Keith A Wailoo, Ph.D.
Institute for Health, Health Care Policy and Aging Research
Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor of History, Department of History
kwailoo@ifh.rutgers.edu, (732) 932-8419 |
Biosketch • Current Projects • Curriculum Vitae (.pdf) |  | Keith Wailoo (Ph.D. 1992, University of Pennsylvania) joined the Rutgers faculty in July 2001 as Professor of History jointly appointed to the Institute for Health, Health Care Policy, and Aging Research. He was named the Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor of History in 2006. Previously, he spent nine years on the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
He is author of several books examining how patterns of disease change over time in America, and focusing especially on the ways in which scientific and technological understandings have interacted with health care politics, racial and ethnic relations, and cultural politics to inform responses to disease in the 20th century and into the 21st century.
He is co-author (with Stephen Pemberton) of The Troubled Dream of Genetic Medicine: Ethnicity and Innovation in Tay-Sachs, Cystic Fibrosis, Sickle Cell Disease (2006, Johns Hopkins University Press), a comparative history of these "ethnic maladies." More broadly, the book explores why racial and ethnic controversies become attached, as they often do, to discussions of modern genetics, and how theories about genetic difference become entangled with political debates about cultural and group differences in America.
He is co-editor (with Julie Livingston and Peter Guarnaccia) of A Death Retold: Jesica Santillan, The Bungled Transplant, and Paradoxes of Medical Citizenship (University of North Carolina Press, 2006). The project brings together scholars from a wide range of fields – from transplant medicine to anthropology, from history to medical ethics – to reexamine a recent and notorious medical error in 2003 (involving a young Mexican immigrant and a mismatched heart-lung transplant) as a window on contemporary crises in health care.
His 2001 book, Dying in the City of the Blues: Sickle Cell Anemia and the Politics of Race and Health (University of North Carolina Press)-- an account of the disease’s early 20th century invisibility, its gradual rise to clinical, scientific, and political prominence in the 1950s and 1960s, and its changing socio-political significance into the era of managed care -- received several awards, among them the Lillian Smith Book Award for non-fiction writing on race and social justice, the Susanne Glasscock Humanities Book Award for Interdisciplinary Scholarship, an award for scholarship on Race, Ethnicity, and Politics from the American Political Science Association, and the 2005 William H. Welch Medal from the American Association for the History of Medicine. The book also received an Honor Book Award from the New Jersey Council for the Humanities.
His 1997 Drawing Blood: Technology and Disease Identity in Twentieth-Century American (Johns Hopkins University Press) explores the ways in which technological change and cultural assumptions about different patients reshaped approaches to blood and blood disease. The book received the 1997 Arthur Viseltear Award from the American Public Health Association.
Professor Wailoo is co-editor, with political economist Mark Schlesinger and health law scholar Tim Jost of a special double issue of the Journal for Health Politics, Policy, and Law (August-October 2004) entitled, Transforming American Medicine: A Twenty-Year Retrospective on The Social Transformation of American Medicine.
Professor Wailoo is currently completing two studies – How Cancer Crossed the Color Line: Race and Disease in America (to be published by Oxford University Press), and The Cultural Politics of Pain: Medicine, Society, and the Struggle for Relief in America.
His research on pain is funded by a Robert Wood Johnson Investigator Award in 2002. In 1999, Professor Wailoo received the prestigious James S. McDonnell Centennial Fellowship in the History of Science, a $1,000,000 multiyear award to examine the history of cancer, immunology, genetics, and pain in 20th century society. The McDonnell Foundation Fellowship has supported many of his research projects which explore the intersections between understandings of disease in biomedicine, in clinical practice, and in culture. The McDonnell Fellowship has given rise to numerous conferences, including 1) The Cultural Transformation of Cancer (1999); 2) The Politics of Racial Health (2001); 3) The Problem of Pain in Medicine, Culture, and Public Policy (2002); and 4) Beyond the Bungled Transplant: Jesica Santillan and High-Tech Medicine in Cultural Perspective (2004 and 2005). Professor Wailoo’s research has also been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Center for Human Genome Research (Ethical, Legal, and Social Issues Program), and the Burroughs Wellcome Fund.
Professor Wailoo teaches courses on a health and history at the undergraduate and graduate levels including: Drugs, Medicine and Society in America; Health Care and Society in America; Sex, Sexuality, and Medicine; and Major Trends in the Cultural History of Medicine. In the past, he has also taught courses on The Politics of Pain Medicine; The History of Child Health in America; Racial Health and the American South; and Disease in Historical Perspective. | | |
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