Elizabeth Nelson

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https://hdl.handle.net/1805/26680

Elizabeth Nelson is an Assistant Professor of Medical Humanities & Health Studies in the School of Liberal Arts at IU, Indianapolis, and an adjunct Assistant Professor of History and Africana Studies.

Professor Nelson earned a PhD in French History at Indiana University, Bloomington in 2015 and served as the Director of Public Programs at the Indiana Medical History Museum from 2014-2017 before joining the Medical Humanities program in 2018.

Professor Nelson's historical research focuses on rehabilitative institutions, such as mental hospitals and prisons. She explores how people carve out bold and meaningful lives in the most inhospitable spaces. Nelson is currently working on a collaborative book project on the final years and closure of Indiana’s Central State Hospital, inspired by newsletters published by patients with intellectual disabilities in the late 1980s.

Nelson also coordinates the Indiana Women's Prison History Project, a group of currently and formerly incarcerated scholars who are researching the history of prisons for women, eugenics and reproductive justice, and the health and well-being of incarcerated people. She is the co-editor (with Michelle Daniel Jones) of Who Would Believe a Prisoner? Indiana Women's Carceral Institutions, 1848-1920 (The New Press, 2023).

At IU Indianapolis, Nelson has offers courses on the History of Medicine, Disability Studies, Black health and mental health from humanities perspectives, and more.

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Browsing Elizabeth Nelson by Author "Medical Humanities and Health Studies, School of Liberal Arts"

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    Voices from the Newspaper Club: Patient Life at a State Psychiatric Hospital (1988-1992)
    (Springer, 2020-05-21) Beckman, Emily; Nelson, Elizabeth; Labode, Modupe; Medical Humanities and Health Studies, School of Liberal Arts
    The authors conducted a qualitative analysis of thirty-seven issues of The DDU Review, a newsletter produced by residents of the Dual Diagnosis Unit, a residential unit for people who had diagnoses of developmental disability and serious mental illness in the Central State Hospital (Indiana, USA). The analysis of the newsletters produced between September 1988 and June 1992 revealed three major themes: 1) the mundane; 2) good behavior; and 3) advocacy. Contrary to the authors’ expectations, the discourse of medicalization—such as relations with physicians, diagnoses, and medications—receive little attention. Instead, the patient-journalists focus on prosaic aspects of institutional life. The patients used their writing as a form self-definition and advocacy. The authors argue that even though it is tempting to consider the patients’ emphasis on good behavior as evidence of institutional control, internalized discipline, and medicalization, a more nuanced interpretation, which focuses on how the patients’ understood their own experiences, is warranted. Researchers must also recognize the ways in which The DDU Review reveals the patient-journalists’ experience of an institutional life that includes non-medical staff (attendants, secretaries, and therapists), varied social relationships among patients, and negotiated freedoms.