Current Events and Announcements:
2013 Alma Dae Morani Awardee
Florence P. Haseltine, Ph.D., M.D.
Emerita Director, Center for Population Research at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute for Public Health (NICHD) of the National Institutes of Health
Bio
Dr. Haseltine is a board-certified obstetrician and gynecologist, reproductive endocrinologist, biophysicist, journal editor, novelist, inventor and advocate for women’s health. In each of these roles, her work has been substantive, entrepreneurial and game-changing. In the late 1980’s, seeing an underrepresentation of research into conditions affecting women, she founded the Society for Women’s Health Research (SWHR) and made the issue of sex differences research a priority on the nation’s research agenda. She was the founding editor of the Journal of Women’s Health and Gender-Based Medicine. Dr. Haseltine is also the founder of Haseltine Systems, a company that develops products devoted to easing the difficulties of travel for persons with disabilities. She holds several patents for products in this area.
Our Thoughts
FHWIM Alma Dea Morani Award Chairperson Dr. Carol Nadelson notes that, “Dr. Haseltine is an outstanding and tireless advocate for women’s health research in gender differences and women’s career advancement. She embodies the attributes that the Alma Dea Morani Award celebrates.”
It is an honor to have two FHWIM Alma Dea Morani Award recipients on the SWHR Board. Dr. Carol Nadelson was the 2009 recipient.
» More on the Alma Dea Morani Award
2013 Fellowship Awardee
Dr. Ciara Brethnach, Ph.D.
Lecturer in History, Director of the History of Family Project
University of Limerick, Ireland
Bio
Dr. Brethnach has published on Irish socio-economic and health histories in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as well as contributed to numerous research projects and papers. She has a Ph.D. in history from the National University of Ireland and an MA of History from the National University of Ireland.
Her Research
Her research focuses on how the poor experienced, engaged with and negotiated medical services in Ireland and in North America from 1860-1912. It builds on Breathnach’s wider studies on the family unit and the social history of medicine in Ireland and will help to advance her hypothesis that the rural Irish female was slow to medicalize, not only for socio-economic reasons, but also for reasons of personal agency (Breathnach, 2011a, 2011b, 2012a). Using evidence from Boston dispensary and various hospital records this research aims to show that Irish women continued to present as a problematic group long after the ethnic associations with cholera and typhoid outbreaks of earlier decades had dissipated (Kraut, 1994; Rosenberg 1997).
Breathnach’s study examines migratory waves against trends in medical and social modernity processes. Combining pre-existing hypotheses from migration history and history of family, this study argues that because most Irish immigrants came from pre and proto-industrial households, they occupied a ‘transition phase’ of the social development process and were unfamiliar with modern medicine. Displaced by agricultural transition, and changes in marriage and inheritance patterns, Irish female migration came to outnumber male by the 1890s. Even after economic convergence had been reached in terms of real wages the rural Irish female continued to emigrate in significant numbers for economic, social and cultural reasons. These gendered migration trends have been well explored and established by economic and social historians but the history of their medical acculturation has remained largely ignored. By contrast the strain of Irish immigrants on the mental health system has received due consideration. This focused study of records held at the Archives for Women in Medicine at the Countway Library will be weighed against other socio-economic evidence to establish how problematic groups such as the Irish poor affected and shaped medical care in Boston.
Wilma Siegel Named Foundation Board President
The Foundation Board is pleased to announce that Wilma Bulkin Siegel, M.D. has been named President of the Foundation beginning July 1, 2012. Wilma Bulkin Siegel, M.D. graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1958 and received her medical degree in 1962 at Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania. She has had a distinguished career as a prominent oncologist in New York City and is noted as establishing one of the first Hospices in the state of New York, and one of the first to accept AIDS patients.
» More about Dr. Siegel
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