About
I am a historian and anthropologist of medicine and economy with research experience in the United States and China. My dissertation research, based in Chicago, spans the twentieth century with a focus on medical billing: the processes by which clinical actions are rendered into the basis for economic transactions, and how those transactions are negotiated between patients, healthcare providers, and third parties. Through this lens, I will explore the ideational and technical underpinnings of the 'fee-for-service' and its successive transformations in medicine, the labor and expertise involved in structuring medical transactions, and the history of doctor-patient relationships in economic context.
Recent conference presentations include: “G. Frank Lydston and the Business of Medicine in Early Twentieth-Century Chicago,” for the Society for Humanities, Social Science, and Medicine, "Quack Encounters: Accountability in Early Twentieth-Century Medical Interactions," and "Patients, Doctors, and Other Doctors: Competition and the Clinical Here-and-Now," both for the Michicagoan linguistic anthropology conference.
Past research has focused on theories of mind and therapeutic deception in seventeenth-century Chinese medicine; and the integration of biomedical diagnostic technologies into Traditional Chinese Medicine gynecology in present-day Beijing.
My research has been funded by the Fulbright U.S. Student Program and the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellows Program, as well as the Rackham Graduate Student Research Grant.
