About

Officers 2025

President: Gideon Manning

Treasurer: Mario Molina

Secretary: Russell Johnson

Board Members

Gideon Manning, PhD (President) is Professor of Early Modern Studies at the Claremont Graduate University.  With special expertise in the history of early modern medicine, science, and philosophy, he is the author, most recently, of “The Good Death in Early Modern Europe,” “Evolving Images of Tuberculosis: Seeing and Understanding an Ancient, Endemic Disease” and “The Medical Provenance of Cartesian Illustrations: History, Action and Use.”  Prof. Manning’s research has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the American Association for the History of Medicine, the History of Science Society, and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science.

Dr. J. Mario Molina (Treasurer) is a trustee of the Huntington Library, member of the standing committee of the Osler Library at McGill, and a member of the Grolier and Zamorano clubs.

Russell A. Johnson (Secretary) is Curator for History of Medicine and the Sciences at UCLA Library Special Collections, President (2023-2024) of the International Society for the History of the Neurosciences (ISHN), and the 2023 recipient of the Lisabeth M. Holloway Award from Librarians, Archivists, and Museum Professionals in the History of the Health Sciences (LAMPHHS).

James S. Brust, MD is a psychiatrist in private practice in San Pedro, CA, and Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at UCLA. He has been affiliated with this group for many years, and served as President of the George Dock Society for the History of Medicine. His wide research interests include not only medical history, but 19th century popular prints and photographs. He is the author of “A Psychiatrist Looks at Mary Lincoln” in The Mary Lincoln Enigma, Historians on America’s Most Controversial First Lady (Southern Illinois University Press, 2012).

Deepthiman Gowda, MD is Assistant Dean for Medical Education and the leader of the narrative medicine program at the Kaiser Permanente Bernard J. Tyson School of Medicine in Pasadena.

Monique Kornell, PhD is an art historian specializing in the history of anatomical book illustration and the study of anatomy by artists. She has published articles on anatomical drawings and prints, and on illustrated anatomy books from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, with a particular focus on anatomy books for artists, and has a general interest in the bibliography of the history of medicine. Dr Kornell has held research fellowships at the Wellcome Library, London and at the University of California, Los Angeles. She curated the recent exhibition at the Getty Research Institute, Flesh and Bones: The Art of Anatomy (22 Feb. – 10 July 2022) and was a co-curator of The Ingenious Machine of Nature: Four Centuries of Art and Anatomy, an international exhibition of prints and drawings organized by the National Gallery of Canada in 1996. Current research topics are sixteenth-century French botanical illustration and the preparation of the woodblocks for Andreas Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica (1543). She is a Visiting Associate Professor in the Program in the History of Medicine, Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles.

Patrick A. Mauer, MD received his medical degree from USC in 1969 and practiced internal medicine until 2015.  A longtime member of the board, his affiliation began through his father, Edgar F. Mauer, MD, who was one of the founders of the Friends of the LACMA Library and delivered the Dock Lecture in 1969.  A personal friend of George Dock and his son, William, Edgar Mauer was deeply involved in the transfer of the LACMA historical collection to the Huntington in 1991.  Through his father, Dr. Maurer participated in board meetings and has since maintained his family’s commitment to preserving the history of medicine in Southern California.

Lisa A. Mix is Director of University Archives & Special Collections at California State University, Fullerton. She has worked in archives and historical collections at several academic medical centers, including Johns Hopkins Medicine, the University of California San Francisco, and New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medicine. She has published and presented widely on archives and on history of the health sciences, and was the 2020 recipient of the Lisabeth M. Holloway Award from Librarians, Archivists, and Museum Professionals in the History of the Health Sciences (LAMPHHS).

Peter Rosenberg, MD grew up in suburban Chicago. He graduated magna cum laude in the History of Science from Harvard College, where his thesis centered on the reception of Harvey’s theory of the circulation in 17th century France. He then attended Harvard Medical school and completed his internal medicine residency and gastroenterology/hepatology fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital. He moved to Southern California in 1999, where he worked as a gastroenterologist in private practice on the West Side for four years, then at Kaiser-Permanente Baldwin Park Medical Center for one year, and finally at Alliance Digestive Disease Consultants and Huntington Hospital, both in Pasadena, since April 2004. At Huntington Hospital, he has been active in patient care, medical staff leadership, and medical education, helping to train medical students and residents. He currently serves as the Chief of Staff at Huntington Hospital. He has been happily married to his wife Cathy, a pediatric surgeon at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, since 2005. They reside in South Pasadena and have one daughter at USC’s Keck School of Medicine and another in high school. He enjoys hiking, traveling, skiing, swimming, playing and watching soccer, and collecting old books, especially medical works.

Megan Rosenbloom is Collection Strategies Librarian at UCLA and former president of the Southern California Society for the History of Medicine. She has written a bestselling book on the history of medicine – Dark Archives: A Librarian’s Investigation into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin – and led a research team called The Anthropodermic Book Project whose focus is on books bound in human skin. She was formerly a medical librarian at USC Norris Medical Library.

Pamela Schaff, MD, PhD is Professor of Medical Education, Family Medicine, and Pediatrics (Educational Scholar), and Director of the HEAL (Humanities, Ethics/Economics, Art, and the Law) Program and the Master of Science in Narrative Medicine Program at the Keck School of Medicine (KSOM) of the University of Southern California (USC). She received her B.A. from Pomona College, her M.D. from Mount Sinai School of Medicine, and her Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from USC. She completed her residency in pediatrics at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles and maintains her clinical pediatric practice in the department of Family Medicine. Dr. Schaff previously served as director of the Introduction to Clinical Medicine (ICM) Program, and as associate dean for curriculum. She was a member of the Association of American Medical College (AAMC) Humanities and Arts Integration Committee, charged with determining and advancing the role of the humanities and arts in medical education and physician development (2019-2021). In addition to teaching in the HEAL and Narrative Medicine Programs, Dr. Schaff designs educational content that integrates arts and humanities instruction in courses, clerkships, and electives through all four years of the medical school curriculum. She is the recipient of numerous awards for excellence in teaching and mentoring. Her current areas of investigation include professional identity formation, narrative medicine, and the role of the arts and humanities in medical education.

William Schubert, MD has been in Family Practice in La Canada Flintridge since 1957. His support of the LACMA library began in the 1960s and he has continued his affiliation with the collection through all of the subsequent groups and support committees for five decades.  An avid student of the history of medicine, Dr. Schubert has long advocated for broad public access to the history of medicine and events that reach a wide audience.

Tamara Venit-Shelton, PhD is Professor of History at Claremont McKenna College. She is the author of two books, including Herbs and Roots: A History of Chinese Doctors in the American Medical Marketplace, which won the 2020 Phi Beta Kappa National Book Prize for best subsequent book. Her research interests include the social history of American medicine, environmental health, and immigration with an emphasis on the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.

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