Research Associate, Supervisor: Thomas Schlich
| rachel.elder [at] mcgill.ca | 3647 Peel, 212
Rachel Elder is a historian of science, medicine, technology, and disability in American culture. Her current book manuscript, “Secrecy and Safety: A Cultural History of Seizures in Mid-Twentieth Century America” (under contract and forthcoming with Johns Hopkins University Press), explores how epilepsy was redefined in an era of rising, yet largely unrealized, hopes for medical control. The project traces new forms of invisible disability that followed in postwar public life, and as a dissertation-to-book project, won the Pressman-Burroughs Career Development Award from the American Association for the History of Medicine. She is also working on projects that examine the role of neurological patients in constructing knowledge about the brain, histories of men in nursing, and a CIHR-funded project with Thomas Schlich on technology and patient consumerism in American medicine and healthcare. Before coming to McGill, Rachel was a postdoctoral fellow in the Center for Social Medicine and Humanities at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Lecturer in the Program of the History of Science and Medicine at Yale University. She holds a Ph.D. in the History and Sociology of Science from the University of Pennsylvania.
Research Interests:
20th century medicine; disability; technology and the body; gender and science; sexuality; neurology and neuroscience
Selected Publications:
“White Suits and Kangaroo Kills: Making Men’s Careers in American Nursing.” Gender & History (May 2021).
“Speaking Secrets: Epilepsy, Neurosurgery, and the Patient Testimony in the Age of the Explorable Brain, 1934-1960.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 89.4 (Winter 2015), 761-789.
“Safe Seizures, Schoolyard Stoics, and the Construction of Secure Citizens at the Detroit White School for Epileptic Children." Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 7.3 (Fall 2014), 430-461.
“Chasing Whispers in the Neuro Archive.” Osler Library Newsletter. No. 117 (Fall 2012), 6-7.
With Catherine Carstairs. “Expertise, Health, and Popular Opinion: Debating Water Fluoridation, 1945-80.” The Canadian Historical Review 89.3 (Fall 2008), 345-371.