The Richard B. Davis, MD, PhD, History of Medicine Lectureship brings national experts to the UNMC campus to discuss the history of medicine, in support of special collections at the McGoogan Library, including rare books and works on the history of medicine.
The lectureship is supported through an endowed fund given by the late Richard B. Davis, MD, PhD (1926-2010), professor emeritus of internal medicine at UNMC, and his wife, Jean. Dr. Davis, a faculty member at UNMC from 1969-1994, supported the lectureship out of his longstanding interest in the history of medicine.
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Sickness & Stigma at Sea View: The Black Angels
Maria Smilios
Discover the true story of the Black Angels at the 16th annual Richard B. Davis, MD, PhD History of Medicine Lecture.
Author Maria Smilios learned about the Black Angels while working as a science book editor at Springer Publishing. As a native New Yorker and lover of history, medicine, and women’s narratives, she became determined to tell their story.
“The Black Angels” is the true story of the Black nurses who, in 1929, wagered their lives by leaving the Jim Crow south and went north to work on an isolated hilltop in Staten Island at Sea View Hospital. The “pest house” was an overcrowded municipal tuberculosis sanatorium where the city sent its poorest residents, considered “uncouth and un-American consumptives” to languish and die.
Maria Smilios is an award-winning author, keynote speaker, and adjunct lecturer at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. She was born and raised in New York City. She holds a Master of Arts in American literature and religion from Boston University where she was a Luce and Presidential scholar. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, Narratively, The Forward, Lit Hub, Writers Digest, The Emancipator, Newsweek, and other publications.
The Black Angels won the 2024 Christopher Award in literature, which celebrates works that “affirm the highest values of the human spirit.” It was also a finalist for the prestigious Gotham Book Prize, an NASW Science in Society Journalism finalist, an NPR Science Friday Summer Read for 2024, and shortlisted for the English PEN literary award.
New York City and State recently honored Maria for “outstanding service” and “positive contribution” to the people of New York. The book greatly informed and inspired the Staten Island Museum’s exhibit “Taking Care: The Black Angels of Sea View,” which is on display through the end of 2025.
The Richard B. Davis, MD, PhD, History of Medicine Lectureship brings national experts to the UNMC campus to discuss the history of medicine in support of special collections at the McGoogan Library, including rare books and works on the history of medicine. The lectureship is supported through an endowed fund given by the late Richard B. Davis (1926-2010), MD, PhD, who was a UNMC faculty member from 1969 to 1994 and professor emeritus of internal medicine at UNMC. Dr. Davis and his wife, Jean, provided support for the lectureship out of his longstanding interest in the history of medicine.
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Humanities as critical medicine: the necessary practice of uncertainty, adaptability, and discovery
Jay Baruch
Dr. Jay Baruch presented for the 15th annual Richard B. Davis, MD, PhD, History of Medicine Lecture, hosted by the McGoogan Health Sciences Library. Dr. Baruch’s lecture, “Humanities as critical medicine: the necessary practice of uncertainty, adaptability, and discovery” encompassed his more than 30 years as an ER physician and the emotions, difficult choices and moral challenges he has experienced.
As a practicing ER physician for over thirty years, Dr. Baruch has learned that caring for patients can feel like swimming in choppy waters teeming with uncertainty, crests of emotions, difficult choices and moral challenges. He also discovered how bridging disciplines with skills from his other life as a writer and his humanities-and arts-based work have been critical clinical tools in his practice and informed his “accidental” academic career. The humanities provide sharp navigational tools for explorations into those messy spaces where medical data and decision-making tools cannot reach. In his discussion, he will share some personal challenges and offer examples of how the arts and humanities and learning from people who think differently are necessary in a changing health care system.
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Negotiating Normalcy: Deafness Cures in American History
Jaipreet Virdi
Jaipreet Virdi, PhD, presented the 14th annual Richard B. Davis, MD, PhD, History of Medicine Lecture on April 14, 2023.
During the late 19th century, entrepreneurs began to glut the direct-to-consumer medical market with a plethora of remedies they professed could miraculously cure deafness. They claimed their medicines and machines fostered a world of unbridled optimism for providing hope to deaf ears. Even as medical specialists denounced these cure-all treatments as quackery in its finest form, the messages of restoring hearing would transfer over to the hearing aid industry.
Focusing on the marketing of cures for deafness — hearing trumpets, electrotherapy apparatuses and hearing aids — this presentation unravels the many ways deaf people sought to restore or gain hearing. This history provides a broad context for understanding the lived experiences of deaf people and how cultural pressures of normalcy significantly stigmatized deafness.
Dr. Virdi is an assistant professor in the Department of History at the University of Delaware. A historian of medicine, technology and disability, she has focused her research on the ways medicine and technology impact people with disability. She is author of “Hearing Happiness: Deafness Cures in History” (University of Chicago Press, 2020), is co-editor of “Disability and the Victorians: Attitudes, Legacies, Interventions” (Manchester University Press, 2020) and has published articles on diagnostic technologies, audiometry and the medicalization of deafness.
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Scientific Discovery: How Meningitis Was Conquered
Janet R. Gilsdorf
Janet Gilsdorf, MD, presented at the 13th annual Richard B. Davis, MD, PhD, History of Medicine Lecture on April 22 from noon to 1 p.m.
Dr. Gilsdorf shared stories based on her book, “Continual Raving: A History of Meningitis and the People Who Conquered It.” The book tells how scientists across the 19th and 20th centuries defeated the deadly brain infection meningitis — not through flawless research but through a series of serendipitous events, misplaced assumptions and flawed conclusions. The result shows not just how a disease is vanquished but how scientific accomplishment can sometimes occur where it is least expected.
Dr. Gilsdorf, an alum of the UNMC College of Medicine, is the Robert P. Kelch Research Professor Emerita in the University of Michigan Department of Pediatrics. She is an infectious diseases physician at C. S. Mott Children’s Hospital in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she participates in the diagnosis and management of pediatric patients with complex infectious diseases and in the clinical training of medical students, pediatric residents and pediatric infectious diseases fellows.
She has published more than 100 articles of original research, most centering on the epidemiology, molecular characteristics and pathogenesis of Haemophilus influenzae. She is a past president of the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society and received the PIDS Distinguished Physician award in 2012.
She also is the author of “Inside/Outside: A Physician’s Journey with Breast Cancer” (U of Michigan Press) and “Ten Days” (a novel from Kensington Books). She has published several personal essays in the Journal of the American Medical Association Emerging Infectious Diseases, Health Affairs and The Examined Life. In 1999, she was awarded the Journal of Internal Medicine Award for Prose.
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Resuscitation: Past Beliefs and Current Clinical Trials
David Hoyt
David Hoyt, MD, executive director of the American College of Surgeons, gave the 12th annual Richard B. Davis, MD, PhD History of Medicine Lecture on June 29.
Dr. Hoyt has held numerous positions at the University of California, Irvine, and remains an emeritus professor of surgery. In 2010, he was appointed executive director of the American College of Surgeons.
His distinguished career has included delivering numerous named lectures and receiving multiple significant awards while serving in positions of leadership. Dr. Hoyt is a member of numerous surgical organizations and has served in multiple board and senior leadership roles therein. He has been a visiting professor at numerous institutions nationally and internationally and is an editorial board member of six journals. He consistently receives significant public research funding and is the author of more than 700 publications and three books.