| Research Assistant professor
Oncofertility, Medical Humanities & Bioethics
The history of women’s sexual and reproductive health and reproductive science and medicine, especially how history frames current discussions on these topics.
Sarah Rodriguez attended the University of Iowa for her BA in American Studies, the University of Wisconsin-Madison for her MA in the History of Science and Medicine, and her PhD in Medical Sciences, Preventive and Societal Medicine, from the University of Nebraska Medical Center. She converted part of her dissertation, on the history of female circumcision and clitoridectomy in the United States since the mid-nineteenth century as medical treatments, into an article that appeared in the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences (July 2008). She is currently conducting significant new research while revising her entire dissertation into a book tentatively titled The Errant Organ: Female Sexuality, the Clitoris, and the Medical Indications for Female Circumcision and Clitoridectomy in the United States, 1865-2010. Additionally, she is working on expanding a segment from this dissertation concerning Ohio gynecologist James Burt, who operated on the genitalia of thousands of (largely unknowing) women from the 1960s through the 1980s, into an article as well as, in the future, a separate book. Rodriguez is further writing a separate article on medical ideas about the clitoris and female heterosexuality in the twentieth century. For both her work on Burt and on medical ideas of the clitoris and female heterosexuality, she received a competitive the Sexualities Project Grant from Northwestern University this year.
Rodriguez organized a roundtable and presented on the roundtable her future work, “Embedded and Embodied: A Physician, His Casebook, and the Women Within, 1902 to 1908,” at the most recent Berkshire Conference of Women Historians. The project she spoke about is framed around the casebook of Chicago gynecologist and surgeon, Franklin Martin. Through the use of his casebook, this book project aims to add to our understanding of not only the male doctor’s and female patients’ relationship and their interpretations of women’s bodies, but also to further our understanding of how the casebook shaped the doctor’s and the patients’ individual and collective narratives as well as to examine the casebook itself as an early method of uniform medical record taking.
Rodriguez also recently presented at the American Association for the History of Medicine (AAHM) on her work about Miriam Menkin, who in the 1940s, along with Dr. John Rock, published on the first human in vitro fertilization. Rodriguez received a 2010-2011 Foundation for Women in Medicine Fellowship to do archival work at the Center for the History of Medicine, Archives for Women in Medicine, at Countway Medical Library at Harvard Medical School regarding Menkin’s role in this research.
In addition to her independent research, Rodriguez is also a collaborative scholar. A component of the research she presented at the AAHM in 2010 on early twentieth century ovarian transplantation recently appeared in an article in Perspectives in Biology and Medicine (Summer 2011), an article she co-wrote with bioethicist Lisa Campo-Engelstein. In addition, an article by Rodriguez and Campo-Engelstein, “Two Chicks in a Lab with Eggs,” was recently one of 200 chosen by the Hasting Center Report (May-June 2011) in their call for papers on new issues in bioethics for their 40th anniversary issue. Rodriguez has also recently had co-authored articles in Science and the American Journal of Bioethics.
Rodriguez has also given papers at the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities, and has been asked to speak at the DePaul University College of Law and before the Chicago Area Medical Archivists.
312-503-2887
srodriguez@northwestern.edu
750 N Lake Shore Dr, Room 643N | |
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