The ‘LSD Block’ and the Therapeutic Alliance: The Rise and Fall (and Rise) of Psychedelic Medicine in the U.K. (Yale History of Science and Medicine Program Holmes Lecture)

Wendy Kline joins is the Dema G. Seelye Chair in the History of Medicine in the Department of History at Purdue University.  She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Davis, in 1998. She is the author of several articles and two books: Bodies of Knowledge: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Women’s Health in the Second Wave (University of Chicago Press, 2010) and Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom (University of California Press, 2001).

Her current book project, under contract with Oxford University Press, is entitled Coming Home: Medicine, Midwives, and the Transformation of Birth in Late-Twentieth-Century America.  Based on interviews and archival records of midwives, doctors, and health organizations, this book will be the first in-depth, historical analysis of the home birth movement in the U.S.  Two articles on this topic are forthcoming: “Communicating a New Consciousness: Countercultural Print and the Home Birth Movement in the 1970s,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine. And “The Little Manual That Started a Revolution: How Hippie Midwifery Became Mainstream,” in David Kaiser and Patrick McCray, eds., Groovy Science: The Countercultural Embrace of Science and Technology over the Long 1970s.