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David H. Flood, PhD has been a faculty member first at Hahnemann then MCP Hahnemann University and now Drexel University in Philadelphia since 1976. He received his bachelor’s and doctoral degrees in English Literature from the University of Pennsylvania and currently teaches courses in medical and healthcare humanities at Drexel’s Hahnemann Center City Campus including Health Care in Drama, Portrayals of Mental Disorders, and Health Care and the Media. He earlier served as director of Hahnemann’s Science-Intensive Preprofessional Studies program for premedical and pre-physical therapy students and director of the Division of Arts and Social Sciences.
His research in the medical humanities examines topics in medicine and health care from the perspectives of literature, the arts, and medical ethics. He often works on research projects with Rhonda Soricelli, a physician, with whom he has written a play about physicians in professional crisis, an analysis of physician narrative voice in the medical case history, and several commentaries on medicine and the arts.
He is currently working on a book, From Body Stealing to Organ Dealing, which traces society’s response first to the 18th-and-19th-century shortage of bodies for anatomical dissection, which led to grave robbing of corpses and worse activities to supply the needed cadavers, and more recently to parallel concerns stemming from the shortage of organs for transplantation. A second interest is the medical thriller, for which he is preparing a reader’s guide.
He has also written on such topics as blood and transfusion in Dracula, on H. Rider Haggard’s role in the nineteenth-century anti-vaccination controversy, and other issues involving the social and cultural context of medicine such as epidemics and bioterrorism, conflicts in the physician-patient relationship, and narratives about Alzheimer’s patients and their caregivers. |
