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American Association for the History of Medicine

Call for Papers, 2003 Annual Meeting

The American Association for the History of Medicine invites submissions on any area of medical history for its 76th annual meeting, to be held in Boston, Massachusetts, 1-4 May 2003. The Association welcomes papers on topics related to the history of health and healing; of medical ideas, practices, and institutions; and of illness, disease, and public health, from all eras and regions of the world. In addition to single-paper proposals, the program committee welcomes proposals for sessions and luncheon workshops; individual papers for those sessions will be judged on their own merits.

All papers must represent original work not already published or in press. Because the Bulletin of the History of Medicine is the official journal of the AAHM, the Association encourages speakers to make their manuscripts available for consideration by the Bulletin.

Please send six copies of a one-page abstract (350 words maximum) to co-chair John M. Eyler, Ph.D., Program in the History of Medicine, 511 Diehl Hall, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455. Inquiries can be directed to Professor Eyler or to co-chair Margaret Humphreys, M.D., Ph.D., Box 90719, Department of History, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708. Abstracts should clearly state findings and conclusions as well as research questions. They should also provide the following information on the same sheet: name, preferred mailing address, work and home telephone numbers, e-mail address, present institutional affiliation, and academic degrees. Abstracts must be received by 15 September 2002. E-mail or faxed proposals will not be accepted.

In Memoriam

Gerald Lynn Geison (1943-2001)

The death of Gerald Geison from heart disease at Princeton early in July 2001 was a grievous loss to his family, his friends, and his students. It removed, tragically early, a most accomplished, reflective, and exact historian of medicine and science.

A native of the Midwest prairies, Geison was born on 26 March 1943 at Savanna, a small town in western Illinois on the bank of the Mississippi River. In high school he was a star basketball player and on graduation in 1961 was valedictorian for his class. That autumn he entered Beloit College, where Professor Joseph Barrell aroused his interest in the history of science. In 1965 he entered the graduate program in History of Science and Medicine at Yale. A shy, intense student, he soon revealed an original and penetrating mind. In 1967 his first published article appeared in Isis, a critical examination of the evidence that Conon of Samos introduced Babylonian astronomical data to Greece. This was followed in 1969 by his historical analysis, remarkable for its maturity and decisive force, of the concept of protoplasm. Geison's work on protoplasm led him to contribute to the Dictionary of Scientific Biography articles on four scientists who had been active in developing the concept of protoplasm: Lionel Smith Beale, Alexander Braun, Ferdinand Cohn, and Felix Dujardin. The articles were the first of some twenty that he would ultimately write for the D.S.B. Each was based on extensive original research, and together they constitute a major historical contribution. Among the initial four articles, that on Ferdinand Cohn in particular was a masterpiece, treating in depth Cohn's fundamental contributions to the biology of bacteria.

In 1967 Geison married Lynne Tryon of Fairfield, Connecticut. They had two sons: Christopher, born in 1973, and Andrew, born in 1976. The marriage ended later in divorce.

In 1969 Geison came to the University of Minnesota as a research fellow in the History of Medicine and during the following year completed his dissertation on Michael Foster, for which Yale awarded him a Ph.D. in 1970. The same year he was appointed an assistant professor of history at Princeton University. During the summer of 1970, before going to Princeton, he visited England to work in archives. At the Wellcome Institute he met a Canadian Rhodes Scholar, Richard French, whose research on the English antivivisection movement...