Deborah Streahle
Deborah Streahle is a historian of medicine whose research focuses on end-of-life care and health activism in the 20th-century U.S. Additional areas of interest include reproductive health and technology and medicine. She earned a B.A. in Philosophy from Lehigh University and a Ph.D. in History of Science and Medicine from Yale. Deborah has taught a variety of history courses for high school and undergraduate students in the HSHM, Yale Young Global Scholars, and Life Worth Living programs.
In her dissertation, “Care Underground: Activists and the Transformation of American Dying in the 1960s,” she argued that the 1960s were a turning point in death care in the U.S. Through several case studies, she examined efforts to incorporate greater personalization, meaning, and community connection into mainstream death care practices. Chapter one traced the rise of the funeral reform movement, whose white, middle-class membership denounced the consumer excesses of modern funerals but failed to account for broader racial politics of death. In chapter two, she examined how many African American funeral directors involved in the civil rights movement provided emergency medical services, safe passage, and political funerals, demonstrating a broad commitment to protecting African American life. The third chapter traced two experimental innovations for improving end-of-life care—hospice and psychedelic therapy. In it, she argued that, despite their mixed legacies, hospice providers’ and psychedelic therapists’ attention to pain management as well as the social and physical contexts of care reshaped Americans’ expectations for the end-of-life period. The fourth chapter assessed how conventional American death care was exported to military mortuaries during the Vietnam War amid the changing landscape of death and dying stateside. Her epilogue evaluated the complicated legacy of death care activism into the 21st century.
As Guest Historian at the Intrepid Museum, Deborah is co-curating an exhibition about Navy medicine on the restored medical facilities of a historic aircraft carrier. During her graduate education, she curated five exhibits on topics ranging from surgical tools to disability activism. Her research has been featured on COVID Calls, the Dead Ladies Show podcast, and in the Los Angeles Review of Books. She is active in disability advocacy on campus. In her free time, she hangs out with her family, explores local beaches, eats pizza, and cycles around the region.