Event
Women’s Bodies and Public Health in Poland before and after the Holocaust
Healing Women in Jewish History
This talk explores how Jewish physicians in twentieth-century Poland were concerned with women’s health, mobilizing female bodies to ensure the future of the community. It compares the discourse and the medical practices before and after the Holocaust. New histories of medicine and the body offer a more direct vantage on women’s experiences than traditional approaches mediated through the sources and concerns of men. This series explores what we know about women as both practitioners and patients throughout Jewish history, and what we stand to learn from such scholarship about women’s lives more generally.
Featured Speaker
Natalia Aleksiun is the Harry Rich Professor of Holocaust Studies at the University of Florida, where she teaches courses on the Holocaust and its aftermath, Eastern Europe, Jewish childhood, and the history of medicine. She serves as editor of East European Jewish Affairs and has written extensively on the history of Polish Jews and the Holocaust. She is completing a monograph on the so-called “Cadaver Affair” in medical schools in East Central Europe between two world wars. Aleksiun holds doctoral degrees from Warsaw University and New York University.