Deanna Day, a historian, writer and postdoctoral fellow at the Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia, will present the Percy Skuy Lecture April 9 at 6 p.m. in Ford Auditorium, located in the Allen Memorial Medical Library.
Day will present a talk titled “Reinventing the Safe Period: The Contested History of Fertility,” which builds on her University of Pennsylvania dissertation, “98.6: Fevers, Fertility and the Patient Labor of American Medicine.” As a graduate student in 2011, Day came to the Dittrick Medical History Center to delve into the artifact collection and trade catalogs pertaining to clinical thermometry. Her dissertation examined American women’s domestic medical work by following the medical thermometer through more than a century of home use, as taking temperatures at home became a new way of controlling fertility—reinventing the idea of the “safe” period.
To attend the event, RSVP to Jennifer Nieves at jks4@case.edu or call 216.368.3648.