Countway's Center for the History of Medicine
invites you to attend the fifth lecture of the Spring 2025
Colloquium on the History of Psychiatry and Medicine

with Beth Linker, Ph.D., Department Chair, Samuel H. Preston Endowed Term Professor in the Social Sciences, Department of History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania

Beth Linker presents her 2024 King's College London Kass Lecture in the History of Medicine, ‘The Other Disabled President,’ which describes the crippling back pain John F. Kennedy suffered from in his first year as president, a fact largely hidden at the time from public view. After several failed medical interventions, the president finally experienced some relief under the care of Dr. Hans Kraus, an orthopedist and posture-fitness guru. Linker's talk explores how this chance relationship would go on to inform Cold War notions of physical fitness, and how disabling back pain—and its prevention—rose to national prominence and stoked geopolitical concerns regarding the communist threat to the so-called free world.

Beth Linker is Chair of the Department of the History and Sociology of Science and the Samuel H. Preston Endowed Term Professor in the Social Sciences. She is also a former physical therapist and holds an M.A. in bioethics. Her research focuses on how disability becomes defined, medicalized, and marginalized in modern U.S. history.

1:00 P.M.—2:30 P.M. Eastern U.S. time
This is an online event. No RSVP required.
Please use the following Zoom link:
https://harvard.zoom.us/j/94337617055?pwd=M0pqNEFZQXVzRXluQ0llalVBRjB0UT09
Passcode: 471501 Meeting ID 943 3761 7055

For more information, contact David G. Satin, MD, Colloquium Director

Co-sponsored by the Department of Postgraduate and Continuing Education, McLean Hospital, and the Center for the History of Medicine, Countway Library, Harvard Longwood Campus