Participant Info

First Name
Courtney E.
Last Name
Thompson
Country
United States
State
MS Mississippi
Affiliation
Mississippi State University
Website URL
Keywords
History of medicine, history of science, visual culture, phrenology, history of emotions, history of women, gender, and sexuality, precocity
Availability
Media Contact
Additional Contact Information
PhD
PhD

Personal Info

Photo
About Me

Courtney E. Thompson is an associate professor of the history of science and medicine and U.S. women’s and gender history at Mississippi State University. She received her Ph.D. in History at Yale in 2015 through the Program for the History of Science and Medicine. She is currently the Book Review Editor for The Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences.

Her first book, An Organ of Murder: Crime, Violence, and Phrenology in Nineteenth-Century America, was published in 2021 by Rutgers University Press. Her current research projects focus on affect and identity in the doctor-patient relationship in the late-nineteenth-century United States and precocity and childhood development in nineteenth-century medicine and culture.

I am also the Book Review Editor for the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences. Please be in touch if you are interested in reviewing for us!

Recent Publications

An Organ of Murder: Crime, Violence, and Phrenology in Nineteenth-Century America (Rutgers University Press, 2021).

“Danger, Disability, and Double Age: Precocity and the Misfit Bodymind in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 15, no. 3 (Fall 2022): 376-386.

“Beyond Imperturbability: The Nineteenth-Century Medical Casebook as Affective Genre,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 96, no. 2 (June 2022): 182-210. DOI: 10.1353/bhm.2022.0021

“‘Written of by Novelists’: Scripting and Managing Emotions in Nineteenth-Century Medical Manuscripts,” Medical Humanities (preprint: Nov. 2021). DOI: 10.1136/medhum-2020-012116

“Finding Deborah: Centering Patients and Placing Emotion in the History of Disease,” Isis 111, no. 4 (Dec. 2020): 826-829. DOI: 10.1086/712236

“A Propensity to Murder: Phrenology in Antebellum Medico-Legal Theory and Practice,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 74, no. 4 (October 2019): 416-439. DOI: 10.1093/jhmas/jrz055

“Physogs: A Game with Consequences,” Endeavour 43, no. 3 (September 2019): 100689. DOI: 10.1016/j.endeavour.2019.07.002

“The Curious Case of Chastine Cox: Murder, Race, Medicine and the Media in the Gilded Age,” Social History of Medicine 32, no. 3 (August 2019): 481-501. DOI: 10.1093/shm/hkx112

“Questions of Genre: Picturing the Hermaphrodite in Eighteenth-Century France and England,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 49, no. 3 (Spring 2016): 391-413. DOI: 10.1353/ecs.2016.0020

Media Coverage
Country Focus
United States
Expertise by Geography
United States
Expertise by Chronology
19th century
Expertise by Topic
Children & Youth, Gender, Medicine, Science, Sexual Violence, Women