Faculty

Bio

I am a historian of 19th- and 20th-century medicine, interested in the historical intersections of health, medicine, biology, social sciences, institutions, and public policy. Integrative approaches have been central to my education: I earned my B.A. from Hampshire College and my M.A. and Ph.D. in History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania (1997). I am working on a book that addresses the significance of place and practice in American medicine by exploring the history of rural health and medicine in the Upper Midwest, 1900-1955. In addition, I have done extensive research on the history of population studies and demography in the interwar period, and on the history of philanthropy. The University of Minnesota offers a wealth of opportunities for cross-disciplinary collaboration. I have been involved with initiatives around interprofessional, community-based education, the history of the unit formerly known as the Academic Health Center, and the historical organization of medical care. Within the larger university, I am working with faculty on four campuses in History of Science and Technology, History, Anthropology, Global Studies, Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies, Native American and Indigenous Studies, and Public Health (among others) on projects related to health humanities, biomedicine, global philanthropy, the human in (big) data, and environmental and social issues.

Specialties:
19th and 20th century US History of Medicine and Public Health, Rural History or Rural Studies, History of Social Sciences

Research Summary

Selected Publications:

President's Award for Outstanding Service, 2021

‘Democracy Trains its Microscope’ on public health: intergovernmental relations, competing publics, and negotiations at the grassroots. In Mold, Alex, Peder Clark, and Hannah Elizabeth, eds. Publics and Their Health: Historical Perspectives (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2023).

Meeting Rural Health Needs: Interprofessional Practice or Public Health? Nursing History Review 24(2016): 1-9. http://dx.doi.org/10.1891/1062-8061.24.1

Silos and Synergies: Considering the History of Interprofessional Education and Practice in the United States. Nursing History Review 24(2016): 1-4. http://dx.doi.org/10.1891/1062-8061.24.1

Back to the Future: Minnesota's Rural Health Workforce Shortages. Minnesota Medicine 96 (2013): 41-45.

Compromising Positions: A Story of Early 20th-Century Occupational Medicine on Minnesota’s Iron Range. Minnesota Medicine 90 (2007): 34-39.

‘The First Adequate Graduate School of Medicine in America.’ Minnesota Medicine 86(2003): 63-68.

"A Few Good Men: the Rockefellers and Population Studies." Pp. 97-114 in The Development of the Social Sciences in the U.S. and Canada: the Role of Philanthropy, eds. Theresa Richardson and Donald Fisher (Stamford, CT: Ablex Publishing, 1999).

"Factory Work for Doctors: The Early Years of the Section on Industrial Medicine and Public Health of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia." Transactions and Studies of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia Series V 17 (1995): 61-93.

Bio

Matthew L. Reznicek is Associate Professor of Medical Humanities at the University of Minnesota Medical School, where he uses eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and Irish literature to explore the impact of social, historical, and cultural factors in the experience of medicine and health. He has published widely on the intersection of health and citizenship in the long-nineteenth century, including on writers like Maria Edgeworth, Sydney Owenson, Walter Scott, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Charles Dickens in journals like Irish University Review, Nineteenth-Century Literature, and Éire-Ireland. His first monograph, The European Metropolis: Paris and Nineteenth-Century Irish Women Novelists, was published with Clemson University Press/Liverpool University Press in 2017. He is co-editing The Irish Bildungsroman, 1800-Present for Syracuse University Press and The Corpse in Irish Literature for Liverpool University Press. He currently serves as President of the American Conference for Irish Studies.

Research Summary

Matthew L. Reznicek utilizes Medical Humanities and History of Medicine to better understand eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and Irish Literature. He is currently completing a monograph on the politics of health in the Romantic genre of the National Tale, including works by Jane Austen, Walter Scott, Maria Edgeworth, Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan), and Germaine deStaël. Previously, he has published on biopolitics and death in the National Tale; urban infrastructure and public health in nineteenth-century novels; the corpse and abjection in Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Maria Edgeworth; and on teaching healthcare inequities through Austen's Mansfield Park.

Teaching Summary

I teach at the intersection of literature and Medical Humanities or History of Medicine. Arguing that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature best reveals the impact of the Social Determinants of Health, my teaching explores ideas of health, illness, disability, and the intersection with gender and class in the works of authors like Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Walter Scott, Elizabeth Gaskell, Maria Edgeworth, and others.

