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Funded by Charles and Linda Wilson, the Humanities in Medicine program works with the UNMC program each year to bring a speaker to both campuses to speak on humanities topics related to medicine.
"The Dreaded Pox: Sex and Disease in Early Modern London"
Dr. Olivia Weisser
April 9, 2026 • 5:00 p.m. • Great Plains Art Museum, 1155 Q St.
This talk offers a history of London life from 1650-1750 from the point of view of a shameful sexually transmitted disease. A substantial number of Londoners contracted venereal disease, yet we know relatively little about what it was like to live with it. The talk recovers everyday experiences of disease by turning away from medical institutions and learned writing and toward streets, shops, and homes where ordinary patients and healers interacted. In
particular, it looks at how patients shopped for pox cures using addresses printed on over 700 advertisements. There was a substantial market for treating the pox that included healers peddling pills and potions alongside non-medical retailers like bakers and grocers who sold treatments secretly out of their shops -- the leading edge of a vast proprietary drug trade over a century earlier than historians presumed.
Olivia Weisser is Associate Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts Boston. The Dreaded Pox (Cambridge University Press, 2026) is about life in London in the 17th and 18th centuries told from the perspective of venereal disease. Her first book, Ill Composed (Yale University Press, 2015) was a finalist for the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Award and short-listed for a British Medical Association Book Award. Her work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, American Historical Association, and Huntington Library, among others.
2025
Suman Seth is the Marie Underhill Noll Professor of the History of Science and Chair of the Department of Science and Technology Studies. His latest book is Mortality and Measurement: Race-Medicine, Statistics, and the Making of Empire.
2023
Jim Downs, the author of Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine, rethinks the history of epidemiology by uncovering the untold ways that slavery, imperialism, and war created built environments—ships, plantations, and battlefields—that enabled physicians to study the spread of infectious disease.
2022
Janice P. Nimura is a New York Times bestselling author whose book was a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in biography. Her essays and book reviews have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Smithsonian, and other publications. She majored in English at Yale and completed an M.A. in East Asian studies at Columbia University.
2021
Samuel Kelton Roberts, PhD presents a history of race and the current opioid crisis, also stopping to offer thoughts about how harm reduction can and should be infused with racial and economic justice agendas.
2019
Dr. Lara Freidenfelds offered a far-reaching look at the rise of our current childbearing culture from its earliest glimmers in the Revolutionary era to today, with suggestions for realistic and humane expectations. A historian of health, reproduction, and parenting in America, Freidenfelds holds a doctorate in history of science and a bachelor’s degree in social anthropology from Harvard University.
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Dr. Deirdre Cooper Owens moved between southern plantations and northern urban centers to reveal how nineteenth-century American ideas about race, health, and status influenced doctor-patient relationships in sites of healing like slave cabins, medical colleges, and hospitals. She retold the story of the rise of modern gynecology from the perspectives of black enslaved women and Irish immigrant women.
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Nancy Tomes is a Distinguished Professor of History at Stony Brook University, State University of New York (SUNY).
2015
Dr. Mark Vonnegut is the author of several books, including The Eden Express: A Memoir of Insanity (1975) and Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only Moreso (2010).