Eric Boyle
I earned my Ph.D. in the History of Science, Technology and Medicine from the University of California Santa Barbara in 2007. Since grad school, I've taught at five universities. I worked as Chief Archivist for the National Museum of Health and Medicine from 2012 to March of 2016 and have since been lucky enough to work as Chief Historian for the Department of Energy, where I am also an archivist and Deputy Federal Preservation Officer. My first book, Quack Medicine: Combating Health Fraud in Twentieth-Century America, was published in 2013. My current work includes a book project tentatively titled In the Belly of the Beast: A History of Complementary and Alternative Medicine at the National Institutes of Health, as well as a history of the Department of Energy.
less
Related Authors
InterestsView All (6)
Uploads
Papers by Eric Boyle
probably never progress or threaten a patient’s life.
For readers of Ilana Lowy’s book, Preventive Strikes: Women, Precancer, and Prophylactic Surgery, these findings come as no surprise. Lowy’s compelling narrative is driven by what the author sees as a bewildering and perplexing relationship between the sophistication of diagnostic technologies (grounded in the latest developments of molecular biology) and the crudeness of modern cancer treatments. As the author also deftly reveals, the diagnosis of cancer itself has long been a complex, uncertain, and ritualized practice, shaped not only by shifts in scientific knowledge and technological advances, but also professional priorities that are historically and geographically contingent. Lowy shows how professional and lay understanding of cancer was and continues to be shaped by the aspiration of identifying and eliminating precancerous lesions, like those identified by mammography. But the author also argues that present-day preventive recommendations risk oversimplifying complex phenomena.
Digging beneath the surface, the book uncovers the history of allegedly fraudulent therapies including pain medications, obesity and asthma cures, gastrointestinal remedies, virility treatments, and panaceas for diseases such as arthritis, asthma, diabetes, and HIV/AIDS. It shows how efforts to combat alleged medical quackery have been connected to broader debates among medical professionals, scientists, legislators, businesses, and consumers, and it exposes the competing professional, economic, and political priorities that have encouraged the drawing of arbitrary, vaguely defined boundaries between good medicine and "quack medicine."