Martin S. Pernick, Ph.D. is Associate Director for History and Medicine, Program in Society and Medicine, and Professor of History. Dr. Pernick studies the history of medicine, specializing in the role of value issues in medicine, and the links between medicine and mass culture. (Please see the Historical Health Film Collection.) He has written two books: The Black Stork: Eugenics and the Death of "Defective" Babies in American Medicine and Motion Pictures since 1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); and A Calculus of Suffering: Pain, Professionalism, and Anesthesia in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).
CONTACT INORMATION
Office address - 3613 Haven Hall,
Campus address - 1029 Tisch Hall
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1045
Phone: (734) 647-4876 (9-10 AM Eastern time)
FAX: (734) 647-4881
E-Mail: MPernick@umich.edu
Other significant publications include:
"Eugenics and Public Health in American History," American Journal of Public Health 87 (November 1997) 1767-1772.
"Brain Death in Cultural Context: The Reconstruction of Death 1967-1981" in Defining Death in a Technological Age, ed. Stuart Youngner and Robert Arnold (Johns Hopkins University Press, in press 1998).
"Defining the Defective: Eugenics, Aesthetics, and Mass Culture in Early 20th Century America," in The Body and Physical Difference: Discourses of Disability, ed. David T. Mitchell and Sharon Snyder (University of Michigan Press, 1997), 89-110.
"U.S. Government Sex Education Films in the 1920s," Isis, Special Issue on Science and Film, 84 (December 1993), 766- 68; "Back from the Grave: Recurring Controversies Over Defining and Diagnosing Death in History," in Death: Beyond Whole-Brain Criteria, Philosophy and Medicine Series (Dordrecht and Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988), ed. by Richard M. Zaner, pp. 17-74;
"The Patient's Role in Medical Decisionmaking: A Social History of Informed Consent in Medical Therapy," in Making Health Care Decisions: Studies on the Foundations of Informed Consent, President's Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine, Vol. III (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1982), pp. 1-35;
"The Ethics of Preventive Medicine: Thomas Edison's Tuberculosis Films: Mass Media and Health Propaganda," Hastings Center Report, 8 (June 1978), 21-27;
"Medical Professionalism," Encyclopedia of Bioethics (New York: The Free Press, 1978), III, 1028-1034;
"Politics, Parties, and Pestilence: Epidemic Yellow Fever in Philadelphia and the Rise of the First Party System," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., XXIX (October 1972), 559-586. Revised and reprinted in Sickness and Health in America, 2nd ed (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), edited by Judith Leavitt and Ronald Numbers, pp. 356-371.
Last Revised: 5/19/99
The Program in Society and Medicine