History and biology alumna Katherine Montgomery ’23 presented a paper, titled “A Crafty Woman in a Mangled World: The Intersection of Art and Facial Reconstruction in Anna Coleman Ladd’s Mask Making,” at the Virtual Graduate Conference of the Southern Association for the History of Medicine held on September 13. Katherine originally worked with Chair and Associate Professor of History Joseph E. Hower on this project during her history capstone course. After graduation, she worked with Associate Professor of History Jethro Hernández Berrones to turn her project into a piece for publication. Her presentation explored the intersections of gender, disability, surgery, and military history to highlight the innovative work in the field of prosthetics of Anna Coleman in the late 1910s.

Associate Professor of History Jethro Hernández Berrones was invited to participate in a workshop of the “Seminar of the social and cultural history of health and disease in Mexico,” held at the Institute of Historical Research, National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). Discussants contributed their chapters for an upcoming volume on hidden histories of health and disease in Mexico in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Professor Hernandez Berrones’ contribution, titled “Recovering the relics of modern medicine in Mexico: Homeopathy, vitalism, and religion, 1853-1912,” examines the associations between heterodox religious and medical systems in the construction of a plural therapeutic market place in modern Mexico.

Associate Professor of History Jethro Hernández Berrones was invited to present his work in the seminar “Itinerante” of History and Historiography of Sciences and Technologies jointly hosted by UNAM, CINVESTAV, and COLMEX. In his talk titled “Homeopathy in the light of biology: The Limits of Medical Science after the Mexican Revolution,” he discussed how MDs used the emerging paradigm of experimental physiology to establish the limits between what counted as legitimate medicine and not in the 1920s, 30s and 40s. Given their professional differences, homeopaths and its detractors adopted and adapted the paradigm to criticize each other´s curriculum and practices. While the different interpretations created a boundary between both types of practitioners, patients and authorities regarded both approaches as scientific and, therefore, susceptible to consumption and support. You can see the entire session (in Spanish) on YouTube or Facebook.

Samantha Alvarado ’22 (Anthropology) presented a paper titled “Challenging Norms: Gender, Obstetrics, and the Gynecological Massage in Mexico in the 1920s,” coauthored with Associate Professor of History Jethro Hernández Berrones at the Southern Association for the History of Science and Medicine 2023 Annual Conference in Atlanta, GA. This project was the culmination of a faculty-student research collaboration with Hernández Berrones, who mentored her through the design of the project, archival work in the summer of 2022 in Mexico City, and the production of the conference paper. Alvarado received multiple compliments for the breadth and depth of her project and even an invitation by the editor of the top-notch blog on the history of medicine, Nursing Clio, to submit her work for online publication.

Associate Professor of History Jethro Hernández Berrones was invited as a lecturer and discussant to the inquiry immersion elective course on Decolonization within the Health Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco. He virtually gave the talk: “Colonial Legacies in the Mexican Pharmaceutical Industry: The Instituto Médico Nacional (1888-1905) and the Exploration of Medicinal Plants” to medical students and guided a discussion about how to dismantle those legacies.