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Focus on DAHSM: Archive October 2009 Dr. Vincanne Adams awarded the Basham Medal at the Seventh International Congress on Asian Medicine (ICTAM VII) held in Bhutan
July 2009 UCOP Multicampus Program Initiative awards to foster growth in Medical Humanities at UCSF
Dr. Dorothy Porter is co-I on a large humanities grant in collaboration with humanities deans and faculty from each of the 10 UC campuses to fund respective “Humanities Centers” with a remit to establishing nodal points across the UC system where new initiatives can be explored in fostering humanities-based scholarship. Dr. Porter is the Director of the Center for Humanities and Health Sciences at UCSF, which will provide competitive awards and support across all health science schools at UCSF. Announcements about activities and opportunities will be made available through the Center’s website, linked through www.dahsm.ucsf.edu, at the beginning of 2010. May 2009 Medical Humanities Area of Concentration students produce second volume of 'Med Hum' writings
Course director Dr. Brian Dolan guided the work into production for public viewing by editing the annual yearbook that contains parts of each legacy. A PDF is down-loadable for free
October 2008 Welcome to new DAHSM faculty member Dr. Ian Whitmarsh!
Ian's research examines biomedical categories linking race and disease, and has included studying ambiguities in the genetic diagnosis of disease. His book, Biomedical Ambiguity, was published earlier this year. For more info, see his website here.
May 2008 Medical Humanities Area of Concentration students produce first volume of 'Med Hum' writings
January 2008DAHSM Medical Anthropologist awared top honor in book prize
Read the UCSF Today article here.
November 2007DAHSM Faculty rank #1 in Scholarly Productivity by the Chronicle of Higher Education Great news for the anthropology program and the Department as a whole! October 2007 Aftershock! An Award Winning Exhibition
Aftershock! focuses on the earthquake’s impact on the people living in the Bay Area a century ago. The exhibition recounts how individuals withstood and rebounded from the calamitous 1906 events. It goes beyond the familiar images and statistics to tell the stories of a cross section of Bay Area citizens, including Dennis Sullivan, the fire chief whose death in the quake contributed to the unfocused and ineffective fire-fighting efforts; Flora Allen, a survivor and longtime participant in the annual commemoration at Lotta’s Fountain; the Quan family, who sponsored “paper sons”—male immigrants without legal documentation—after the quake destroyed citizenship records; and the renowned Spanish dancer La Estrellita, who performed in the Panama Pacific International Exhibition, a ten-month celebration of the rebirth of San Francisco; among many others. April 2007 The Estrogen Elixir
Describing the development, spread, and shifting role of HRT in America from the early twentieth century to the present, Watkins explores how the interplay between science and society shaped the dissemination and reception of HRT and how the medicalization -- and subsequent efforts toward the demedicalization -- of menopause and aging affected the role of estrogen as a medical therapy. Telling the story from multiple perspectives -- physicians, pharmaceutical manufacturers, government regulators, feminist health activists, and the media, as well as women as patients and consumers -- she reveals the striking parallels between estrogen's history as a medical therapy and broad shifts in the role of medicine in an aging society. January 7, 2007 Remembering Gay Becker
January 2007 Medicating Modern America
Medicating Modern America, edited by DAHSM's Dr Elizabeth Watkins and Dr. Andrea Tone (McGill) examines the meanings behind this pharmaceutical revolution through the interconnected histories of eight of the most influential and important drugs: antibiotics, mood stabilizers, hormone replacement therapy, oral contraceptives, tranquilizers, stimulants, statins, and Viagra. All of these drugs have been popular, profitable, influential, and controversial, and the authors take a historical approach to studying their development, prescription, and consumption. This perspective locates the histories of prescription medicines in specific cultural contexts while revealing the extent to which contemporary debates about pharmaceutical drugs echo concerns voiced by Americans in the past. Exploring the rich and multi-faceted history of pharmaceutical drugs in the United States , Medicating Modern America unveils the untold stories behind America 's pharmaceutical obsession. October 2006 Public Library of Science
Read the articles in the issue by following the link here. September 2006 Ethical Worlds of Stem Cell Medicine
Summer 2006 DAHSM's Class of 2006
Pictured from left to right: Dr. Robert Bartz, Dr. Maya Ponte, Dr. Seth Holmes, and Dr. Alex Choby. (Not pictured Dr. Frances Norwood.) The titles of their PhD dissertations: April 2006 Humanities in Medicine AoC Curtain Call