Bio

Evan Roberts is a demographic historian with a focus on changes in health and mortality from the nineteenth century to the present in Australasia and North America. His current research focuses on early-life experiences and later life socio-economic and health outcomes. He has extensive experience in creating longitudinal data, linking early-twentieth century records to modern epidemiological surveys and vital records.

Roberts received his BA(Hons) (History and Economics) and BSc (Mathematics and Statistics) degrees from Victoria University of Wellington, before completing an MA and PhD in History at the University of Minnesota. Roberts worked in health and social policy evaluation at the New Zealand Ministry of Health and the Health Services Research Centre, and taught at Victoria University of Wellington from 2007-11.

His research interests are in the demographic, social, and economic history of Australasia and North America in the 19th and 20th centuries. His current research projects are about (1) health and living standards in New Zealand and the United States from the early nineteenth century to the present, and (2) married women's work and the family economy in the United States between the Civil War and World War II.

His research explores how the impact of early life influences on later life outcomes has changed over time. This focus on changes in the life course brings a conceptual unity to studies of weight and mortality in New Zealand soldiers, migration and later-life health in Iowa women, children in early-twentieth century Saint Paul, and married couples in Chicago, to name just a few of the data sources he has worked with. His work is characterized by a search for early-life data that can be linked to later life sources. The practical challenges of this work have taken me into work on record linkage and efficient ways to crowd-source or computer recognize old hand writing.

Roberts has published widely in demographic and economic history journals including Demography, Explorations in Economic History, Journal of Economic History, History of the Family, and Historical Methods.

Research Summary

My research interests are in the demographic, social, and economic history of Australasia and North America in the 19th and 20th centuries, with a focus on examining how the impact of early life influences on later life outcomes has changed over time. My current research projects are about (1) health and living standards in New Zealand and the United States from the early nineteenth century to the present, and (2) married women's work and the family economy in the United States between the Civil War and World War II. This focus on changes in the life course brings a conceptual unity to studies of weight and mortality in New Zealand soldiers, migration and later-life health in Iowa women, children in early-twentieth century Saint Paul, and married couples in Chicago, to name just a few of the data sources I have worked with. My work is characterized by a search for early-life data that can be linked to later life sources. The practical challenges of this work have taken me into work on record linkage and efficient ways to crowd-source or computer recognize old handwriting. I lead the Measuring the ANZACs project (http://www.measuringtheanzacs.org/) to crowd-source the transcription of all New Zealand's World War I personnel files.

Bio

I am a historian of early science and medicine with a research specialty in ideas about the inner workings of nature that were developed in medieval and early modern Europe. In A Philosophical Path for Paracelsian Medicine and several articles I explore elements of a biological philosophy developed by the followers of the German iconoclastic physician and lay preacher, Theophrastus Paracelsus. I am particularly interested in the manifold connections between medicine, science, pharmacy, and religion in early thought. Recently I have undertaken research in the history of biological rhythms studies (chronobiology) and am promoting this area of research among my colleagues and developing an on-line research database of related materials (if interested, please send e-mail).I received the B.S., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees in the History of Science at the University of Wisconsin.

Specialties

Early Modern European Science and Medicine, History of Paracelsianism, History of Biological Rhythm Studies

Research Summary

BOOKS & MONOGRAPHS IN PRINT

An Introduction to the History of Chronobiology, vol. 1: Biological Rhythms Emerge as a Subject of Scientific Research. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022.

An Introduction to the History of Chronobiology, vol. 2: Biological Rhythms in Animals and Humans.  Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022.

An Introduction to the History of Chronobiology, vol. 3: Metaphors, Models, and Mechanisms.  Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022.

Northern Light and Northern Times: Swedish Leadership in the Foundation of Biological Rhythms Research.  Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, vol.103, part 2.  Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2013.  

A Philosophical Path for Paracelsian Medicine.  The Ideas, Intellectual Context, and Influence of Petrus Severinus (1540/2-1602), Acta historica scientiarum naturalium et medicinalium 46.  Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, University of Copenhagen, 2004. 

William Harvey and the Mechanics of the Heart, in the series Oxford Portraits in Science, ed. Owen Gingerich (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).  This series is aimed at the young adult reader (secondary market; pedagogical).  Translated into Japanese 2009 (ISBN 978-4-272-44050-4).

