We are delighted to announce our 42nd speaker series. NEW THIS YEAR: all lectures take place at 7pm Eastern Time. This will make it easier for folks who are joining after work or from more western time zones. The lectures are still free and open to the public via Zoom. Watch this space, join our email list, or check out our Facebook page to get the link.
C.F. Reynolds Medical History Society
Pittsburgh-based medical history and humanities organization that hosts free public lectures
Sunday, August 3, 2025
2025-2026 Lecture Series
Monday, March 3, 2025
The Legacy of Infant Surgery without Anesthesia: Implications for Today
In her memoir, Autobiography of a Sea Creature: Healing the Trauma of Infant Surgery (University of California Health Humanities Press, 2023), Wendy Patrice Williams shares her story of healing from PTSD that resulted from a stomach surgery at one-month old. She reveals her discovery that pre-1987, it was standard practice that infants needing surgery were not given anesthesia or pain control. Wendy blogs at Healing Infant Trauma and appears in the film Cutdown: Infant Surgery without Anesthesia, produced by Roey Shmool and free to watch at the link. Wendy earned a BA in English and an MFA in Creative Writing at Mills College and taught English at the College of Alameda and Folsom Lake College. She also studied biological sciences at Barnard College and marine science at the University of Miami. More information is available on her author page.
The C.F. Reynolds Medical History Society thanks its dues-paying members and the University of Pittsburgh Center for Bioethics and Health Law for its support of the continuing relevance of medical history in our world.
Tuesday, January 28, 2025
Black Infant Mortality and the American Roots of a Health Inequality
Join Dr. Muigai as she traces the origins of one of the most enduring health disparities in the nation: the racial gap in infant survival. Drawing on a range of archival materials spanning the 19th and 20th centuries, this talk explores the ways Black families, health care practitioners, and government officials have addressed the health and survival of Black mothers and their babies. The talk will conclude by reflecting on the legacy of these local and nationwide efforts in the ongoing struggle to improve birth equity.
A historian of medicine and public health, Dr. Muigai is an assistant professor at Brandeis University. Her research examines the racial, social, and ethical dimensions of health and health care in America across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is a Class of 2025 Fellow in the Greenwall Foundation’s Faculty Scholars Program in Bioethics and former History Fellow at the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. Currently she is completing a book-length history of Black infant mortality, forthcoming with Harvard University Press, and researching African American views on trust in health care. She earned her Ph.D. from Princeton University and A.B. from Harvard University.
Saturday, January 11, 2025
History of Engineering Public Health
Monday, October 7, 2024
Commemorating the 100th Anniversary of the 1st Exchange Transfusion for Icterus Gravis Neonatorum
The C.F. Reynolds Medical History Society has invited Dr. Jon F. Watchko, MD, Professor Emeritus in the Division of Newborn Medicine in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine to present a lecture commemorating the 100th anniversary of the first exchange transfusion for severe neonatal jaundice. He will cover the groundbreaking work of Alfred P. Hart and L. Bruce Robertson at The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto.
Mark your calendars for Tuesday, November 19, 2024, from 7-8pm, via Zoom. Zoom link: https://ccac.zoom.us/j/
Exchange transfusion (ET) is a procedure that couples alternating blood removal (exsanguination) with blood infusion (transfusion) to accomplish its beneficial effect. ET has been a mainstay of treating hazardous neonatal hyperbilirubinemia (severe jaundice) for a 100 years dating back to Alfred P. Hart’s seminal use of the procedure in a newborn with familial icterus gravis neonatorum at the Hospital for Sick Children Toronto in 1924. Its novel application by Hart at that time and at the Hospital for Sick Children was no accident. The history of the development of ET as a viable treatment intervention and its original application to neonatal hyperbilirubinemia by Hart in 1924 is commemorated in this C.F. Reynolds Medical History Society presentation.
Dr. Watchko has a keen interest in the pathobiology of bilirubin-induced brain injury and clinical strategies to prevent kernicterus. His early work focused on unconjugated bilirubin brain uptake and clearance, determination of in vivo neurotoxic central nervous system bilirubin thresholds in the Gunn rat model of acute bilirubin encephalopathy (ABE) and in human neonates with kernicterus, pharmacologic neuroprotection against ABE, and bilirubin-induced cerebellar hypoplasia. More recently he has conducted clinical studies on improving the identification of infants at risk for significant hyperbilirubinemia and bilirubin neurotoxicity. Dr. Watchko is recognized as a world authority on neonatal jaundice, authored more than 200 academic papers, chapters and reviews, and co-edited two books, Neonatal Jaundice (2000) and Care of the Jaundiced Neonate (2012). He serves on the American Academy of Pediatrics National Hyperbilirubinemia Clinical Practice Subcommittee and is a member of the Society for Pediatric Research, the American Pediatric Society, and the Perinatal Research Society.
Image credit: Exchange Transfusion ~ early 1950s. Peter Dunn. Arch Dis Child 1993;69:95-96.
The C.F. Reynolds Medical History Society thanks its dues-paying members and the University of Pittsburgh Center for Bioethics and Health Law for its support of the continuing relevance of medical history in our world.