~This post courtesy Joan Ilacqua, Archivist for Diversity and Inclusion, Center for the History of Medicine at the Francis A. Countway Library of Harvard Medical School.
We would like to cordially invite you to our upcoming Women in Medicine Legacy Fellow’s lecture, given by Carla Bittel, PhD, our current fellow working at the Countway Library.
Her lecture, “Measure of Power? Gender, Phrenology and 19th Century Cultures of Medicine” will take place at the Countway Library of Medicine on May 16 from 4 to 6pm.
Phrenology, considered a “science of the mind” in the nineteenth century, purported to measure the “power” of human mental faculties. This talk will examine the role of gender in the making of those measurements, and demonstrate how middle-class women—as practitioners and consumers—merged phrenology with multiple forms of medical and domestic knowledge.
Carla Bittel is Associate Professor of History at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. She is a historian of nineteenth-century America, specializing in the history of medicine, science, and technology. Her research focuses on gender issues and she has written on the history of women’s health, women physicians, and the role of science in medicine.
Sponsored by the Women in Medicine Legacy Foundation, in partnership with the Center for the History of Medicine, Countway Library.