I am a historian of American medicine specializing in psychiatry and the sciences of the mind. I am especially interested in how reform projects, such as the early twentieth century mental hygiene movement, impact professional mental health care. My research considers how psychiatric concepts and categories take shape inextricable from the American socio-cultural landscape and the profession’s sense of itself. My published work has appeared in Feminist Collections and History of Psychiatry.
My recent dissertation, “The Personality with Which We Have to Deal:” St. Elizabeths Hospital and the New Psychiatry, 1903-1937, examines records from St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C. to understand the development of “personality” as a psychiatric concept in the early twentieth century. We are all familiar with the idea of personality disorders or tests that can tell you your personality type, but these diagnoses and metrics depend on a notion of personality as something everyone has that comes in functional and dysfunctional types. That such a thing exists is not a foregone conclusion. Though initially more a social idea than a psychiatric one, personality rose to prominence alongside mental hygiene, a multifaceted Progressive Era public health movement that aimed to shift psychiatry’s focus from insanity in asylums to a socially-minded sense of mental wellness. St. Elizabeths records and psychiatrists’ published writings show that personality was a keystone for the new, self-consciously modern, psychiatry clinicians were developing in this period. It interwove psychological and physiological ways of understanding the individual, such as endocrinology and psychoanalysis, into a singular object of analysis over which psychiatrists could assert expertise. Psychiatrists depended on their work with hospitalized patients to develop their ideas about personality function and dysfunction, and the personality framework guided clinicians’ understanding of the hospital as a scientific and therapeutic institution in dynamic relationship with the wider social world. Hospital practice was embedded in the American cultural landscape meaning that beliefs about the relative potential of different personalities to make a social adjustment were inextricable from raced, classed, and gendered expectations of appropriate social conduct.
Aside from developing my dissertation for publication, I am also exploring new areas of research considering how scientists of the mind, physicians, and critics position psychiatry in relation to medicine writ large. In varying times and contexts, these groups might frame psychiatry as lagging behind medicine, primary a mode of social control, or as a kind of dark reflection of medicine — devoid of the objective science that made supposedly objective medical science so modern. I am also curious about psychiatric reform movements in the mid to late twentieth century. In particular, I’m interested in exploring how the label “anti-psychiatry” can obscure the variety of perspectives and goals among mental health activists in the late twentieth century.
Education
Ph.D., University of Wisconsin–Madison, History of Science, Medicine, and Technology, 2026
M.A., University of Wisconsin–Madison, History of Science, Medicine, and Technology, 2017
M.A., University of Wisconsin–Madison, Gender and Women’s Studies, 2015
B.Sc., McGill University, Animal Biology, 2005
Selected Publications
- Suzanna Schulert, “King vs. Laqueur: Sex and Texts in Ancient and Early Modern Europe,”Feminist Collections: A Quarterly of Women’s Studies Resources 35, no. 3-4 (Summer-Fall 2014): 19-21.
- Suzanna Banks Schulert, “Blowing Glass Flowers: How Gender Shaped Psychopathy in American Psychiatry, 1906-1941,” History of Psychiatry OnlineFirst (2026).
History Courses
- HistSci 212 – Bodies, Disease, and Healers
- HistSci 211 – Historian’s Craft: History of Science, Medicine, and Technology: Health and Healing in American History
- HistSci 250 – Special Topics, Madness in the History of Medicine
- HistSci 531 – Women and Health in American History