Alice Dreger

Alice Dreger is a historian of medicine and science, both an academic and mainstream writer, and patient advocate. Since 2005 she has been at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University in Chicago where she now serves as Professor of Clinical Medical Humanities and Bioethics.    Two previous books, Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex and One of Us: Conjoined Twins and the Future of Normal are widely considered to be must-reads for those doing work in the medical humanities.  In 2009, W.W. Norton selected her essay “Lavish Dwarf Entertainment” for its annual Best Creative Non-Fiction collection.

Her academic work has appeared in venues from The Hastings Center Report to the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine.   Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, and The Atlantic.  Op-eds have appeared in The Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, Newsday, and The Wall Street Journal.  Her 2011 TED talk, “Is Anatomy Destiny?” has been viewed more than 900,000 times, and discusses some of the same work that lead the UTNE Reader to name her a visionary, which they define as someone who not only concocts great ideas, but acts on them.

Her new book, Galileo’s Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science will be published in 2015 by Penguin Press.