End of Semester Review

It's been a good semester, all things considered.

I reached a few personal/professional milestones. I finally taught my class on the history of alternative medicine. At my school, we have a very well-defined set of criteria we have to meet in order to get tenure. We draw up a faculty plan that meets the programmatic expectations for Teaching, Research, and Service, and then we basically check our goals off the list over our first 9 semesters. Teaching the History of Health Fraud, a freshman seminar, was the last teaching item on my list.

Another milestone was the last of the peer-reviewed publications I needed for tenure. This was an article that came out of the WWII class I taught last year. The article was accepted with some minor revisions in mid-November. In the summer, I answered a call for papers about a special journal issue on War and Conflict in Autobiographical and Documentary Narratives. My dissertation was on WWII veterans writings, both memoir and fiction, so I felt I could contribute. The article is called, "A Conspicuous Absence: Combat Veterans and America's Memory of World War II." This was the only component of my tenure file that was in any question, mostly because the review process is out of my hands. This was a huge relief for me. I still have to to write up my tenure file for review in mid February. I have excellent support from my program and am not worried about that aspect of the process. My program values scholarship of engagement, and my work in skepticism, giving talks around the country, podcasting, writing the occasional blog entry on conspiracy theory for Skeptical Inquirer's blog--that sort of thing--has been counted together as the equivalent of a publication. The other required publication was kind of a surprise. I had written an article with Mike Jarsulic for Skeptical Inquirer about the quackbuster Arthur J. Cramp. Every item in the tenure file is backed by evidence, and when I included this article and supporting documentation, I honestly considered it as being part of my scholarship of engagement. The committee, however, noted the work that went into it, the fact that it relied on funded, original archival research, and the fact that there are few academic journals that specialize in the critical appraisal of bullshit, I received the wonderful surprise in my committee letter that they considered it a scholarly publication. So, that's all three publications in the can with a few months to spare.

The health fraud seminar was superb. My students were great. They kept up with the reading, which was considerable. They were smart and funny and their final projects were great. I think that it has the possibility of becoming an upper-level general studies course down the line. We came nowhere near close to covering everything that I had hoped to at the beginning of the semester, however, adjusting the pacing and revising the syllabus will bring a number of changes. I was really impressed how well the students handled the primary documents of colonial and early America. We started with Benjamin Rush and the standard practice of medicine at the time. Then we looked at the yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia from a variety of perspectives. (Honestly, there is easily a whole class in that topic alone.) We read some of Rush's letters to his wife, the contemporary publications of his fellow doctors as the medical community publicly fought over the best way to handle the crisis, and the experiences of the black community as they managed the chaos. An unexpectedly fun day was when I was showing students a couple of slides, maps of the city at the time of the plague. On a hunch I brought up Google maps and showed how closely the old city plan maps onto the current plan, and that you could pinpoint the location of the waterfront slums Rush thought the disease originated in if you noticed that a side street making a little bootleg in an otherwise regular city plan appeared on both maps. I felt like Stewart Ainsworth, I tell you.

We looked at black herbalist from 19th century New Jersey (James Still), and we read foundational texts of the Thomsonian movement and the eclectics, phrenology, mesmerism, homeopathy, and chiropractic. We looked at the history of a variety of patent medicines, problems with regulation of drugs in the early 20th century, and then we hit the biggest wall, a book about John R. Brinkley, the goat gland doctor of Milford, KS. It changed the pace of the class for a few weeks. By the time we finished, it was time to start the final project, and so a lot went unsaid about modern regulation. Still, it was a hell of fun a semester.

I'll be teaching 2 sections of my war class in the Spring and a section of science and pseudoscience. Books are ordered. Teaching assistants have been lined up. It should be another fun and rewarding semester.

RJB