Professor of History
Associate appointment, Transcultural Psychiatry Divison, Department of Psychiatry
514-398-6035 | andrea.tone [at] mcgill.ca | 3647 Peel, room 204
A historian by training, Andrea Tone’s scholarship on medicine reflects her commitment to interdisciplinary and public history. Working with archives, museums, and professional societies, she has strived to make research accessible to audiences beyond academia. Her five books include Devices and Desires, which inspired an Emmy-award winning PBS documentary and was named one of the best books of the year by the Washington Post. Her research has been featured on CBC, NPR, and other mediums. In 2011, she was awarded the APA’s Benjamin Rush Award for contributions to the history of psychiatry. In 2017, she was elected to the Royal Society of Canada.
Research Interests:
Professor Tone’s research interests explore twentieth-century American medical history, particularly the histories of gender, sexuality, psychiatry, pharmacology, and epistemology. A transcendent theme is the intersection of patient experience and institutional power, a frame that integrates politics into the study of the social. She is completing a monograph on the CIA and Cold War Psychiatry funded, in part, by an Open Operating Grant from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. She is also researching the history of female sexuality before FSD, the medicalization of beauty, and women’s encounters with pregnancy, pharmacology, and pathology from the 1950s to the present.
Selected Publications:
The Age of Anxiety: A History of America’s Turbulent Affair with Tranquilizers
Medicating Modern America: Prescription Drugs in History
Devices and Desires: A History of Contraceptives in America
Controlling Reproduction: An American History
The Business of Benevolence: Industrial Paternalism in Progressive America
Courses Given:
History of Psychiatry
History of Gender, Sexuality, and Medicine
Gender and Health in 20th century US History