Wehrman, Andrew
Biography
Professor Andrew Wehrman specializes in the political and cultural history of Colonial America and the early United States with an emphasis on medicine and disease. Before joining the faculty at CMU in 2015, he was an assistant professor at Marietta College where he earned the John G. And Jeanne McCoy Professorship, the college’s highest honor for teaching. In 2023, Wehrman was named a Distinguished Lecturer by the Organization of American Historians.
He is the author of The Contagion of Liberty: The Politics of Smallpox in the American Revolution, which was selected as one of the best books of the year by Havard Public Health Magazine, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and was the winner of the Peter J. Gomes Memorial Book Prize from the Massachusetts Historical Society for the best book on Massachusetts and New England History.
His media appearances include op-eds and interviews in major print outlets (such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, NBCNews.com, and Voice of America), radio (NPR), television (CSPAN), and many podcasts (including Ben Franklin’s World, The Daily Stoic, This Podcast Will Kill You, and America Dissected).
More about Andrew Wehrman
Publications & Presentations
Books:
The Contagion of Liberty: The Politics of Smallpox in the American Revolution (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022; audiobook 2022; paperback 2026), explores the origins of vaccination and public health in the United States. It argues that popular demand for inoculation and other public solutions such as quarantine during smallpox epidemics in the 18th century infected revolutionary politics and changed the way understood their health and government’s responsibility to protect it.
My second book is tentatively titled Afterlife and Liberty: The 1788 Doctors’ Riot in New York City. It closely examines this little-known riot which coincided with the ratification of the United States Constitution. A violent multiracial mob attacked medical students after catching them digging up bodies from local cemeteries for use in anatomy classes. Emphasizing the intersections of race, medicine, and politics in the early United States, the book will recount, in narrative style, the morbid origins of the nation.
Selected Essays and Articles:
- “Reflections on Covid-19 and Smallpox: The View from Philadelphia in 2023 and 1776,” Fides et Historia, Volume 55, no. 1 (Fall 2023)
- “The Contagious Cure: Inoculation Experiments in British Colonial Port Cities,” in Jacob Steere-Williams and Blake C. Scott, eds., Port Cities of the Atlantic World, The University of South Carolina Press (2023)
- "Thomas Jefferson, Inoculation, and the Norfolk Riots: Public Health vs. Private Medicine in Revolutionary Virginia,” in American Philosophical Society, ed., The Spirit of Inquiry in the Age of Jefferson, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 110, Part 2 (2021)
- “Inoculate Before it is Too Late: Lessons Drawn From Charles Willson Peale’s Rachel Weeping,” Age of Revolutions (2021)
- “The Siege of ‘Castle Pox’: A Medical Revolution in Marblehead, Massachusetts, 1764-1777,” New England Quarterly 82, No. 3 (2009). Winner of the Walter Muir Whitehill Prize.
Education
- B.A. from the University of Arkansas, 2003
- M.A.T. from the University of Arkansas, 2004
- M.A. from Northwestern University, 2005
- Ph.D. from Northwestern University, 2011
Courses Taught
- Colonial and Revolutionary America
- The Early Republic
- History of American medicine