| Jeffrey S. Reznick | Kenneth M. Koyle | Michael North | Michael Sappol |

Michael Sappol, Ph.D.,

Historian

Michael Sappol, Ph.D.,
Historian

• Contact Details
• Professional Experience
• Publications
• Web and Popular Articles

• Contact Details

  Building 38, Room 1E21
  National Library of Medicine
  8600 Rockville Pike
  Bethesda, MD 20894-3819

  sappolm@mail.nih.gov
  Office phone: 301.594.0348
  Fax: 201.402.0872

  
  

  

  
  

• Professional Experience

  
  

  Current Position

  
  

  Historian, History of Medicine Division

  National Library of Medicine
  Bethesda, MD

  Michael Sappol is a historian in the History of Medicine Division of the National Library of Medicine (National Institutes of Health), Bethesda, MD.He received a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University in 1997. He is the author of A Traffic of Dead Bodies (2002) and the editor of several other books, most recently Hidden Treasure (2012). His scholarly work focuses on the cultural history of the body; the history of anatomy and medical representations and displays of the body; the history of alternative and popular medicine; the history of medical film. In 2003, he curated Dream Anatomy, an exhibition on the history of evocative anatomical illustration and display; in 2006 Visible Proofs, an exhibition on the history of forensic medicine; and in 2009 (with Paul Theerman) Rewriting the Book of Nature: Charles Darwin and the Rise of Evolutionary Theory. He currently lives in Washington, DC.

  
  

  

  
  

• Publications

  
  

  Books

  How to Get Modern with Scientific Illustration: Fritz Kahn, Pictured Knowledge and the Visual Rhetoric of Modernity, 1916-1960 (in preparation)

  ed., Hidden Treasure: The National Library of Medicine (New York: Blast Books, 2012)

  ed., with Stephen Rice, A Cultural History of the Human Body in the Age of Empire, 1800-1920(Oxford: Berg Palgrave, 2010)

  Dream Anatomy (washington, DC:GPO, 2006)

  A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomical Dissection and Embodied Social Identity in 19th-century America (Princeton University Press, 2002; pb 2004)

  
  

  Articles

  
  

  with Shelley Wall (artist), “My quest for health” [graphic memoir], in Therese Jones, Delese Wear & Lester D. Friedman, eds., Health and Humanities Reader (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, forthcoming 2013)

  "Bodies in empires, empires in bodies," in Sappol & Rice, eds.,A cultural History of the Human Body in Age of Empire (2010)

  “The odd case of Charles Knowlton: Anatomical performance, medical narrative and identity in antebellum America,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 83 (Fall 2009): 460-98

  with Eva Åhrén, “The strange spaces of the body: Two dialogues,” in Amanda Lagerkvist & André Jansson, eds., Strange Spaces: Explorations in Mediated Obscurity (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009)

  “The foul altar of a dissecting table”: Anatomy, sex and sensationalist fiction in antebellum America,” Transactions & Studies of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, sr. 5, 20 (1998): 65-97

  “Sammy Tubbs and Dr. Hubbs: Anatomical dissection, minstrelsy, and the technology of self-making in postbellum America,” Configurations 4.2 (1996): 131-83

  
  

  

  
  

• Web and Popular Articles

  
  

  “Anti-Bodies” (Visual AIDS Web Gallery, 3-2006)

  “Why the Dead are a Killer Act: The cadaver as smash hit,” Op Ed commentary, Los Angeles Times, 6-14-2005"

  “Visionary anatomies & the great divide,” catalog essay, Visionary Anatomies (Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences, 2004)

  “ ‘Morbid curiosity’: The decline and fall of the popular anatomical museum,” Common-Place 4.2 (1-2004)

  “The anatomical mission to Burma: How the anatomical body became our body,” Science (10-10-2003)