Janet Tighe, Ph.D.
University of Pennsylvania
History & Sociology of Science
121 Claudia Cohen Hall, 249 S. 36th Street
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6304
Telephone: (215) 898-6341
E-mail
Dean of Freshman and Director of Academic Advising, College of Arts and Sciences
Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania
B.A., The Johns Hopkins University
Janet Tighe studied history and literature at Johns Hopkins and received a doctorate in American Civilization from Penn. Her research and teaching focuses on modern America's cultural investment in scientific medicine, and its interaction with, among others, the law and capitalism. She has worked in several contemporary policy institutes, exploring the development of forensic psychiatry and the insanity defense, the expanding role of the medical expert, and the evolution of medical education and accreditation institutions. A growing interest in medical schools and the role they have played in the American medical profession's expansion of social authority led to her current book project, which has the working title A "Key of Gold": Science, Money, and the Public Good in an American Medical School. The manuscript uses the history of a single medical school to explore the changing role of academic medical centers in the urban landscape.
Research Interests
- American medical profession's negotiations for social and cultural authority, with a special interest in medical-legal interactions
- Development of medical education and training programs in the twentieth century
- Social history of mental illness, particularly the development of forensic psychiatry in the United States
- Traditions of public health provision in the United States
- Policing and accreditation mechanisms for American healers
Selected Publications
Major Problems in the History of American Medicine and Public Health, a reader co-edited with John H. Warner (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Press, 2000).
"The Legal Art of Psychiatric Diagnosis: Searching for Reliability." in Framing Disease, eds. Charles Rosenberg and Janet Golden (Rutgers University Press, 1992).
"Never Knowing One's Place: Temple University School of Medicine and the American Medical Education Hierarchy."Transactions and Studies of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, vol. 12 (Sept. 1990), pp. 311-334.
"The New York Medico-Legal Society: Legitimating An Unstable Union," The International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, vol. 9 (1986), pp. 231-243.
"'Be It Ever So Little': Reforming the Insanity Defense in the Progressive Era." Bulletin of the History of Medicine, vol. 57 (Fall 1983), pp. 397-411.
"Francis Wharton and the Nineteenth Century Insanity Defense: The Origins of a Reform Tradition." American Journal, vol. 27 (Summer 1983), pp. 223-253.
