Glasgow History of Medicine Seminar: Professor Nancy Campbell (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, New York)
“Re-discovering Addiction: The U.S. Narcotic Farm and the History of Innovative Public Health Approaches to Drug Research and Treatment”
Date: 28th February, 5.00pm, coffee and biscuits from 4.45pm
Location: Seminar Room, Lilybank House
Professor Campbell’s research focuses on technology as related to healthcare, with recent work on the social significance of legal and illegal drugs to those who govern and use them, produce scientific knowledge about them, and seek to treat drug problems. “How have ideas about drugs and drug addiction changed over time? What do we know about drug addiction, and how do we know it? Why do we have the drug policies that we do?”
Campbell is currently working on the history of overdose prevention; the ethics of LSD research in the US Public Health Service; and the fruitful convergence between neuroscience and addiction research. Her most recent book, co-authored with Elizabeth Ettorre, is titled Gendering Addiction: The Politics of Drug Treatment in a Neurochemical World. This book took up the theme of gender introduced in Campbell’s first book, Using Women: Gender, Drug Policy, and Social Justice (Routledge, 2000), which was about how drug-using women figured in drug policy discourse from the 1910s to the 1990s. Campbell and co-authors JP Olsen and Luke Walden published a visual history of the federal drug treatment hospital in Lexington, Kentucky, titled The Narcotic Farm: The Rise and Fall of America’s First Prison for Drug Addicts (Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2008).