Gretchen Long

In residence Academic Year 2007-2008

Assistant Professor of History

Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts

Address: 104 Mt. Auburn Street, Floor 3R

Telephone:  617.384.8349

Email: glong@williams.edu

Biography

Gretchen Long is an Assistant Professor of History at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, where she teaches courses in African American History, American Women’s History, and American Medical History. She received her B.A. from Wesleyan University in 1989 and her Ph.D. in History from the University of Chicago in 2004. Professor Long has received fellowships and funding from the Mellon Foundation and the Newberry Library in Chicago. Her current research interests center around the role of medical practice in African American History and she is particularly interested in African Americans’ experiences, both as patients and caregivers, from the Civil War through the early years of the twentieth century. During her tenure at the Du Bois Institute, she will be working on her book project entitled Doctoring Freedom: The Politics of African American Medical Care, 1840-1910.

Project

“Doctoring Freedom: The Politics of African American Medical Care, 1840-1910”

Throughout the Civil War, Reconstruction, and into the early decades of the twentieth century, the medical condition of black people was problematic on several levels. Ex-slaves suffered disproportionately from malnutrition, chronic diseases, and acute illnesses. In the expressed concerns of federal officials, apologists for slavery, and - intriguingly - black people themselves, medical care, health, and illness were intertwined with conceptions of citizenship, freedom, and patriotism. It is the role of medical practice in the formation of specific ideas about African American citizenship that my current book project investigates. The project departs from previous work on black medical care during slavery and the Emancipation era. The focus of much prior work has been the nature of the diseases and care that slaves and freed people received, especially as compared with the experiences of white people. The aim is not a quantitative analysis of African American medical care, nor a narrative of the diseases that African Americans fell prey to, but rather, a cultural and historical exploration of the way medical practice, health, and illness fit into nineteenth-century American ideas about freedom and race.