of Medical Specialization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) for Journal of the American Medical Association, (2006), 296:2861

John Farley, To Cast Out Disease: A History of the International Health Division of the Rockefeller Foundation (1913-1951), for the American Historical Review (June, 2005): 764-765.

Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina, editor, Black Victorians/Black Victoriana (Rutgers, 2003) for Victorian Studies 46.4 (Summer 2004): 696-697.

David Arnold, Science, Technology and Medicine in Colonial India The New Cambridge of History of India, Volume III, Part 5 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) for Journal of Science, Technology and Society (forthcoming).

Stuart Ward, editor, British Culture and the end of empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001) for Albion, 35, 3 (Fall 2003): 547-548.

MacLeod, Roy, editor, Nature and Empire: Science and the Colonial Enterprise (New York: Osiris, Volume 15) for Bulletin of the Pacific Circle, No. 9 (October 2002): 21-24.

D.George Boyce, Decolonisation and the British Empire (NY: St. Martin's Press, 1999) for Albion, 32, 4 (Winter, 2000): 715-716.

Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995) for The American Historical Review, Vol. 105, No. 3 (June 2000): 909-910.

W.F. Bynum and Caroline Overy, editors, The Beast in the Mosquito: the Correspondence of Ronald Ross and Patrick Manson, (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1998) for Medical History, 44, January 2000: 12-13.

Neil Parsons, King Khama, Emperor Joe and the Great White Queen, Victorian Britain through African Eyes. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.) Albion, Vol 31, No. 2 (1999): 371-2.

Philip D. Curtin. Death by Migration. Europe's Encounter with the Tropical World in the Nineteenth Century. New West Indian Guide*Nieuwe West-Indische Gids. Vol. 67, No. 1 & 2 (1993): 112-113.

David McBride. Integrating the City of Medicine: Blacks in Philadelphia Health Care, 1910-1965. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989) and Darlene Clark Hine. Black Women in White: Racial Conflict and Cooperation in the Nursing Profession, 1890-1950 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989). Journal for the Social History of Medicine, 4 (1990): 101-102.

Vice Provost for Academic Personnel and Academic Programs
UC Office of the President 2022—2024

Inaugural Vice Chancellor for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion
UC Irvine 2019—2022

Vice Provost for Academic Equity, Diversity and Inclusion
UC Irvine 2014—2019

Inaugural Senior Faculty Director
Center for Medical Humanities 2014—2019

Link to this profile
https://faculty.uci.edu/profile/?facultyId=2755

Last updated
02/17/2025