Michael J. Neuss, MD, PhD
Associate Professor of Medicine
Areas of Interest
Hospital medicine, history of science and medicine, medical humanities, medical education, general internal medicine
About
My primary appointment is in the Department of Medicine and the Division of Hospital Medicine, where I maintain a busy clinical practice taking care of hospitalized adults at UNC. It is a privilege to care for the people of North Carolina, and to teach medical students and residents while doing so. I also teach first- and second-year medical students in their pre-clinical Foundation Phase, as an instructor in several of the Social and Health Systems courses.
My academic interests relate primarily to the history of medicine and medical humanities. My formal training and PhD are in history. The focus of my dissertation (and subsequent paper in BJHS) was William Harvey’s description of the systemic circulation of blood (ca. 1620s). I presented a novel interpretation of the emergence of Harvey’s “discovery” of the systemic circulation, situating it in courtly culture, mercantile debates about the circulation of coin and commercial goods, and a particular form of Aristotelianism common to Harvey and the merchants who advised their mutual patron, the king. In general, the dissertation and BJHS article pulled Harvey from much narrower intellectual histories of scientific change into an emerging historiography about the epistemic value of different ways of knowing about the body, which were often rooted in early modern mercantilism (and later capitalism) and their attendant value systems.
Lately I have worked on very different topics, including the early history (ca. 1960s-1970s) of what we now call the electronic health record. Some of my published work in this area has intervened in current debates about what it means to be a doctor. What does it mean to be trained as a physician during an era of apparently “clerical” work at computer terminals, as some physicians lament? Are there other metaphors that carry greater weight or meaning, whether those cast the doctor as detective, educator, or something else? My hope is to better understand the history and sociology of physician identity formation and professionalization, especially in relation to the emergence of new technologies.
I am also interested in medical education, especially improving how students and house staff learn on the wards. I was the editor-in-chief of the inaugural edition of Vanderbilt’s internal medicine residency handbook, which provides specific, systems-based guidance for residents on clinical practice at Vanderbilt and the Nashville VA. Later, I served as faculty lead for the handbook. Recently, colleagues and I have been studying how readers interact with and learn from the handbook. A web version, which now welcomes several million visits annually, is available freely to all readers.
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Undergraduate
Pomona College
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Medical School
Duke University
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PhD
Columbia University
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Residency
Vanderbilt University Medical Center