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 Robert Martensen, M.D., Ph.D.
Chair
Robert Martensen teaches and writes about cultural and historical dimensions of health, disease, and health care. He joined The Brody School of Medicine in July 2006 as Professor and Chair of the Department of Medical Humanities. Originally trained in emergency medicine, in mid-career he pursued graduate study of the history of medicine. Currently, he is finishing a book, Between Life and Death: Navigating Illness in Today’s America, that explores how patients and doctors are coping with illness in a high-tech era. The book’s chapters mix stories based on some of his 75,000 patients with descriptions of what goes on ‘behind the scenes’ in hospital boardrooms and other centers of medical power.
In 2004 he published The Brain Takes Shape: An Early History (Oxford), which explores European debates during the 16th and 17th centuries about what constituted human identity—spirit, passion, and the humors or the cerebral cortex, rationality, and the body’s solid organs. The debates flowed across philosophy, politics, and religion, and his book interweaves their various strands in the past before speculating on their persistence into the present. His next book, American ERs: From Hospital Afterthought to Social Necessity and Cultural Icon (Oxford), will use patient and doctor experiences and cultural trends from the 1950s onward to explore how and why over 100 million Americans now make annual use of our ERs. Before joining Brody, Dr. Martensen earned degrees from Harvard (BA), Dartmouth (MD), and the University of California, San Francisco (PhD), and has taught a wide variety of students in medicine and history at Harvard, the University of Kansas, and Tulane. e-mail: martensenr@ecu.edu | |
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