Biography
Biography
Interests: History of medicine and public health in America; women and medicine.
Affiliations: History of Medicine, Gender and Women’s Studies
Education
Ph.D., University of Chicago, History, 1975
M.A., University of Chicago, History, 1966
B.A., Antioch College, Social Science, 1963
Books
Make Room for Daddy: The Journey from Waiting Room to Birthing Room
Judith W. Leavitt. Make Room for Daddy: The Journey from Waiting Room to Birthing Room. University of North Carolina Press, 2009.
Using fathers’ first-hand accounts from letters, journals, and personal interviews along with hospital records and medical literature, Judith Walzer Leavitt offers a new perspective on the changing role of expectant fathers from the 1940s to the 1980s. She shows how, as men moved first from the hospital waiting room to the labor room in the 1960s, and then on to the delivery and birthing rooms in the 1970s and 1980s, they became progressively more involved in the birth experience and their influence over events expanded. With careful attention to power and privilege, Leavitt charts not only the increasing involvement of fathers, but also medical inequalities, the impact of race and class, and the evolution of hospital policies. Illustrated with more than seventy images from TV, films, and magazines, this book provides important new insights into childbirth in modern America, even as it reminds readers of their own experiences.
Women and Health in America
Judith W. Leavitt. Women and Health in America. no. 2nd Edition, University of Wisconsin Press, 1999.
In this thoroughly updated second edition, Judith Walzer Leavitt, a leading authority on the history of women’s health issues, has collected thirty-five articles representing important scholarship in this once-neglected field. Timely and fascinating, this volume is organized chronologically and then by topic, covering studies of women and health in the colonial and revolutionary periods and the nineteenth century through the Civil War. The remainder of the book concentrates on the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries and addresses such controversial issues as body image and physical fitness, sexuality, fertility, abortion and birth control, childbirth and motherhood, mental illness, women’s health care providers (midwives, nurses, physicians), and health reform and public health.
Sickness and Health in America: Readings in the History of Medicine and Public Health
Judith W. Leavitt (Co-editor). Sickness and Health in America: Readings in the History of Medicine and Public Health. Vol. Third Edition, Revised, University of Wisconsin Press, 1997.
An invaluable resource for students, scholars, and general readers, this highly regarded and widely used social history of medicine and public health in the United States is now available in a third edition. Extensively revised and updated, it includes twenty-one new essays; graphs illustrating the rise in deaths caused by HIV, homicide, and suicide; and a greatly expanded Guide to Further Reading. Entirely new sections on Sickness and Health, Early American Medicine, Therapeutics, the Art of Medicine, and Public Health and Personal Hygiene have been added, supplementing updated sections on the Science of Medicine, Education, the Allied Health Professions, Image and Income, Institutions, Race and Medicine, Epidemics, Public Health Reform, and Public Health and Medical Theory. An introductory essay and a series of historical photographs complement the articles.
The Healthiest City: Milwaukee and the Politics of Health Reform
Judith W. Leavitt. The Healthiest City: Milwaukee and the Politics of Health Reform. Vol. Wisconsin Edition, University of Wisconsin Press, 1996.
Between 1850 and 1900, Milwaukee’s rapid population growth also gave rise to high death rates, infectious diseases, crowded housing, filthy streets, inadequate water supplies, and incredible stench. The Healthiest City shows how a coalition of reform groups brought about community education and municipal action to achieve for Milwaukee the title of “the healthiest city” by the 1930s. This highly praised book reminds us that cutting funds and regulations for preserving public health results in inconvenience, illness, and even death.
Typhoid Mary: Captive to the Public’s Health
Judith W. Leavitt. Typhoid Mary: Captive to the Public’S Health. Beacon Press, 1996.
She was an Irish immigrant cook. Between 1900 and 1907, she infected twenty-two New Yorkers with typhoid fever through her puddings and cakes; one of them died. Tracked down through epidemiological detective work, she was finally apprehended as she hid behind a barricade of trashcans. To protect the public’s health, authorities isolated her on Manhattan’s North Brother Island, where she died some thirty years later. This book tells the remarkable story of Mary Mallon–the real Typhoid Mary. Combining social history with biography, historian Judith Leavitt re-creates early-twentieth-century New York City, a world of strict class divisions and prejudice against immigrants and women. Leavitt engages the reader with the excitement of the early days of microbiology and brings to life the conflicting perspectives of journalists, public health officials, the law, and Mary Mallon herself. Leavitt’s readable account illuminates dilemmas that continue to haunt us. To what degree are we willing to sacrifice individual liberty to protect the public’s health? How far should we go in the age of AIDS, drug-resistant tuberculosis, and other diseases? For anyone who is concerned about the threats and quandaries posed by new epidemics, Typhoid Mary is a vivid reminder of the human side of disease and disease control.
Brought to Bed: Childbearing in America, 1750-1950
Judith W. Leavitt. Brought to Bed: Childbearing in America, 1750-1950. Oxford University Press, 1986.
The classic work on how childbirth has changed from colonial times to the present. Author of renowned expert on women’s medical history. New to this Edition: New preface for 30th anniversary edition on the state of the fields of women’s history and the history of medicine. Addresses how the history of childbirth and women’s health have developed in the intervening decades.
Courses Taught
- MHB 504: Society and Health Care in America
- MHB 509: Development of Public Health in America (Syllabus)
- MHB 720: Historical Perspectives in Medicine
- MHB 531: Women and Health in American History
- MHB 725: Topics in American Medicine
- MHB 919: Graduate Studies in Medical History
- MHB 920: Research Seminar in Medical History and Public Health
- Women’s Studies 430: Biology and Psychology of Women
- Women’s Studies 431: Childbirth in the United States (Syllabus)