Anxiety and contraception

Andrea Tone

Television cameras and cables overran the Social Studies of Medicine offices on Peel Street early this month. The star attraction: Andrea Tone, a specialist in the history of women's health, who arrived in August to assume a cross-faculty appointment in History (Arts) and Social Studies of Medicine (Medicine) for a Canada Research Chair in the Social History of Medicine. Her recent media-star status is well-deserved: when her last book, Devices and Desires: A History of Contraceptives in America, was released in 2001, it hit the cover of the New York Times Review of Books, and Tone was catapulted into the role of public intellectual, which she has since performed with gusto. "After the Times review, everything became chaos — but a welcome chaos," she says. There were dozens of radio interviews, and the PBS series "The American Experience" shot a documentary on the birth control pill, relying heavily on Tone's work, and making her "the chief talking head," she says.

Claudio Calligaris

Her engagement with the history of reproduction evolved from work she did at a women's reproductive centre in Atlanta, Georgia, while completing her doctoral dissertation on workers and industry in 19th-century America at Emory University. Subsequently, her research on the birth control pill for Devices and Desires pointed her towards her current work on the history of anxiolytics — drugs used to treat anxiety. "I realized, looking at the statistics of drug consumption, that the number-one prescribed drug in the world was Valium." But little had been written about the medicalization of anxiety and the rise of tranquilizer culture, and Tone jumped to explore how the everyday nerves of a century ago have since been deemed medical conditions requiring serious drug therapy. She also took up a position as official historian to the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology, a body of some of the most important and influential figures in the field.

Tone's agenda is filled with classes, conferences, research and the odd bit of public performance. "I sometimes feel like I'm on a treadmill, but I'm lucky to have ended up in one of the few professions that allows you to be a renaissance person — you have a remarkably diversified set of intellectual activities," she says. Her colleagues, she stresses, are a big part of the appeal. "In Social Studies of Medicine, I'm working with people who are interested in the points of intellectual intersection that I care about, and at Leacock I can be surrounded by historians. And Montreal itself is an intellectually exciting and culturally vibrant city."

As for the latest television gig — her literary agent, whom she shares with Helen Fielding, among others, had relayed a request from PBS for Tone to appear on "History Detectives," a series featuring a team of four "detectives" who try to cast light upon dark corners of the past. Tone's episode responds to a viewer's queries about the contents of an old box belonging to a great-grandmother: it had turned up in an attic and contained a medical syringe, letters and diaries. "The episode focuses on women, fertility and reproductive control in the late 19th century, so they called me," she says. "It was crazy — they interviewed me about what I thought the syringe might be, we looked at patents and we looked at the ways in which medical technologies were advertised in the Sears, Roebuck catalogue." Interested viewers can see Tone in action when the show airs in June, but she will no doubt be appearing in other venues as well. "It's very important for historians to communicate to a larger public," she insists. "And it's also something I really enjoy doing."

Patrick McDonagh