| A Family History of Illness: Memory as Medicine Subjects: Walker Brett L. 1967 -- Health; Walker Brett L. 1967 -- Family; Walker Brett L. 1967 -- Homes and haunts -- Montana; Immunologic diseases -- Patients -- United States -- Biography; Genetic disorders -- Patients -- United States -- Biography; Familie; While in the ICU with a near-fatal case of pneumonia, Brett Walker was asked, "Do you have a family history of illness?"--a standard and deceptively simple question that for Walker, a professional historian, took on additional meaning and spurred him to investigate his family's medical past. In this deeply personal narrative, he constructs a history of his body to understand his diagnosis with a serious immunological disorder, weaving together his dying grandfather's sneaking a cigarette in a shed on the family's Montana farm, blood fractionation experiments in Europe during World War II, and nineteenth-century cholera outbreaks that ravaged small American towns as his ancestors were making their way west. Brett L. Walker is Regents Professor of History at Montana State University. He is the author of The Conquest of Ainu Lands: Ecology and Culture in Japanese Expansion, 1590-1800 ; A Concise History of Japan ; The Lost Wolves of Japan ; and Toxic Archipelago: A History of Industrial Disease in Japan . |