Todd L. Savitt is an historian of medicine. He received his bachelor's degree from Colgate University (1965) and his M.A. (1970) and Ph.D. (1975) in history from the University of Virginia. After teaching history of medicine and medical humanities at the University of Florida College of Medicine from 1976 to 1982 he joined the faculty of the Department of Medical Humanities at East Carolina University School of Medicine, where he presently teaches history and medical ethics.

His primary research interests are African-American medical history and medical history of the American West and South. He has written or co-edited four books (including Medicine and Slavery: The Diseases and Health Care of Blacks in Ante Bellum Virginia and Disease and Distinctiveness in the American South) and a number of articles on such topics as the history of sickle-cell anemia, sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), use of African Americans for medical experimentation, the entry of black physicians into the American medical profession, and early African-American medical schools. He was visiting professor of history at the University of Montana and St. Patrick Hospital in Missoula in 1994 and recently completed an article on the early history of that hospital.

In 1988, Savitt organized and continues to coordinate ECU's medical readers theater program, taking medical student readers into local communities to perform stories about medicine and hold discussions about the stories with the audience. He chairs the History of Medicine Grants Panel for the National Institutes of Health and serves as Secretary/Treasurer of the American Association for the History of Medicine.

Savitt was guest curator of an exhibit at the Virginia Historical Society in Richmond entitled "Fevers, Agues, and Cures: Medical Life in Old Virginia" and historical consultant for the current exhibit at the North Carolina Museum of History, "Health and Healing Cultures in North Carolina." As a consultant to the Medical College of Georgia, he wrote the historical justification on a successful application to the National Park Service to designate the antebellum MCG building a National Historic Landmark.

He lectures and does medical readers theater performances and discussions nationally.

e-mail: savittT@ecu.edu