Participant Info

First Name
Caitjan
Last Name
Gainty
Country
United Kingdom
State
Affiliation
King's College, London
Website URL
https://www.kcl.ac.uk/people/caitjan-gainty
Keywords
history of medicine and health, 20th century history, American health care, British health care, medical filmmaking, medical technology, history of medical knowledge, history of bioethics, history of health scepticism and health critics.
Availability
Media Contact
Additional Contact Information
PhD
PhD

Personal Info

Photo
About Me

I am a historian of twentieth century medicine and technology, trained in the United States but currently working in London. I am particularly interested in how our current modern systems of health care came to be and since my move to King’s College, London have been able to view this with a uniquely transatlantic perspective. My book The Product of Medicine (Duke, 2025) examines the debt early 20th century American medicine owed to that era’s industrial efficiency movement: the same that inspired the assembly line and our insatiable thirst to be productive.

I have been running the Healthy Scepticism project since 2019, which  aims, for this era of fake news, to examine and find sense in the doubt, cynicism, suspicion, and distrust in and around medical practice from the mid-20th century to the present.  The project seeks to understand what medical sceptics past and present, in individual encounters and in public disavowals of medicine, have expressed in their refusals to comply with conventional medical and public health views. It hopes to shed new light not only on the position of medicine in our uniquely sceptical contemporary as well as offering critical perspective on the position – the health – of scepticism itself as a form of critical engagement.

The project has morphed into a book of the same name, due out in 2026. The book selects twelve contemporary instances of health scepticism – from everyday doubts to virulent conspiracy theories – and picks apart their history and contemporary, examining what they have to tell us about why we are where we are now and how we might do better in future.

This book, as other work, is written for a much broader public than academics normally enjoy, and I have honed my more journalistic skills with articles for the Conversation, Slate, The Washington Post, Wellcome Stories, the Smithsonian Magazine and other publications. I have appeared on podcasts, radio and television talking about topics from Snake Oil to Einstein’s wife. I was the 2021 recipient of the Prof Sir Paul Curran Award for Excellence in Academic Journalism, and I am represented by Richard Pike at C&W Agency in London.

Recent Publications

Books

The Product of Medicine: How Efficiency Made American Health Care (Durham: Duke University Press, 2025)

Healthy Scepticism (London: Hurst, Forthcoming 2026)

Routledge Handbook in the History of Medicine: Medicine from the Margins (co-editor) (London: Routledge, Forthcoming 2027)

Articles

“The Dark Side of Psychiatry” The Conversation 1 April 2025.

“The US Military Launched a Secret Anti-Vax Campaign in the Philippines – Here’s Why I’m not Surprised” The Conversation 21 June 2024.

(with Agnes Arnold-Forster and Paul Addae) ‘Healthy Scepticism’ Wellcome Stories, 17 January 2024.

“What newly digitized records reveal about the Tuskegee Syphilis Study” Smithsonian Magazine and The Conversation 12 January 2024.

Medical gaslighting: when conditions turn out not to be ‘all in the mind’ The Conversation 18 September 2023.

(with Jesse Olszynko-Gryn) “Mask Ambivalence in the 1918 Influenza Pandemic” History Workshop Online 30 March 2023.

“From a ‘deranged’ provocateur to IBM’s failed AI superproject, the controversial story of how data has transformed healthcare”The Conversation 16 January 2023.

“Reversing Death: The weird history of resuscitation” The Conversation 4 November 2021.

“How Snake Oil Got a Bad Name” The Conversation 1 September 2021.

“Poop Wars: The strange history of an American obsession” Slate 23 August 2021.

Caitjan Gainty, “A Note on Universal Access” Washington Post, 19 August 2019.

Caitjan Gainty, ‘“A Bit of Hollywood in the Operating Room”’ Online essay for the U.S. National Library of Medicine “Medicine on Screen” July 2019.

 Caitjan Gainty, “Why Wait?” Modern American History 2019 2(2): 249-255.

 Caitjan Gainty, “A Historical View on Health Care: A New View on Austerity?” Health Care Analysis 2019 27(3): 220-230.

Caitjan Gainty and Grazia de Michele, “The Disease of At Risk” BMJ Opinions. 24 June 2019.

Nikolas Rose and Caitjan Gainty, “Neurovisions” Advances in Clinical Neuroscience and Rehabilitation 2019 18(2): 17-18.

Jesse Olszynko-Gryn, Patrick Ellis, and Caitjan Gainty, eds. “Reproduction on Film,” Special Issue British Journal for the History of Science 2017 50(3).

Caitjan Gainty, “‘Items for criticism (not in sequence)’: Joseph DeLee, Pare Lorentz and The Fight for Life (1940)” British Journal for the History of Science 2017 50(3): 429-449.

Caitjan Gainty, “The Autobiographical Shoulder of Ernest Amory Codman: Crafting Medical Meaning in the 20th Century.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 2016 90: 394-423.

 Caitjan Gainty, “‘Going After the High-Brows:’ Frank Gilbreth and the Surgical Subject, 1912-1917.” Representations 2012 118: 1-27.

 

Media Coverage
Country Focus
USA/UK
Expertise by Geography
United Kingdom, United States
Expertise by Chronology
Modern, 20th century, 21st century
Expertise by Topic
Medicine, Science