Steven Palmer

Associate Professor, History
Graduate Faculty

Canada Research Chair in History of International Health

Ph.D. Columbia University, 1990
M.A. Columbia, 1986
B.A. University of British Columbia, 1984

2184 Chrysler Hall North / 207 Assumption
University of Windsor
Windsor, Ontario N9B 3P4
tel. 519-253-3000 ext. 2329

spalmer@uwindsor.ca

Research & Teaching Interests

History of medicine, Cuba, Central America, relations between North and Latin America

Current Projects

I am completing a book on the attempt of creole (Cuban-born) doctors to establish scientific sovereignty in the late Spanish colonial period. This revolved around the creation of an institute for bacteriological and serological research in the 1880s and 1890s.

I hold the Canada Research Chair in the History of International Health.

I am also involved in the Cultures of Health project. Cultures of Health: A Historical Anthology is a website dedicated to making available to students and researchers an eclectic mix of sources to stimulate historical conversations about the cultural dimensions of disease, health and medicine. The site is designed to be especially suited for the presentation and discussion of research “fragments” — a venue for graduate students and senior undergraduates, as well as more established researchers, to present and discuss ideas and sources that are not yet worked into the complex, finished “whole” of paper, article, thesis, or book.

Selected Publications

Launching Global Health: The Caribbean Odyssey of the Rockefeller Foundation, (University of Michigan Press, 2010).

“From the Plantation to the Academy: Slavery and the Production of Cuban Medicine, 1800-1880,” in De Barros, Palmer and Wright, eds., Health and Medicine and in the Caribbean, 1800- 1968. N.Y.: Routledge, 2009: 56-83.

From Popular Medicine to Medical Populism: Doctors, Healers and Public Power in Costa Rica, 1800-1940. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003.

Recent Graduate Students Supervised

Malinda Shaw, "The Reverend George Trosse’s Descent into Hell:
The Medicalization of Demonic Possession in Seventeenth-Century England", Major Paper 2010.

Steven Malone, “Genetic Communities and the Politics of Prevention: Screening for Tay-Sachs Disease and Beta-Thalassemia in Montreal, 1972 to the Present,” Major Paper 2010.

Nadine Blacklock, “Religious Discourse and Cholera in Quebec in the 1830s,” Major Paper 2008.

Nicolina Baccari, “From Medical Evidence of Neglected Duties to the People to People Disease: Anne Keyl, The Women's College Hospital, and the Transformation of VD Treatment, Toronto 1964-1975,” Major Paper 2008.

Melissa Baker, “Cakchiquel ‘Traditional’ Midwives: Harmonizing Biomedicine and Beliefs,” Major Paper 2007.

Courses Taught

PDF (printable) Palmer CV June 2009