Keith Wailoo

Keith Wailoo (Ph.D. 1992, University of Pennsylvania) joined the Rutgers faculty in July 2001 as Professor of History jointly appointed to the Institute for Health, Health Care Policy, and Aging Research. He was named the Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor of History in 2006. Previously, he spent nine years on the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  Professor Wailoo teaches courses on a health and history at the undergraduate and graduate levels including: Drugs, Medicine and Society in America; Health Care and Society in America; Sex, Sexuality, and Medicine; and Major Trends in the Cultural History of Medicine. In the past, he has also taught courses on The Politics of Pain Medicine; The History of Child Health in America; Racial Health and the American South; and Disease in Historical Perspective. He is author of several award-winning books examining how patterns of disease change over time in America, and focusing especially on the ways in which scientific and technological understandings have interacted with health care politics, racial and ethnic relations, and cultural politics to inform responses to disease in the 20th century and into the 21st century.  

Among them are: Dying in the City of the Blues: Sickle Cell Anemia and the Politics of Race and Health; Drawing Blood: Technology and Disease Identity in Twentieth Century America; The Troubled Dream of Genetic Medicine: Ethnicity and Innovation in Tay-Sachs, Cystic Fibrosis, and Sickle Cell Disease (co-authored); and A Death Retold: Jesica Santillan, The Bungled Transplant, and Paradoxes of Medical Citizenship (co-edited)

Professor Wailoo is currently completing two studies – How Cancer Crossed the Color Line: Race and Disease in America (to be published by Oxford University Press), and The Cultural Politics of Pain: Medicine, Society, and the Struggle for Relief in America.

• Health Care and Society in America
• Drugs, Medicine, and Society

• Race, Medicine, and Health
• Sex, Sexuality, and Medicine
• Cultural History of Disease and Medicine

Books

• A Death Retold: Jesica Santillan, The Bungled Transplant, and Paradoxes of Medical Citizenship (University of North Carolina Press, 2006) (edited with Julie Livingston and Peter Guarnaccia)
• The Troubled Dream of Genetic Medicine: Innovation and Ethnicity in Tay-Sachs, Cystic Fibrosis, and Sickle Cell Disease (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006) (co-authored with Stephen Pemberton)
• Transforming American Medicine: Professional Sovereignty in a Changing Health Care System - Essays on Paul Starr's Social Transformation of American Medicine (special double issue of the Journal of Health Politics, Policy, and Law 29, Numbers 4-5, August-October 2004) co-edited with Mark Schlesinger and Timothy Jost.
• Dying in the City of the Blues: Sickle Cell Anemia and the Politics of Race and Health (University of North Carolina Press, 2001)
• Drawing Blood: Technology and Disease Identity in Twentieth-Century America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997)

Articles

• "Sovereignty and Science: Revisiting the Role of Science in the Construction and Erosion of Medical Dominance," in Schlesinger, Jost, Wailoo, eds., Transforming American Medicine (special double issue of the Journal of Health Politics, Policy, and Law 29, Numbers 4-5, August-October 2004)
• "The Power of Genetic Testing in a Conflicted Society," in Warner and Tighe, eds., Major Problems in the History of American Medicine and Public Health: Documents and Essays (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2001)
• "Inventing the Heterozygote: Molecular Biology, Racial Identity, and the Narratives of Sickle Cell Disease, Tay-Sachs, and Cystic Fibrosis," in Donald Moore, Anand Pandia, and Jake Kosek, eds., Race, Nature, and the Politics of Difference (Duke University Press, 2003)

Book Awards for Drawing Blood:

• 1997: Arthur Viseltear Book Award from the American Public Health Association

Book Awards for Dying in the City of the Blues:

• 2005 William H. Welch Medal (American Association for the History of Medicine)
• 2002 American Political Science Association Prize from Section on Race, Ethnicity, and Politics (Best Book on Public Policies, Social and Legal Dimensions of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics in the U.S.)
• 2002 Lillian Smith Book Award for Non-Fiction work on Race and Social Justice in the South(Southern Regional Council)
• 2002 New Jersey Council for the Humanities Honor Book
• 2003 Suzanne M Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship

GRANTS

• 1999-2008: James S. McDonnell Centennial Fellowship in the History of Science for "The Body in Parts: Disease and the Biomedical Sciences in the 20th Century"
• 2002-2005: Robert Wood Johnson Investigator Award for "Pain as Policy: The Social Negotiation of Pain in Medicine, Culture, and Public Policy since World War II"

• Association for the History of Medicine
• American Historical Association
• Organization of American Historians