Charles E. Rosenberg

Charles E. Rosenberg is a professor in the History of Science department at Harvard University. He is the author of numerous books on the history of medicine and science, including Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866 (Chicago, 1962, new edition, 1987); The Trial of the Assassin Guiteau. Psychiatry and Law in the Gilded Age (Chicago, 1968); No Other Gods. On Science and American Social Thought (Johns Hopkins, 1976, new and expanded edition, 1997); and The Care of Strangers. He has also co-authored or edited another half-dozen books and is currently at work on a history of conceptions of disease during the past two centuries.

Rosenberg has won several awards for his work, including the William H. Welch Medal of the American Association for the History of Medicine (AAHM), the George Sarton Medal (for lifetime achievement) from the History of Science Society, and fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation and the Guggenheim Foundation. He formerly taught at the University of Pennsylvania, where he advised almost fifty doctoral students and served as chair of both the departments of History and the History & Sociology of Science between 1963 and 2000.

Articles by this Author

What It Was Like To Be Sick In 1884, October/November 1984 | Vol. 35, No. 6

American medicine in a crucial era was at once surprisingly similar and shockingly different from what we know today. You could get aspirin at the drugstore, and anesthesia during surgery. But you could also buy opium over the counter, and the surgery would be more likely to be performed in your kitchen than in a hospital.

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