Faculty & Staff: Howard Markel

Howard Markel, M.D., Ph.D. is the George Edward Wantz Distinguished Professor of the History of Medicine, Professor of Pediatrics and Communicable Diseases, Professor of History, Professor of Health Management and Policy, Professor of Psychiatry, and Director of the Center for the History of Medicine at the University of Michigan.  He was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1960 and grew up in Oak Park and Southfield, Michigan.  Dr. Markel was educated at the University of Michigan (A.B., in English Literature, summa cum laude, 1982; M.D., cum laude, 1986) and the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine (Internship, Residency, and Fellowship in General Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, 1986-1991; Ph.D., History of Science, Medicine and Technology, 1994).  He joined the faculty at the University of Michigan in 1993.

From 2005 to 2006, Professor Markel served as a historical consultant on Pandemic Influenza Preparedness Planning for the United States Department of Defense.  From 2006 to the present, he serves as the principal historical consultant for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services/Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Pandemic Influenza Preparedness Planning. 

In May of 2007, Dr. Markel’s name was added to the masthead of The Journal of the American Medical Association, as “Contributing Writer” and for which he writes commentaries on the history and sociology of medicine in his column, Literatim.

 A prolific writer, Dr. Markel is the author of several books including The H.L. Mencken Baby Book, the textbook The Portable Pediatrician and, The Practical Pediatrician: The A to Z Guide to Your Child’s Health, Behavior and Safety (written with Frank A. Oski and published by W.H. Freeman/Scientific American Books).  In 1996, The Practical Pediatrician was named “Best Book of the Year” by Child Magazine.   He is the co-editor of two books including, Human Diseases and Conditions (Scribner’s, 2000) and Formative Years: Children’s Health in America, 1880-2000 (University of Michigan Press, 2002) and, with Alexandra M. Stern, the co-editor of a series of books called “Conversations in Medicine” for the University of Michigan Press.

His critically acclaimed study of immigration and public health in the United States during the 19th century, Quarantine!  East European Jewish Immigrants and the New York City Epidemics of 1892 was published by the Johns Hopkins University Press in June, 1997.  In a review for The New Republic, Dr. Sherwin Nuland, the 1994 National Book Award winner, described Quarantine! as “a remarkable book, uniting the best of the two worlds of social history and clinical history and yet so gripping in narrative style that it kept me fascinated until the very end.  Markel is to be congratulated on his ability to write engagingly for a wide variety of readers, while making a major scholarly contribution to the field”.  Quarantine! was released in paperback by Johns Hopkins University Press in spring of 1999 and in 2003, it won the American Public Health Association’s Arthur Viseltear Prize for best book in the field of public health.

His most recent book, When Germs Travel: Six Major Epidemics That Have Invaded America Since 1900 and the Fears They Have Unleashed, a history of the American immigration experience with disease and public health in the 20th century, was published by Pantheon/Alfred A. Knopf Books in May, 2004 and as a trade paperback by Vintage/Random House Books in May, 2005.  It was named one of the “Ten Most Important Books of 2004” by The Globalist Magazine. The New York Times Book Review described the book as “vivid”; The St.Louis Post-Dispatch noted that “his ability to make medicine accessible and understandable to readers is remarkable”; Dr. Abraham Verghese wrote “Markel writes beautifully, and his perspective as both a trained historian and a dedicated physician make him a writer like no other; and The Wilson Quarterly urged “Everyone who considers the United States a nation of civilized people should read this book”.

Dr. Markel is a frequent contributor to The New York Times. His articles, essays, commentaries, and reviews have also appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Harper's Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, The Wall Street Journal, The International Herald Tribune, The American Scholar, The Washington Post, The Baltimore Evening Sun, The Boston Globe, The Forward, Redbook, ELLE, Child, and Good Housekeeping and on National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition” and Public Radio International's “Marketplace”.  He also served as the guest co-editor of the February 16, 2000 issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association and has contributed nearly a dozen essays to the Perspectives section of The New England Journal of Medicine.

He is also the author of over one hundred articles, essays and reviews on pediatrics and the history of medicine in the scholarly academic literature such as The New England Journal of Medicine, The American Journal of Public Health, The Journal of the American Medical Association, The Lancet, and Bulletin of the History of Medicine, in addition to being a contributor to The Encyclopedia of New York City, The Oxford Companion to United States History, The American National Biography, and The Encyclopedia of Microbiology.

Professor Markel sits on or has sat on several editorial and executive boards of scholarly publications and academic societies and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics, an elected member of the American Pediatrics Society and the Society for Pediatric Research, an elected member of the American Clinical and Climatological Association, and a member of the American Association for the History of Medicine.  Professor Markel has lectured widely at public institutions, museums and universities around the world. He has been interviewed inThe New York Times.The Washington Post,Time, Newsweek, The Christian Science Monitor, The Associated Press, and many other newspapers and magazines.  He has also appeared on National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition”, “On Point”, “Weekend Edition”, “The DNA Files”, and “All Things Considered”, the BBC World Service’s “The World”, Voice of America, CNN, MSNBC, the “NBC News Hour with Brian Williams”, ABC World News NOW, the PBS News Hour with Jim Lehrer, and in the November, 2005 NOVA/PBS six-hour special on global health, “Rx for Survival”.

Dr. Markel is the recipient of numerous awards, fellowships, and honors including the Robert Wood Johnson Generalist Faculty Scholars Award, the James Shannon Director’s Award of the National Institutes of Health, the National Institutes of Health National Research Service Award, the Commonwealth Fund Award, the Burroughs-Wellcome Fund 40th Anniversary History of Medicine Award, and a National Library of Medicine/National Institutes of Health Award. In 1999, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani named Professor Markel a Centennial Historian of the City of New York for his scholarly study of New York City and the history of public health and immigration.  He has lectured at universities, museums, cultural institutions and hospitals throughout the United States, ranging from the New York Public Library to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies of Science.

During the academic year of 1999- 2000, Dr. Markel was an Inaugural Fellow and Scholar at the Center for Scholars and Writers of the New York Public Library and for the academic year 2006-07, he is the John Rich Professor at the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan.  

 He lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan with his wife Kate Levin Markel and their daughters Bess Rachel and Samantha Louise Markel.