The event was coordinated by Chris Smith, artistic director of the Magic Theater, and Mark Routhier, Literary Manager of the Sloan Foundation Initiative, and is part of the “Sloan Slam” developmental reading series. It is an opportunity for an artistic team and the Magic Theatre to hear and to interact with each piece. The AoC students’ presentations—which include readings from a novel, poetry, and a creative adaptation of a novella, as well as an exhibition of students’ artistic work—will follow an experimental reading of Cherylene Lee’s new play, Dragon, Tiger, Phoenix, a play about the discovery of SARS. For more information about the event, Sunday, April 30, at 7pm, contact Dr. Brian Dolan. See also: December 2005 Diversity in US Medical Schools Copies of the oral histories will be available by the end of summer at the UC systemwide libraries, the National Library of Medicine, and the UCSF Kalmanovitz Library, Archives and Special Collections. Pictured: (left to right) Freeman Bradley, former UCSF Chancellor Dr. Philip Lee, Joanne Lewis, Elba Clemente-Lambert, Walter "Pop" Nelson, and rear, Wendell Earl Adams, at a Black Caucus roundtable discussion Dec. 2002. May 2005 A time to die
July 2004 HIV among the homeless
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Vincanne Adams was recently awarded the Basham Medal for her research and publications on the anthropology of Asian Medicine, and her contributions to the International Association for the Study of Traditional Asian Medicine. Her publications on Asian Medical Systems, from shamans in Nepal to Biomedical Clinical Trials Research in Tibet, from problems of translation to development of programs for safe motherhood, have received widespread attention and praise from the international community of scholars across a wide range of humanities and social science disciplines as well as practitioners of Asian Medicines in Europe, Canada, the US and many Asian countries. The Basham Medal was awarded to Dr. Adams at the Seventh International Congress on Asian Medicine (ICTAM VII) held in Bhutan September 5-10, 2009, where she delivered the keynote lecture for the conference. Dr. Adams is the 7th recipient of the award since the founding of IASTAM in the 1970s. 
Dr. Brian Dolan is PI on a five-year grant to establish the "UC Medical Humanities Consortium", connecting research and teaching in this area at 4 UC medical schools: UCSF, UC Berkeley (JMP), UC Davis, and UC Irvine. Funds will support annually "themed" collaborative student research projects, course development and annual conferences.
Congratulations to this year's Area of Concentration in Medical Humanities students. Six fourth year medical students completed the AoC and produced extraordinary final projects, or "legacies." Media included non-fiction essays and letters, health journalism, documentary film, original art, and ethnography. 
Aaron Bunnell and Meredith Dunn, fourth year medical students enrolled in the 2007-2008 Area of Concentration in Medical Humanities program (Directors, Dr. Brian Dolan and Dr. John Tercier), have produced the first of an annual volume of writings showcasing some of the fruits of their academic labor in the medical humanities.
Congratulations Sharon Kaufman! UCSF Medical Anthropologist Sharon Kaufman, PhD, has received the Millennium Book Award, one of the most prestigious honors bestowed by the Society for Medical Anthropology, for her recent book ... And a Time to Die.
This ranking gives a fourth discipline at UCSF a first-place position. The Chronicle site explains: "The index examines faculty members who are listed on a Ph.D. program's Web sites, and includes a total of 217,254 names. A professor listed in both history and American studies would be counted twice. But at the next level of aggregation (the humanities in this case), the professor would be counted only once. The index creators call this 'de-duplication.' The total number of actual faculty members rated by the index is 164,843." 
PhD candidate in History of Health Sciences, Aimee Klask, recently won the Western Museums Assocaition Award for Exhibition Excellence for her curation of Aftershock! Voices from the 1906 Earthquake and Fire which was at the Oakland Museum of California. The 4,000-square-foot exhibition, with more than 250 artifacts and photographs, is the largest in California dedicated to the centennial of the earthshaking events of April 18, 1906. 
In the first complete history of hormone replacement therapy (HRT), Elizabeth Siegel Watkins illuminates the complex and changing relationship between the medical treatment of menopause and cultural conceptions of aging. 
With Americans paying more than $200 billion in 2005 for prescription pills, the pharmaceutical business is the most profitable in the nation. The popularity of prescription drugs in recent decades has remade the doctor/patient relationship, instituting prescription-writing and pill-taking as an integral part of medical practice and everyday life.
