Gina Feldberg: A Brief Intellectual Biography

Gina Feldberg (1956–2010) had no intention of becoming a medical historian. She was born in Calcutta (now Kolkata), India, and grew up variously in London, New York, Rio de Janeiro, and Miami before heading to Boston for university. Perhaps because her childhood was so peripatetic, Gina forged close relationships with her extended family, especially female cousins and aunts, almost all of whom were STEM-worthy – physicians, engineers, lab scientists, and mathematicians – long before the acronym was coined. Unsurprisingly, Gina simply assumed that she, too, would pursue the sciences as an undergraduate major (biology, as it turns out) and that she would apply to medical school thereafter. This is where things went awry.

At the time she was an undergraduate, Harvard had a program that groomed a small number of promising students for medical school by fast-tracking them into a cluster of first-year courses at Harvard Med during their senior year. Gina was one of those chosen to participate in the program, as a result of which she clambered several times a week onto the bus that shuttled between Harvard Yard and the Harvard Medical School, secure in the belief that if she did well she would soon find herself a full-fledged doctor in training. But that is not how it turned out. In later years, Gina loved to tell the story of a fateful meeting with her med school professor–mentor that took place midway through her senior year. The purpose of the meeting was to review her progress and evaluate her performance as a proto-Harvard Med student. In Gina's retelling, the conversation went something like this: "You're doing very well in your coursework – even better than we might have expected," the professor began. "But I'm afraid our view is that you are just not cut out to be a doctor. You see, you insist on taking every question back to first principles. That is laudable, but the problem is that by the time you get there your patients will be dead. We think it might be better for you to find an academic subject that is more open to asking the question 'Why?' all the time." Thus ended her career as a physician.

It did not take long for Gina to recover from this setback; nor did it take long for her to find a new home for her inquisitive, why-seeking mind in Harvard's Department of the History of Science. Her transition was smoother than one might expect for two reasons. The first is that, unlike the rigid pre-med course regime that handcuffs most Canadian students, the American liberal arts tradition encourages breadth in its pre-med students – at least for those who care to seize it. As a result, Gina already had several history and other humanities courses under her belt when it came time to abandon the pre-med track, which made the transition considerably easier. (Her favourite was a memorable course in English history given by John Clive, whose account of mercantilism turned up from time to time in Gina's later writings.) The second factor that contributed to a smooth transition was the relationship she built with Professor Barbara Rosenkrantz. Professor Rosenkrantz was the "Master" (now called Dean) of Currier House, the residential dormitory in which Gina lived for three years at Harvard/Radcliffe. Thanks to their almost daily contact, Barbara became a charismatic, if sometimes mercurial, mentor who opened up a whole new world of academic possibilities, including, especially, a rigorous introduction to the history of medicine. I think it fair to say that no one influenced Gina more deeply than Barbara Rosenkrantz, especially through her 1972 book Public Health and the State.¹ And I think it fair to say, as well, that without Barbara's course on the Great White Plague, Gina would not have chosen to write her dissertation on tuberculosis.

Gina's interest in the specifically Canadian history of medicine was no less accidental. She and I met across a crowded dining hall at the Harvard dorm in which we both served as graduate student "tutors." As...