The Corner Society: "When the Community Has a Place at the Table: Community Control, Activism and American Medicine in the 1960's and 1970's"

Naomi Rogers, Ph.D.

Professor of the History of Medicine, Program in the History of Science and Medicine, Yale University

Dr. Naomi Rogers will delve into the challenging and important topic of relations between the community and the medical profession, focusing on the 1960s and 1970s, a time when health activists (including many medical students) sought to transform the values and structures of hospitals and clinics to make them responsive to local needs and to provide health care that provided poor patients, especially patients of color, with a sense of respect and dignity.  Dr. Rogers will consider the legacy of these struggles in ongoing contemporary efforts by hospitals and other medical institutions to improve community relations in ways that reflect health justice and seek to prevent health inequities.  

Naomi Rogers is a Professor of the History of Medicine in the Section of the History of Medicine and the Program in the History of Science and Medicine at Yale University. She studies 20^th and 21^st century history of medicine, health inequities and social justice, has published in medical and history journals and has been a keynote speaker in the U.S. and internationally. She is the author of three books: Dirt and Disease: Polio Before FDR (Rutgers, 1992), An Alternative Path: The Making and Remaking of Hahnemann Medical College and Hospital of Philadelphia (Rutgers, 1998), and Polio Wars: Sister Kenny and the Golden Age of American Medicine (Oxford, 2014). Her current research—including her monograph in progress, Health Radicalism and the Humanization of American Medicine—examines critics of medicine since 1945, particularly civil rights, consumer, and feminist activists.