David S. Barnes, Ph.D., Associate Professor
Director, Health & Societies Program
University of Pennsylvania
Department of History and Sociology of Science
303 Claudia Cohen Hall, 249 S. 36th Street
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6304
Telephone: (215) 898-8210
E-mail
David Barnes's website
Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley
B.A. Yale University
Teaching Fields: history of medicine; history of public health; global health policy and disease prevention; history, anthropology, and sociology of health and disease.
Research Interests: history of infectious disease, epidemiology, and public health; the Bacteriological Revolution and its effect on public health; 19th century European (esp. French) social and cultural history; cultural history of bodily knowledge and practices; history of disgust.
David Barnes is a historian of medicine and public health who has taught at Penn since 2002. He received his Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Berkeley in 1992; after a postdoctoral fellowship at U.C. San Francisco, he taught for a year at Emory’s Institute for Liberal Arts and for seven years in the History of Science Department at Harvard. At Penn, he is Associate Professor in the Department of History and Sociology of Science and Director of the interdisciplinary Health and Societies major.
His first book, The Making of a Social Disease: Tuberculosis in Nineteenth-Century France (University of California Press, 1995), explores the social transformations and anxieties which colored and constrained responses to the industrializing world's leading killer. His second book, The Great Stink of Paris and the Nineteenth-Century Struggle against Filth and Germs (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), investigates how scientific developments, political imperatives, and shifting cultural mores combined to reshape perceptions of health, disease, and bodily substances during the Bacteriological Revolution.
David Barnes is currently writing a history of the Lazaretto quarantine station (1801-1893) on the Delaware River outside Philadelphia—the oldest intact quarantine station in the Western Hemisphere. His other ongoing research projects include the politics of international disease control programs in the twentieth century and the history of disgust.
Books
The Great Stink of Paris and the Nineteenth-Century Struggle against Filth and Germs (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006)
The Making of a Social Disease: Tuberculosis in Nineteenth-Century France (University of California Press, 1995)
Other Recent Publications:
"Targeting Patient Zero," in Flurin Condrau and Michael Worboys, eds., The White Plague Revisited: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the History of Tuberculosis (Montreal, QC and Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen's University Press, forthcoming).
“Confronting Sensory Crisis in the Great Stinks of London and Paris,” in William A. Cohen and Ryan Johnson, eds., Filth: Dirt, Disgust, and Modern Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005).
"Scents and Sensibilities: Disgust and the Meanings of Odors in Late Nineteenth-Century Paris," Historical Reflections/Réflexions historiques 28 (2002): 21-49.
"Historical Perspectives on the Etiology of Tuberculosis," Microbes and Infection 2 (2000): 431-440.
David Barnes’s Research in the News:
"Reaching Back for Roots: A Hospital Holds Their Family's Tale, and Part of a Nation's," Philadelphia Inquirer, December 25, 2006
"Commentary: Plea to Save Tinicum's Lazaretto," Philadelphia Inquirer, June 22, 2006
"A Preservation Battle over Immigrant Site," Philadelphia Inquirer, June 21, 2006
"1892 Painting Illustrates Odd Links Among Animals, Art, and Medicine," Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, May 8, 2006
"Ooze and Aahs: Why Tales of Epidemics Catch On," Philadelphia Inquirer, July 3, 2003
"Who's Afraid of the Big, Bad … Whatever It Is? SARS Scarier Than Common Threats; Risk Is a Feeling, Not a Statistic," Toronto Star, May 2, 2003
"Globalization, Economy Also Playing a Role: Understanding the Fear SARS Outbreak Brings," Philadelphia Inquirer, April 18, 2003
"The Uses of Disgust," Harvard University Gazette, April 8, 1999
