DORA B WEINER

Field

Science

Research Interests

align="justify">Dora B. Weiner, Professor of the Medical Humanities and History,
received her primary education in Germany and her secondary education in Paris
where she earned the baccalauréat degree. She majored in European history at
Smith College and at Columbia University where her dissertation, under the direction
of Jacques Barzun, dealt with Ernest Renan and the cultural and intellectual
history of 19th-century France. Marriage to a physician and clinical investigator
led her to focus on the history of science and medicine, as evidenced by her
books.

These include Raspail, Scientist and Reformer (1969),
The Citizen-Patient in Revolutionary and Imperial Paris (1993, paperback
2002) and Philippe Pinel (1745-1826) et la médecine de l’esprit (1999, Spanish
translation 2002). She also translated, edited, or co-edited From Parnassus:
Essays in Honor of Jacques Barzun (1976), The Clinical Training of Doctors:
An Essay of 1793 (1980), Jacques Tenon’s ‘Memoirs on Paris Hospitals’
(1997), and The World of Dr. Francisco Hernández (2002), a work that
deals with a 16th-century Spanish physician and explorer and that grew out of
her association with the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. She
is now preparing an English edition of her book on Pinel for the series by Ashgate:
The History of Medicine in Context.

The goal of her writing and teaching has been to bring the
history of medicine into the mainstream: to convince colleagues, readers and
students that the history of health and healing, of epidemics and hospitals,
of physicians, surgeons, nurses and patients is part of social, cultural, and
even of economic and political history. With this goal in mind, she has published
numerous articles and reviews, in English and French, on the history of public
health, the nursing profession and the politics of health in 18th and 19th-century
France.

With a joint appointment in the Department of Psychiatry and
Biobehavioral Sciences and in the Department of History, she has been able to
teach in the Medical School, the History Department, the Professional Schools
Seminar Program and the Honors Collegium. She now offers an upper-division,
two-quarter lecture course on “The Historic Roots of the Healing Arts” [Hippocrates
to the Renaissance], “The Foundations of Modern Medicine” [Vesalius to the Romantic
Era], a seminar on “Madness in the Enlightenment: The Care and Cure of Mental
Illness” and a graduate research seminar in" The Politics of Health".

Her next major research project grows out of the enthusiastic
reception of Pinel's work in Latin America in the early 19th century. She will
be analyzing the "Image of France" that has encouraged scientists and physicians
from Argentina to Mexico, ever since the Enlightenment and the French Revolution,
to reform their medical education and practice, their hospitals and public health
according to the perceived French model.