In our newest series, Getting to Know the Center, we will be highlighting some of the incredible people, projects, and resources in Countway's Center for the History of Medicine.
First up is the Center's dedicated director, Scott Harris Podolsky, MD!
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Scott Podolsky fell in love with the Countway Library long before he became Director of the Center for the History of Medicine in 2006. “I came down to level L2 in the spring of 1992, during my junior year as an undergraduate history and science concentrator, and it was a jaw-dropping moment.” As he remained at Harvard for medical school, residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a twenty-four-year career in primary care at MGH, and his ongoing faculty role in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, Scott was continually connecting the past to the present. As a practicing clinician, he especially wondered about the forces promoting or resisting therapeutic change, the evolving criteria for considering what “works” in medicine, and the relative roles of education and regulation in promoting a “rational” therapeutics. Embedded within HMS and the Longwood Campus, he considered the legacies and complexities of the schools’ own unique histories, from the global impact of their famous faculty to the telling evolution of their academic departments to their institutional histories with respect to diversity and inclusion. And long situated within the Countway Library, he has become increasingly focused on the history of medical journals themselves, and their relationship to the identity and practices of the medical profession in the United States for more than two centuries.
This has all been made possible not only by the remarkable resources at the Countway – its journals, books, archives, manuscripts, and material objects – but by the world-class expertise of its staff, who work with students, staff, and faculty here at Harvard, and with researchers from around the globe. And one of Scott’s favorite roles is in connecting such students, staff, faculty, and researchers to the resources and Countway experts he still marvels at as deeply as when he first showed up here over three decades ago. So if you’d like to discuss how to frame and research your own historical questions – whether for publication, educational purposes, or for personal interest – please email Scott any time at scott_podolsky@hms.harvard.edu. It’s quite easy for him to be enthusiastic in this role, in such a rich environment among so many wonderful and curious people.