Bob Blaskiewicz's Summer
Bob left graduation to catch a plane to Chicago, where he spent a week in archival
bliss pouring through the American Medical Association's collection of medical quackery.
The work he did there became part of a talk that he gave at Balticon, where he was
also on a panel about pseudoscience. Some of that talk will very shortly be published
at the Skeptics Society INSIGHT blog as a short overview of medical regulation. He was also invited to host a live
Google event by Backstory, an American History podcast, on quackery. He still needs
to set up a date for that. Lastly, he has submitted a (solicited) article to Skeptical
Inquirer magazine; it's an update about a cancer quack in Houston who was in front
of a judge and may lose his license.
It was a busy summer. He would go back to the AMA in heartbeat. He is co-authoring
another article, probably a feature, for Skeptical Inquirer about the guy who established the quackery archive, Arthur J. Cramp. He did a huge
amount of work detailing questionable medical practices and in doing so played a huge
role in professionalizing American medicine. He doesn't even have a wikipedia page.
He figured that he'll write the article for Skeptical Inquirer with a friend (who
apparently had been interested in doing the wiki page) and then they will use that
for the Wikipedia article. But that's all down the line still.
Robert J. Blaskiewicz, Jr.
Assistant Professor of Critical Thinking and First-Year Studies