October 2006 saw the publication of a special issue of the on-line, open access journal PLoS titled "Social Medicine in the Twenty-First Century." Edited by DAHSM recent graduate Seth Holmes and MSTP student Scott Stonington, the collection of essays features an impressive range of international scholars addressing issues relating to how social structures contribute to illness. 
Stem cell medicine, including both research and potential clinical applications, has introduced some of the most innovative medical possibilities of the 21 st century, from cellular therapies for previously untreatable conditions to actualized alliances between research and industry, patients, scientists, and politicians, generating a surfeit of promissory biocapital. Simultaneously, stem cell medicine has heightened public and political concerns over the ethics of research, intervention, and translation. Ethical debates have been re-ignited over: the religious and ontological status of embryos; cultural knowledge of and tolerance for chimeras; the genetic and bodily integrity of human subjects and donors; the distribution of benefits and burdens among patients, publics, industry, government, and science; the profit boundaries between academy and industry; the implications of globalization for this emergent science. This two day conference explored the “ethical worlds” that have become more visible, critical, and in some cases refigured because of the research and therapeutic possibilities and promises of stem cell medicine. Organized by Vincanne Adams, Charis Thompson (UCB), Joanna Weinberg and Clair Dunne. 
This year’s Area of Concentration in Humanities in Medicine for fourth year medical students comes to a finale in late April when the student legacies will be performed at a special event at the Magic Theater in San Francisco, April 30. Course Director, Dr. Brian Dolan, has worked with playwright Cherylene Lee and artistic director Barbara Oliver ( Aurora Theater, Berkeley), to help prepare student projects for a staged presentation by professional actors. 
The Oral History Program is currently releasing ten interviews with fifteen informants focusing on case studies comparing two California medical schools with remarkably parallel histories: the University of California , San Francisco and Stanford. These detailed biographical interviews reveal the personal motivations and insights of fifteen narrators, selected from faculty and administration. They provide a qualitative, historically based, longitudinal study of the direct impact of the civil rights movement in the 1960s through the shifting national political environment of affirmative action in the last decades of the twentieth century. As these interviews reveal, the diversification of medical school classes was an intensely personal and social process, but the background of supportive federal legislation in civil rights, and health manpower in the late 1960s and early 1970s was also an important catalyst. As the federal and state political environment became less supportive, concerned leaders tried to shore up their gains and maintain their progress through a variety of unique strategies. 
In a penetrating and revelatory study, medical anthropologist Sharon R. Kaufman examines the powerful center of those changes -- the hospital, where most Americans die today. In the hospital world, the deep, irresolvable tension between the urge to extend life at all costs and the desire to allow "letting go" is rarely acknowledged, yet it underlies everything that happens there among patients, families, and health professionals. Over the course of two years, Kaufman observed and interviewed critically ill patients, their families, doctors, nurses, and other hospital staff at three community hospitals. In ...And a Time to Die, her research places us at the heart of that science-driven yet fractured and often irrational world of health care delivery, where empathetic yet frustrated, hard-working yet constrained professionals both respond to and create the anxieties and often inchoate expectations of patients and families, who must make "decisions" they are ill-prepared to make. 
Wedgwood is the Enlightenment's supreme success story. Born into an impoverished potter's family in Staffordshire, England, Josiah Wedgwood began a life with dim prospects. He had scant education, and a bout with smallpox left him with a lame leg. But while he was apprenticed to his hapless elder brother, his natural curiosity and ambition led him to conduct a series of rigorous experiments in the hope of discovering a pure white glaze then unattainable in Europe. He moved on, and up, cleverly cultivating patronage, and early on in his career won commissions from Queen Charlotte and Catherine the Great. This, however, was just the beginning. Read reviews of Dolan's book by visiting the 
Professor Bourgois has been conducting participant-observation fieldwork among a social network of homeless heroin addicts and crack smokers since November 1994. He accompanies them in their daily (and nightly) scramble for survival in order to understand the logics for their risky behaviors. Funded by the NIH he is working to develop more realistic and effective HIV prevention services. With former student, Jeff Schonberg he is co-authoring a "photo-ethnography" based on this project to be published by University of California Press entitled Righteous Dopefiend . In addition to portraying the intimate daily life of homeless addicts the book examines conflictual race relations on the street, as well as, interactions with family, participation in legal and illegal income generation, and the interface with social services--especially the County Hospital's Emergency Department. 