Robert L. Martensen, Ph.D. M.D.

Professor,Chair

Recent schlarship by Professor Robert Martensen, who serves as chair of the Department and director of its Clendening Library and Museum of the History of Medicine, has focused on three areas:
1) thought styles among the medical humanities, especially history and bioethics;
2) the development of medical physics and its human subjects research;
3) early modern European medicine. Currently, he is completing a book with the working title of "The Cerebral Body: origins and cultural politics" for Oxford University Press.

Education and Credentials:
BA: Harvard College;
MD: Dartmouth Medical School;
PhD: University of California, San Francisco in History of Health Sciences.
Post-graduate clinical training: San Francisco General Hospital/Department of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco.
Certifed in emergency medicine by American Board of Emergency Medicine.
Papers and book chapters from 1999-present:

1) "The Compulsory Registration of Patients with Tuberculosis: an 1894 debate at the College of Physicians." Trans. & Studies of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, 1999:5:21:149-164.
2) "Thomas Willis and the formation of the Cerebral Body in 17th Century England," in F. Clifford Rose. ed., A Short History of Neurology, (London, U.K.: Butterworth-Heinemann, 1999), pp. 19-35.
3) "The History of Bioethics: an essay review," Journal of History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 2001:56:168-175.

Manuscripts and book chapters in press
-New Dictionary of National Biography--entries on William Croone (1633-1684); Sir Samuel Garth (1661-1719); Clopton Havers (d. 1702); Sir Edmund King (1629-1709); John Radcliffe (1652-1714); Sir Charles Scarburgh (1616-1694); Thomas Wharton (1614-1673); Daniel Whistler (1619-1684); Thomas Willis (1621-1675). Forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

" Hippocrates and the Politics of Medical Knowledge in 17th century England." chapter in David Cantor, ed., Hippocrates in the Modern Era.

with David S. Jones, "Medical physics at the University of California, 1937-1962," in Jordan Goodman, Lara Marks (eds) Using Bodies: human experimentation in the twentieth century. Forthcoming in 2002 from Johns Hopkins University Press.

"Thought styles among the medical humanities: past, present, and near-term future," in Ron Carson, Chester Burns, Harold Vanderpool, Tom Cole, editors, The Medical Humanities. Forthcoming in 2002 from University Publishing Group.

Book Reviews 1999-present:

Thomas Wharton's Adenographia. Edited Freer and Cuningham. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1996. Reviewed in Bulletin of the History of Medicine, winter, 1999.

Infection and Inequalities, Farmer, Paul. Berkeley: University of California Press; Reviewed in New England Journal of Medicine, 5/4/2000.

The Great Plague, Porter, Stephen. Gloucestershire: Sutton; 1999. Reviewed in Medical History, 2001:45 (3):431-433.

Philosophy and Memory Traces: Descartes to Connectionism, Sutton, John. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge U. Press. Reviewed in Early Science and Medicine, 2000:3.

Selected Presentations 1999-present:

February 18, 1999: "Early Modern European Medical Illustration and the 'Cerebral Body', 13th annual DeBartolo Conference, "Revolutions in Print", University of South Florida, Tampa.

September 17, 1999: "What Makes Women Hysterical? an historical perspective," First International Joint Congress of the European Association for the History of Psychiatry, the International Society for the History of Neurosciences, and European History of Neurology Club, Lausanne, Switzerland.

April 22, 1999: "Cancer & Women: an historical perspective," Mead-Swing Lecture, Department of History, Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio.

July 1, 1999: 6th Biennial Conference of the Australian Society of the History of Medicine, Inc., Sydney Australia, "Managing Medical Uncertainty: 100 Years Ago and Today."

October 23, 1999: "Presence, Proportion, Wonder: an historical perspective on themes in Western perception ," lecture in symposium "The Garden of Our Perceptions" at the Huntington Gardens, Library, & Museum, San Marino, California.

July 1-8, 2000: Faculty member of International School of Biomedical Science, Annecy, France. "Understanding Cancer: Historical Perspectives," sponsored by Institute Louis Jeantet/University of Geneva; Foundation Marcel Mérieux; Wellcome Institute, London.

September 23, 2000: "Mind, Brain, and Culture in Early Modern England," annual meeting of International Society of Intellectual History, U. of Chicago.

Robert Martensen

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