Tycho Brahe.  Instruments of the Renewed Astronomy.  English trans. (Raeder et al. 1946) revised and commented by Alena Hadravova, Petr Hadrava and Jole R. Shackelford.  Clavis Monumentorum Litterarum (Regnum Bohemiae) 2, Facsimilia - Translationes 1.  Prague: Koniasch Latin Press, 1996.

ARTICLES IN RECENT PEER REVIEWED JOURNALS AND TOPICAL COLLECTIONS

“Mechanical Arts and Biological Development on the Sixteenth-Century World Stage: The Paracelsian Mechanical Philosophy of Petrus Severinus,” in Christoph Lüthy and Elena Nicoli, eds., Atoms, Corpuscles and Minima in the Renaissance.  Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy and Science 36 (Leiden: Brill, 2023), pp. 146-75.

“Chemical Paradigm vs. Biological Paradigm in the Biological Clock Controversy,” Ambix 67.4(2020): 366-388.  DOI: 10.1080/00026980.2020.1826821 

“Transplantation and Corpuscular Identity in Paracelsian Vital Philosophy,” in Peter Distelzweig, Benny Goldberg, and Evan Ragland, eds., Early Modern Medicine and Natural Philosophy (New York: Springer, 2016), pp. 229-253.

“Johann Hayne and Paracelsian Praxis: Chemical Physiology as a Link between Semeiotics and Therapeutics,” in Bridging Traditions: Alchemy, Chemistry, and Paracelsian Practices in the Early Modern Era, ed.  Karen Hunger Parshall, Michael T.  Walton, and Bruce T.  Moran (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2015), pp. 19-58.
 

Bio

Wayne Soon is an Associate Professor in the Program of the History of Medicine in the Department of Surgery and the Program of History of Science, Medicine, and Technology. He received his B.A. from Carleton College and his Ph.D. in history from Princeton University and previously taught at Earlham College and Vassar College.

Dr. Soon is a historian of medicine as well as modern China and Taiwan, with an interest in how international ideas and practices of medicine, institutional building, and diaspora have shaped Chinese East Asia’s interaction with its people and the world in the twentieth century. His book, Global Medicine in China: A Diasporic History (Stanford University Press, 2020), tells the global health history of Chinese East Asia through the lens of diasporic Chinese medical personnel, who were central in introducing new practices of military medicine, blood banking, mobile medicine, and mass medical training to China and Taiwan. Universal care, practical medical education, and mobile medicine are all lasting legacies of this effort on both sides of the Taiwan Straits.

His current research projects centers around the history of health insurance and medical practices in postwar China and Taiwan and the transpacific history of SARS and COVID-19. He is also the editor for a forthcoming special issue in the East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal entitled “Biogeopolitics of Health Insurance in East and Southeast Asia.”

Dr. Soon is a frequent contributor to The Diplomat, a Washington D.C. based current affairs magazine. He has also published scholarly articles in Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Twentieth Century China, American Journal of Chinese Studies, and East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal.

Research Summary

History of Global Health; History of Medicine in China; History of Health Insurance; History of SARS and COVID-19

Selected Publications:

Global Medicine in China: A Diasporic History, Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2020. 

Transpacific Taiwanese Americans and the Global Fight against Covid-19, Global China Pulse 2, no. 1 (2023): 104-113. 

Military Medicine in East Asia: Histories of Instrumentalism, Resistance, and Agency, East Asian Science, Technology, and Society 17, no. 2 (2023): 222-231.

From SARS to COVID-19: Rethinking Global Health Lessons from Taiwan, East Asian Science, Technology, and Society 14, no. 4 (2020): 647–655.

“Taiwan as Study Abroad,” American Journal for Chinese Studies, 27, no. 1 (April 2020): 66–68.

“Blood, Soy Milk, and Vitality: The Wartime Origins of Blood Banking in China, 1943–45,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 90 no. 3 (2016): 424-454. (Article was awarded the Zhu Kezhen Junior Scholar Prize by ISHEASTM in 2019)

“Science, Medicine, and Confucianism in the Making of China and Southeast Asia – Lim Boon Keng and the Overseas Chinese, 1897 to 1937,” Twentieth-Century China 39, no. 1 (2014): 24-43.

Teaching Summary

History of Medicine; History of Infectious Disease; History of Modern China and Taiwan; History of Global Health; History of Health Insurance

Service Summary

Professional Associations

• American Association for the History of Medicine (AAHM)
• American Historical Association
• Association for Asian Studies