Tag Archives: meta

History at Work and Play: Thoughts on the AA Archives Workshop

Posted on September 19, 2011 by

Points readers interested in the history of Alcoholics Anonymous will be interested to know that this weekend (22-25 Sept.) is the 15th Annual National AA Archives Workshop– a get-together dedicated to collecting and preserving the history of that fellowship at … Continue reading →

Posted in Trysh Travis | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Reminder: Pub/Street/Meds is Going Fast

Posted on May 10, 2011 by

The window is closing fast for next month’s scintillating Alcohol and Drugs History Society Conference on The Pub, the Street, and the Medicine Cabinet, 24-26 June in Buffalo, New York.  By “window” in this instance we mostly mean “conference hotel … Continue reading →

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Historical Scholarship as a Subordinate Enterprise

Posted on April 4, 2011 by

I was recently speaking with a very prominent psychiatrist about the history and science of various mental illnesses, and he told something along the lines of “what historians can do to help is to explain how diseases came to be … Continue reading →

Posted in Joseph Gabriel, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | 14 Comments

Work in Progress: Between Biological Reductionism and the Social Construction of Addiction

Posted on March 7, 2011 by

I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Randolph Nesse about the evolutionary origins of addiction – Nesse is perhaps the leading expert on the evolutionary basis of disease and immunity, and in 1997 he wrote an influential article on … Continue reading →

Posted in Joseph Gabriel | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

On Moving Beyond “Context”

Posted on February 2, 2011 by

Perhaps it is because I teach in a medical school, rather than a traditional academic history department, but over the past two years I have become increasingly interested in thinking about how historical scholarship can directly contribute to solving current problems. … Continue reading →

Posted in Joseph Gabriel | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment