OSU-CHR Seminar:
Matthew Klingle, Bowdoin College
Sweet Blood: Toward an Environmental History of Diabetes, Chronic Disease, and Race in North America
This paper is part of my larger project, tentatively titled "Sweet Blood: History and the Nature of Diabetes and Chronic Disease in America," in which I trace the environmental history of the diabetes outbreak from its antecedents in the mid-nineteenth century to the present. I track how changes in nutrition, plus other environmental and social factors, may explain the increased prevalence of diabetes mellitus, specifically Type 2, among all Americans, and among certain Americans in particular by the late twentieth century: Native Americans, African Americans, Latinos, and the rural and urban poor.
In this paper, I focus on the work of two pioneering epidemiologists—notably Kelly West of Oklahoma, the putative "father" of modern diabetes epidemiology and a leader in the field of comparative and global DM epidemiology, and Peter Bennett, principal investigator of the Pima Indian studies in western Arizona—to explore how changing conceptions of metabolic disease and ideas about Native American bodies and environment shaped broader biomedical understandings of diabetesetiology, treatment, and prevention for Native Americans and people living with diabetes from all backgrounds.
See the Center for Historical Research website for more information on events.
