Victoria A. Harden, PhD (Office of NIH History, retired)
November 10, 2026, 7-8:15pm (Eastern)
~ Sylvan E. Stool Memorial Lecture ~
In June 1981, the world was surprised to learn that a new and deadly infectious disease of unknown cause had been recognized after two decades when it seemed that modern medicine had vanquished them with vaccines and antibiotics. By mid 1996—just 15 years later—this disease, now known as HIV/AIDS, had been transformed into a chronic condition that permitted those infected to live mostly normal lives. Such an achievement was unprecedented in medical history. In 2026, we mark the 45th anniversary of the first medical publication about HIV/AIDS. The physicians, scientists, public health officials, activists, and others who addressed the pandemic are aging, and it is appropriate to consider what they did. This talk will look back at these years and also ask what else there is to do to end HIV/AIDS worldwide.
Victoria A. Harden studied at Emory University and the Institute for the History of Medicine of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. As part of the 1986-87 observance of the NIH centennial, Dr. Harden founded and directed the Office of NIH History and the Stetten Museum, which collects and exhibits biomedical research instruments and memorabilia related to the National Institutes of Health. She retired in 2006.
Her books include Inventing the NIH: Federal Biomedical Research Policy, 1887-1937 (1986); Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever: History of a Twentieth-Century Disease (1990); AIDS and the Historian (1991); AIDS and the Public Debate: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (1995); AIDS at 30: A History (2012).
Her many prizes and awards include the Herbert Feis prize for outstanding contributions to public history by the American Historical Association (2006), the Lifetime Achievement Award of the American Association for the History of Medicine (2007), and the Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Roger R. Trask awards of the Society for History in the Federal Government for outstanding contributions to the mission of the Society and to the study of the federal government’s history (2013, 2014). In 2023, the National Institutes of Health created and named an annual lectureship in NIH history in her honor. She lives at the Riderwood Village Retirement Community in Silver Spring, Maryland, where she teaches a course on the history of medicine.
This lecture was endowed in memory of pioneering pediatric otolaryngologist Sylvan Stool. He is usually introduced by Dr. Eugene N. Myers, who became the first full-time academic faculty in the University of Pittsburgh Department of Otolaryngology in 1972. Dr. Myers recruited Dr. Stool, who built up the ENT department at Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh and with Dr. Charles Bluestone literally wrote the book on Pediatric Otolaryngology. You can learn more about Dr. Stool in his own words here.
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