Join us on Tuesday, January 28 from 1:00 to 2:00 for a talk on physician anti-nuclear activism.
This event is open to all. Registration is required.

In 1961, a small group of Boston-area doctors and medical students started meeting weekly at one faculty member’s home in Newton, Massachusetts to discuss the health consequences of a nuclear explosion on civilian populations. Over the course of the next six months, this group, later called Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR), realized there was hardly any literature, and insufficient data, on the medical effects of long-term radiation exposure. These conversations resulted in a series of articles published in the New England Journal of Medicine, which synthesized information from military strategists and scientists to extrapolate the medical consequences of a hypothetical nuclear attack on the United States and project this evidence onto the Boston area. By 1963, PSR had roughly 1,000 physician members with five chapters in major U.S. cities. After successfully lobbying for the passage of the Limited Test Ban Treaty to prohibit atmospheric nuclear testing, the organization entered a period of dormancy until it emerged again in the 1980s, at the height of Cold War tensions between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., as International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW), which eventually grew to a global network of over 100,000 physicians in over 40 countries. IPPNW was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985 for efforts to urge President Reagan and General Secretary Gorbachev to consider the medical consequences of nuclear war.

This talk will present a brief history of PSR and IPPNW, following the creation of a medical model for anti-nuclear activism in the 1960s to the internationalization of that model in the 1980s.  It will examine how physicians advanced a powerful political agenda by medicalizing and humanizing the nuclear threat during periods of geopolitical crisis.

Katie Blanton, MSc, is a graduating student at Harvard Medical School who recently completed a master’s degree in public health at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. Her undergraduate thesis, “The Doomsday Doctors: Medical Activism in the Nuclear Age, 1960–2000,” won Harvard’s Thomas Temple Hoopes Prize for outstanding scholarly research and excellence in the art of teaching.

This event accompanies the launch of the Center for the History of Medicine's Prescriptions for Peace, an exhibition on physician anti-nuclear activism, 1961-1985, on view on floors L2, L1, and 1 of the Countway Library beginning January 21, 2025.