Deborah Streahle, MA

As a social and cultural historian of medicine, I study the relationships among medicine, technology, and care in the 20th-century United States. My dissertation explores how attitudes and practices surrounding death and dying changed in the 1960s. I examine several forces that reshaped end-of-life and death care: the U.S. military’s management of the dead throughout the war in Southeast Asia; African American funeral directors’ role in the civil rights movement; and alternative death care activism. As a guest historian at the Intrepid Sea, Air, and Space Museum, I am developing a public exhibition about the medical facilities aboard a historic Navy aircraft carrier.