Sarah Rodriguez, PhD
Senior Research Fellow in Medical Humanities
Northwestern University
Sarah Rodriguez’s project, Miriam Menkin and the Roots of Reproductive Medicine, will focus on Miriam Menkin's role in the history of reproductive medicine. Miriam Menkin was the lab assistant to John C. Rock, widely considered one of the founders of reproductive medicine. Though Menkin received first name authorship on one of their groundbreaking articles on human in vitro fertilization (1948), Menkin remains largely unknown outside of the study of the history of reproduction, while Rock became essentially a household name. Rock's papers include Menkin's research and lab notebooks, correspondence, conference notes, interview transcripts, and three boxes of Menkin's own personal and professional papers, 1918-1979.
Dr. Rodriguez states “I will uncover this unsung heroine’s own story to reveal her role in the history of reproductive medicine. I will examine her within the context of her role as a bench scientist, who, like so many other women of her era, conducted research as an assistant to a man, but I will also search for her own interest in reproductive medicine and how she perhaps influenced the direction of the reproductive medical research conducted under John Rock.”
Dr. Rodriguez attended the University of Iowa for her BA in American Studies and the University of Wisconsin-Madison for her MA in the History of Science and Medicine. She obtained her PhD in Medical Sciences, Preventive and Societal Medicine, from the University of Nebraska Medical Center, and wrote her dissertation on the history of female circumcision and clitoridectomy in the United States since the mid-nineteenth century. She is currently a medical humanities postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University where she is researching medical and popular understandings of women’s reproductive health, in particular infertility.