History at UCSF makes the news!

In case you have missed it, the Department of Anthropology, History and Social Medicine was featured on the San Francisco Chronicle yesterday, in relation to a correction to Rick Santorum's erroneous statement that "seven or eight of the California system of universities — don’t even teach an American history courses". As reported by the San Francisco Chronicle, Santorum dismissed higher education on Monday while campaigning in Wisconsin, citing California’s university system as an example of “how bad it’s gotten in this country". The article appeared yesterday on the SF Chronicle corrected Santorum's statement, and noted that all the campuses, both within the University of California system and the California State University system, do offer American history courses. In particular, UCSF and the DAHSM were explicitly referred to -and the DAHSM linked to- as offering courses in history of American medicine. While it is not precise to say, as the SF Chronicle reports, that the DAHSM offers a PhD program in 'Anthropology, History and Social Medicine' - that is the name of the Department, which offers a PhD program in Medical Anthropology and a PhD program in History of Medicine and the Health Sciences, both in coordination with UC Berkeley - we are thankful anyway to Rick Santorum for this free and unsoliticited publicity to our department. The graduate program in History of Medicine and the Health Sciences at DAHSM trains students to examine the history of health sciences (medicine, nursing, pharmacy, public health, alternative healing, and biomedical research) from a variety of critical approaches. In addition, the physical and intellectual location of this history program within one of the nation's leading medical schools offers students the opportunity to advance the historical analysis and understanding of biomedical sciences, clinical practices, and health policies from an insider vantage point. More information on the content of the PhD program in History of Medicine and the Health Sciences can be found here.