Courtney E. Thompson – författare

Offers reflections, provocative questions, and practical strategies for ethical, responsible approaches to health history.In Do Less Harm, editors Courtney E. Thompson and Kylie M. Smith bring together a group of leading historians and scholars to confront one of the most pressing questions in health history: How can we ethically approach stories of medicine and health without perpetuating harm? This thought-provoking collection invites readers into a crucial conversation about the responsibilities of historians when documenting the past. Through carefully curated essays, the contributors explore the ethical dilemmas that arise in researching, teaching, and writing about the history of health care. From patient privacy to the politics of archives, the essays cover how health histories have often overlooked, misunderstood, or misrepresented the people and communities most affected by medical practices. The contributors challenge the assumptions of the field, offering a more thoughtful approach to historical research—one that emphasizes empathy, accountability, and inclusivity. The book raises provocative questions and proposes practical strategies for historians and scholars to do less harm in their work and is organized around key themes such as research, teaching, writing, and public engagement, making it an indispensable resource for anyone working in the history of health care, ethics, or the health humanities. With its engaging style and accessible insights, Do Less Harm offers a fresh and timely perspective for academics, students, and readers interested in the ethical challenges of representing the past.

Finalist for the 2022 Cheiron Book Prize An Organ of Murder explores the origins of both popular and elite theories of criminality in the nineteenth-century United States, focusing in particular on the influence of phrenology. In the United States, phrenology shaped the production of medico-legal knowledge around crime, the treatment of the criminal within prisons and in public discourse, and sociocultural expectations about the causes of crime. The criminal was phrenology's ideal research and demonstration subject, and the courtroom and the prison were essential spaces for the staging of scientific expertise. In particular, phrenology constructed ways of looking as well as a language for identifying, understanding, and analyzing criminals and their actions. This work traces the long-lasting influence of phrenological visual culture and language in American culture, law, and medicine, as well as the practical uses of phrenology in courts, prisons, and daily life.