Bert Hansen
Bert Hansen was named Professor Emeritus in 2015 after teaching a variety of courses in the History Department since the early 1990s. His favorite course was a one-semester introduction to three centuries of American history. He received a Baruch College Presidential Excellence Award for Distinguished Research in 2010 at the commencement in Madison Square Garden. Before joining the History Department, he had worked in the College’s President’s Office as executive assistant to Matthew Goldstein, where he played a role in securing early naming gifts for the Mishkin Gallery, the Newman Library, and the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences.
Hansen holds degrees in chemistry from Columbia and in history of science from Princeton. Much of his scholarly writings examined science and medicine in public culture. After starting as a medievalist, he redirected his research to the nineteenth century, beginning with the medical understanding of childbirth at the time just before general medical knowledge was transformed into a highly technical and esoteric specialization: “Medical Education in New York City in 1866-1867: A Student’s Notebook of Professor Budd’s Lectures on Obstetrics,” New York State Journal of Medicine (August and September 1985).
An active dialogue between doctors and their patients was the subject of “American Physicians’ ‘Discovery’ of Homosexuals, 1880-1900: A New Diagnosis in a Changing Society,” in Framing Disease: Studies in Cultural History edited by Charles E. Rosenberg and Janet L. Golden (1992).
For the American Journal of Public Health (November 1997), he examined a non-verbal dialogue in “The Image and Advocacy of Public Health in American Caricature and Cartoons from 1860 to 1900.” Later in the same journal, he published “Public Careers and Private Sexuality: Some Gay and Lesbian Lives in the History of Medicine and Public Health,” AJPH (January 2002).
“America’s First Medical Breakthrough: How Popular Excitement about a French Rabies Cure in 1885 Raised New Expectations of Medical Progress” was in the American Historical Review (April 1998). The narrative was extended in “New Images of a New Medicine: Visual Evidence for Widespread Popularity of Therapeutic Discoveries in America after 1885,”Bulletin of the History of Medicine (December 1999).
Hansen examined images of medicine in several other popular media of the mid-twentieth century with “Medical History for the Masses: How American Comic Books Celebrated Heroes of Medicine in the 1940s,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine (Spring 2004); “True-Adventure Comic Books and American Popular Culture in the 1940s: An Annotated Research Bibliography of the Medical Heroes,” International Journal of Comic Art (Spring 2004); “Medical History’s Moment in Art Photography (1920 to 1950): How Lejaren à Hiller and Valentino Sarra Created a Fashion for Scenes of Early Surgery,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences (October 2017); “Medical History on the Silver Screen: Hollywood’s Ten-Minute Films about Medical Heroes,” Hektoen International: A Journal of Medical Humanities (2018); and “Medical History as Fine Art in American Mural Painting of the 1930s,” Canadian Bulletin of Medical History (Spring 2019).
Throughout his career, he sought wider audiences for his historical analyses. “The Complementarity of Magic and Science” was published in a general magazine for scientists in all fields, American Scientist (1986). Later it was reprinted as a model of expository prose in a college textbook, Good Writing: A Guide and Sourcebook for Writing Across the Curriculum by Linda Simon (St. Martin’s Press, 1988). His article on obstetrics in the 1860s was honored with the Laurance D. Redway Award For Excellence in Medical Writing. His study of the first stage in the medicalization of homosexuality was included in an anthology of readings in medical history used in college and medical school courses, Sickness and Health in America edited by Judith Walzer Leavitt and Ronald L. Numbers, 3rd ed. (Wisconsin, 1997). “America’s First Medical Breakthrough” was included in another teaching anthology, Major Problems in the History of American Medicine and Public Health: Documents and Essays edited by John Harley Warner and Janet A. Tighe (Houghton Mifflin, 2001).
His second book, Picturing Medical Progress from Pasteur to Polio (Rutgers University Press, 2009) was reviewed in the New York Times and the Journal of the American Medical Association and honored with two national awards: the 2010 Ray and Pat Browne Award of the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association and selection by the American Library Association for its “Best of the Best from the University Presses for Public and Secondary School Libraries.”
Recently, with a long-postponed return to European history, Hansen’s scholarship expanded from the American story of Pasteur’s rabies breakthrough to the un-examined role of art in Pasteur’s own life and career. A comprehensive study appeared in Annals of Science (2021), “Pasteur’s Lifelong Engagement with the Fine Arts: Uncovering a Scientist’s Passion and Personality.” An earlier study was centered on one artist and co-authored with a former student: Richard E. Weisberg and Bert Hansen, “Collaboration of Art and Science in Albert Edelfelt’s Portrait of Louis Pasteur: The Making of an Enduring Medical Icon,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine (2015).
His research, writing, and lecturing have continued in retirement. Alongside his scholarship, he has donated extensive historical prints and artifacts to libraries and archives. Donations have included scientific instruments and printed materials to the Science History Institute, audio-visual materials to the National Library of Medicine, and early comic books to Columbia University, Fordham University, Michigan State University, and the Yale School of Medicine. Yale’s Cushing/Whitney Medical Library is receiving the largest group of materials, thousands of antique prints illustrating medical history, designated as Ms. Coll. 67. Additionally his personal archive consisting of correspondence, records of organizations, and documents from his work as a gay movement activist first in 1970s and then in the 1980s AIDS struggles is being donated to Yale University for their collection of gay and lesbian lives being curated in the division of Manuscripts and Archives, as Ms. Coll. 2042.