I study the interplay among medicine, commerce, and culture in the United States in the 20th-21st centuries. I am especially interested in relationships among biomedical researchers, health care providers, lay people, drug makers, government regulators, and the media and how information flows between these groups. My research has focused on four main areas of inquiry:
1. Birth control
My first book, On the Pill: A Social History of Oral Contraceptives, 1950-1970 (Johns Hopkins, 1998), analyzed the development and subsequent impact of oral contraception on American society and culture during the 1950s and 1960s. I have recently completed two journal articles on the history of Norplant, the
contraceptive implant. The first examined Norplant from its development in the 1960s, to its approval by the FDA in 1990, through its tumultuous reception in American society, to its removal from the market in 2000. I argued that the rejection of Norplant by women was influenced by the social and political climate of the 1990s, in which a feminist health agenda, a consumerist ideology in health care, a growing tendency toward class action litigation, and increasing distrust of the pharmaceutical industry worked together to empower women to take charge of their reproductive decision making. The second looked at Norplant qua technology and employed analytic frameworks from the social construction of technology to explain the trajectory of its brief history.
2. Hormones, gender, and aging
My second book, The Estrogen Elixir: A History of Hormone Replacement Therapy in America (Johns Hopkins, 2007), told the story of the rise and fall, and rise again and fall again of estrogen and its promise to forestall the diseases of aging and to maintain youthfulness in women. I am currently working on a medical and cultural history of male menopause. This study fits into contemporary efforts to expand gender studies to include men's experiences along with those of women. I have published two journal articles on this topic so far. The first described how the topic of male menopause occupied space on the medical radar screen from the late 1930s through the mid-1950s, then virtually disappeared for the next four decades, but was covered in the popular press from the mid-1950s through the mid-1990s in spite of its contemporary absence from the medical literature. I argued that male menopause became medicalized not by the driving forces of academic researchers and influential clinicians, but instead by a model perpetuated by laypeople and medical popularizers. The second addressed the question of why male menopause vanished from medical discourse in the 1950s and looked to both medical fashion and cultural conceptions of masculinity and aging to explain changes in the framing of this condition.
3. Information about pharmaceuticals
I co-edited a volume, Medicating Modern America: Prescription Drugs In History (NYU, 2007), that examined the rich and multifaceted history of pharmaceutical medicines in modern America since World War II through the discrete but interconnected histories of eight important drugs. I am currently engaged in co-editing another volume, titled The Prescription in Perspective: Therapeutic Authority in Late 20th Century America (Johns Hopkins, forthcoming). This book will push the history of late 20th century pharmaceuticals and therapeutics beyond the drugs themselves, to shine a spotlight on various actors and their interactions over how these medications are used.
4. Stress and disease
Another current project explores popular understandings of andreferences to stress as a cause of disease, looking at how and when stress made its way into common parlance in America. Here, stress serves as a case study of how a medical idea makes its way from professional discourse into everyday vernacular, as I continue my research into the transmission and translation of scientific and medical ideas from experts to the lay public.
http://www.dahsm.medschool.ucsf.edu/faculty/bios/watkins_elizabeth.aspx