Emily Abel

Emily K. Abel is a historian of medicine and public health. Her book, Hearts of Wisdom: American Women Caring for Kin, 1850-1940 (Harvard University Press, 2000), was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Book for 2000. Her two books on the history of tuberculosis in Los Angeles are Suffering in the Land of Sunshine: A Los Angeles Illness Narrative (Rutgers University Press, 2006) and Tuberculosis and the Politics of Exclusion: A History of Public Health and Migration to Los Angeles (Rutgers University Press, 2007), which won the Viseltear Prize of the Medical Section of the American Public Health Association for an outstanding book in the history of public health. Her most recent book is After the Cure: Untold Stories of Breast Cancer Survivors (NYU Press, 1908), co-written with Saskia Subramanian.

Areas of Interest

• Health Services & Women's Studies
• Historian of Medicine and Public Health
• Tuberculosis

Selected Publications

• Co-Editor, Circles of Care (State University of New York Press, 1990).
• Who Cares for the Elderly? Public Policy and the Experiences of Adult Daughters (Temple University Press, 1991).
• "Parental Dependence and Filial Responsibility in the Nineteenth Century: Hial Hawley and Emily Hawley Gillespie, 1884-1885," The Gerontologist, Vol. 32, No.4 (1992):519-526.
• "Benevolence and Social Control: Advice from the Children's Bureau in the Early Twentieth Century," Social Service Review, Vol. 68, No. 1, (March 1994): 1-19
• "Family Caregiving in the Nineteenth Century: Emily Hawley Gillespie and Sarah Gillespie, 1858-1888," Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Vol. 68, No. 4 (Winter 1994): 573-599.
• "'Man, Woman, and Chore Boy': Transformations in the Antagonistic Demands of Work and Care on Women in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries," The Milbank Quarterly, Vol. 73, No. 2 (1995): 187-212.
• "A ‘Terrible and Exhausting' Struggle: Family Caregiving during the Transformation of Medicine," Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Vol. 50 (1995): 474-502.
• "Interactions between Public Health Nurses and Clients on American Indian Reservations during the 1930s," Social History of Medicine, Vol. 9, No.1 (1996), 89-108 (with Nancy Reifel).  
• The Inevitable Hour: A History of Caring for Dying Patients in America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013).
• Living in Death’s Shadow: Family Experiences of Terminal Care and Irreplaceable Loss (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017).
• Prelude to Hospice: Florence Wald, Dying People, and Their Families (Rutgers University Press, 2018).
• Sick and Tired: An Intimate History of Fatigue (University of North Carolina Press, 2021).
• Mable Jones: A Black Children’s Nurse in a Northern White Household (with Margret K. Nelson) (University of Virginia Press, 2021).
• Elder Care in Crisis: How the Social Safety Net Fails Families (New York University Press, 2022).
• The Farm & Wilderness Summer Camps (With Margaret K. Nelson) (New York University Press, 2024)
• Gluten Free for Life: Celiac Disease, Medical Recognition and the Food Industry (New York University Press, 2025).
• Listening to Dementia: Advocating for Dignity and Autonomy (New York University Press, September 2026).