Janet Tighe

University of Pennsylvania The College of Arts and Sciences 120 Logan Hall, 249 S. 36th Street Philadelphia, PA 19104-6304 Telephone: (215) 898-6341 E-mail: jtighe@sas.upenn.edu

Current Research Interests

• • American medical profession's negotiations for social and cultural authority, with a special interest in medical-legal interactions
• • Development of medical education and training programs in the twentieth century
• • Social history of mental illness, particularly the development of forensic psychiatry in the United States
• • Traditions of public health provision in the United States
• • Policing and accreditation mechanisms for American healers

Education and Academic History

• • University of Pennsylvania, Ph.D. (1983)
• • The Johns Hopkins University, B.A. (1976)

JANET A. TIGHE is Dean of Freshmen and Director Academic Advising in the College of Arts and Sciences of the University of Pennsylvania.  She is also a member of the History and Sociology of Science Department and previously co-directed the department’s Health and Societies Program.  Tighe has been awarded both the Provost’s Teaching Award for outstanding contributions to the graduate and undergraduate curriculum at the University of Pennsylvania and the Dean’s Teaching Award.  Her research has been funded by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Institute of Mental Health.  She is currently working on projects dealing with the changing role of the expert medical witness in the American legal system, the insanity defense in the United States, as well as continuing her work on medical schools and the role they have played in the American medical profession’s expansion of social authority.

Selected Publications

Major Problems in the History of American Medicine and Public Health,
a reader co-edited with John H. Warner (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Press, 2000).

"The Legal Art of Psychiatric Diagnosis: Searching for Reliability."
in Framing Disease, eds. Charles Rosenberg and Janet Golden (Rutgers University Press, 1992).

"Never Knowing One's Place: Temple University School of Medicine and the American Medical Education Hierarchy."
Transactions and Studies of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, vol. 12 (Sept. 1990), pp. 311-334.

"The New York Medico-Legal Society: Legitimating An Unstable Union,"
The International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, vol. 9 (1986), pp. 231-243.

"'Be It Ever So Little': Reforming the Insanity Defense in the Progressive Era."
Bulletin of the History of Medicine, vol. 57 (Fall 1983), pp. 397-411.

"Francis Wharton and the Nineteenth Century Insanity Defense: The Origins of a Reform Tradition."
American Journal, vol. 27 (Summer 1983), pp. 223-253.