POSTPONED: The Politics of Pain: Pursuing Relief in the Opiate Epidemic
This lecture has been postponed until further notice. Thank you for your patience.
Today's opiate epidemic in the United States has sparked a lively debate. Should we enact steeper penalties for dealers? Restrict doctors' prescribing power? Often overlooked in these discussions are the medical needs of patients in pain and the clinicians they turn to for relief. This talk explores the history of pain management in the US, including patients and medical providers caught in the crossfire of political debates.
About Andrea Tone
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.
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.
