Keith Wailoo is the Townsend Martin Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University where he is appointed in History and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. From 2001 to 2010, he served on the faculty at Rutgers University. From 1992 to 2001, he served on the faculty in the Department of Social Medicine (School of Medicine) and in History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His books on biomedical sciences, racial and ethnic relations in medicine, and genetics include: Pain: A Political History; Dying in the City of the Blues: Sickle Cell Anemia and the Politics of Race and Health; How Cancer Crossed the Color Line; The Troubled Dream of Genetic Medicine: Ethnicity and Innovation in Tay-Sachs, Cystic Fibrosis, and Sickle Cell Disease; and Medicare and Medicaid at 50. His writings have appeared in The Lancet, New York Times, American Prospect, the Journal of Health Politics, Policy, and Law, and the Daily Beast. In 1999, he received the prestigious James S. McDonnell Centennial Fellowship in the History of Science. His work has also been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Center for Human Genome Research. He was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2007, contributing to its recent report on the ethical, social, and policy considerations in moving forward with Mitochondrial Replacement and gene-editing techniques. He holds a Ph.D. in the History and Sociology of Science from the University of Pennsylvania, and a Bachelors in Chemical Engineering from Yale University.
Presentation Abstract
Learning from Pain: Social Analysis and the Gatekeepers of Relief
The talk examines how pain has defined the line between liberal and conservative care in the U.S., and how physicians, policymakers, judges, and others have acted as gatekeepers of relief for people in chronic pain. Covering the period from just after World War II to the present, Wailoo explores how and why disabling pain has inflamed public policy debates. He explores how a wide range of disciplinary perspectives and social analysts (from psychology to physiology, and from anthropology to sociology and history) has shaped this policy debate, defined the politics of pain, and determined the nature of recognition, care, and relief for people in pain. Drawing on his book, Pain: A Political History, the talk examines how and why (from disabling pain to end-of-life pain to fetal pain) the battle over whose pain is real and who deserves relief has created stark ideological divisions at the bedside, in politics, and in the courts.