Sweet Blood: Diabetes and the Changing Nature of Modern Health - An interdisciplinary historical study of a global health crisis, focused primarily on North America, Sweet Blood traces how today’s diabetes epidemic grows from changing relationships with nature over the past 150 years, and how those relationships create or reinforce social inequities that further drive illness, comorbidities, and social differences. A NLM-NIH grant will provide essential funding to assist remaining research as well as time away from the classroom for a sabbatical to finish the book manuscript. As a scholar-teacher at a selective residential liberal arts college, the twinned gifts of research and leave support are vital to maintain scholarly productivity. My additional training in epidemiology will also allow me to complete a project applicable to public health. Sweet Blood fills a significant gap in our knowledge of diabetes by analyzing how an expanded and historicized understanding of “environment” reveals the origins and persistence of social determinants of ill health. The project draws upon scholarship in four distinct academic fields. First, environmental history, which demonstrates how microbes, animals, and other forces of nature act upon history by reinforcing or limiting human agency. Second, the history of medicine, which connects race, gender, and class to reconsider how illnesses and identities entwine. Third, science and technology studies, which emphasizes how contests over expertise are shaped by engagement with material nature and cultural norms. Finally, social epidemiology, which pools diverse methodologies to evaluate the origins and distribution of disease and health inequities. “Sweet Blood” connects these fields through extensive archival and primary source research to offer an important and timely reinterpretation of diabetes. Sweet Blood thus examines diabetes on several interlocking levels. It is a story of diabetes as material reality, of its increase and spread over the course of the twentieth century. It is a story of the creation of knowledge about diabetes to aid diagnosis, promote prevention, and assist treatment from clinical findings to entire populations. And it is a story of diabetes as a cultural symbol for ideas and practices about health, human behavior, and the environment that often generate inequalities. Sweet Blood blends these stories to reframe diabetes as a series of environmental relationships that change over time and space. This project will result in a book (under contract) with Yale University Press.
