As an historian and physician, Robert Martensen’s interests range widely across medical practice, biomedical science, and culture. Perhaps that is why doing historical research at the NIH appeals to him strongly, as the agency’s range of inquiry and impact have been huge. Previously, he has explored the origins of neuroscience in the Scientific Revolution, the development of nuclear medicine, and the scientific transformation of United States medicine that occurred during the Progressive Era, among other topics. In 2002 he received a Guggenheim fellowship to complete his book, The Brain Takes Shape: An Early History (Oxford University Press, 2004). Educated at Harvard (B.A.), Dartmouth (M.D.), and the University of California-San Francisco( M.A. and Ph.D.), Martensen has held several university professorships, including service that involved leading a history of medicine museum and archive, prior to joining the NIH in October 2007.

Selected recent publications

In Press:
The American Way of Illness: Tales from the Front Lines (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008). Intended for general readers confronting tough questions about how to navigate serious illness, this book of eight linked tales draws on Martensen’s experiences of caring for approximately 75,000 patients as an emergency physician.

“American Medical Professionalism: At Home and In the World,” in Global Bioethics, ed. John Harris (London: Oxford University Press, 2008).

“Landscape Designers, Doctors, and the Making of Healthy Urban Spaces in 19th Century America,” in “Restorative Commons: Making Healthy Urban Spaces,” ed. Anne Wiesen (Proceedings of the U.S. Forest Service, special supplement, 2008).

2004-Present:
(with David S. Jones) “Human Radiation Experiments and the Formation of Medical Physics at the University of California, San Francisco and Berkeley, 1937-1962,” in Useful Bodies: Humans in the Service of Medical Science in the Twentieth Century, ed. Jordan Goodman, Anthony McElligott, and Lara Marks (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), pp. 81-108.

“Plagues and Patients,” in Clio in the Clinic: Doctors’ Stories of Using History in Medical Practice, ed. Jacalyn Duffin (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), pp. 56-72.

“Bioethics on the Brain,” Medical Humanities Review, 2004,18(1): 27-45.