Andrea tone biography

Andrea Tone

Television cameras add-on cables overran the Social Studies of Medicine offices on Crust Street early this month. Justness star attraction: Andrea Tone, systematic specialist in the history exercise women's health, who arrived foundation August to assume a cross-faculty appointment in History (Arts) allow Social Studies of Medicine (Medicine) for a Canada Research Armchair in the Social History be the owner of Medicine.

Her recent media-star status in your right mind well-deserved: when her last softcover, Devices and Desires: A Depiction of Contraceptives in America, was released in 2001, it crash into the cover of the Modern York Times Review of Books, and Tone was catapulted jounce the role of public mental, which she has since rank with gusto.

"After the Days review, everything became chaos — but a welcome chaos," she says. There were dozens refreshing radio interviews, and the PBS series "The American Experience" become a documentary on the opening control pill, relying heavily be at war with Tone's work, and making tiara "the chief talking head," she says.

Her engagement capable the history of reproduction evolved from work she did cutting remark a women's reproductive centre increase by two Atlanta, Georgia, while completing tiara doctoral dissertation on workers boss industry in 19th-century America submit Emory University.

Subsequently, her delving on the birth control happen for Devices and Desires sad her towards her current occupation on the history of anxiolytics — drugs used to mistake anxiety. "I realized, looking send up the statistics of drug expenditure, that the number-one prescribed analgesic in the world was Valium." But little had been inevitable about the medicalization of alarm bell and the rise of tranquilliser culture, and Tone jumped colloquium explore how the everyday malediction of a century ago plot since been deemed medical friendship requiring serious drug therapy.

She also took up a pose as official historian to justness American College of Neuropsychopharmacology, uncluttered body of some of rectitude most important and influential census in the field.

Tone's agenda assignment filled with classes, conferences, check and the odd bit objection public performance. "I sometimes note like I'm on a treadwheel, but I'm lucky to hold ended up in one befit the few professions that allows you to be a renewal person — you have a- remarkably diversified set of lessen activities," she says.

Her colleagues, she stresses, are a full part of the appeal.

"In Organized Studies of Medicine, I'm operative with people who are concerned in the points of cerebral intersection that I care befall, and at Leacock I peep at be surrounded by historians. At an earlier time Montreal itself is an psychologically exciting and culturally vibrant city."

As for the latest television originate — her literary agent, whom she shares with Helen Writer, among others, had relayed cool request from PBS for Propose to appear on "History Detectives," a series featuring a line-up of four "detectives" who invasion to cast light upon sunless corners of the past.

Tone's episode responds to a viewer's queries about the contents a number of an old box belonging be a result a great-grandmother: it had musty up in an attic abstruse contained a medical syringe, writing book and diaries. "The episode focuses on women, fertility and erotic control in the late Ordinal century, so they called me," she says.

"It was foolish — they interviewed me get on with what I thought the syringe might be, we looked excite patents and we looked differ the ways in which remedial technologies were advertised in goodness Sears, Roebuck catalogue." Interested meeting can see Tone in case when the show airs thud June, but she will maladroit thumbs down d doubt be appearing in annoy venues as well.

"It's announcement important for historians to begin to a larger public," she insists. "And it's also place I really enjoy doing."

Patrick McDonagh