Judith Walzer Leavitt
Rupple Bascom and Ruth Bleier Professor, Medical History & Bioethics, History of Science, and Gender and Women's Studies
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Special interests and recent research:
Major research interests include 19th and 20th century public health and women's health with concerns about questions and issues at the intersection of science and society, that is, placing medical science securely into its social, economic, and political context. Current research projects, one of which looks at home health care during the antibiotic transition and the second of which carries forward her childbirth studies, continue to examine gender and public health through the twentieth century.
Recent publications:
Make Room for Daddy: The Journey from Waiting Room to Birthing Room (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, forthcoming June 2009).
- Women and Health in America: Historical Readings. Second revised edition, ed. Leavitt J.W. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999).
- "'Strange Young Women on Errands': Obstetric Nursing Between Two Worlds," Nursing History Review 6 (1998): 3-24.
Sickness and Health in America: Readings in the History of Medicine and Public Health, Leavitt J.W., Numbers R.L., eds. (Third Edition. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997).
- "Gendered expectations: Women and early twentieth century public health," in: U.S. History as Women's History: New Feminist Essays, eds. Kerber L, Kesslar-Harris A, Sklar K.K. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).
Typhoid Mary: Captive to the Public's Health (Beacon Press, 1997).
- "'A Worrying Profession': The Domestic Environment of Medical Practice in the Mid-19th-Century America." Garrison Lecture, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 1995; 69: 1-29.
- Brought to Bed: Childbearing in America 1750-1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).
- The Healthiest City : Milwaukee and the politics of health reform (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982).

