David Jones, MD, PhD

A. Bernard Ackerman Professor of the Culture of Medicine

Educational History

  • A.B., Harvard College, History and Science, 1993
  • A.M., Harvard University, History of Science, 1997
  • M.D., Harvard Medical School, 2001
  • Ph.D., History of Science, Harvard University, 2001
  • Intern, Boston Combined Residency Program in Pediatrics, Children’s Hospital and Boston Medical Center, 2001-2002
  • Resident, Adult Psychiatry Residency Training Program, McLean Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital, 2002-2005

Courses Taught

SM750, Introduction to Social Medicine
SM934, Introduction to Global Medicine: Bioscience, Technologies, Disparities, Strategies

Research Interests

  • Health inequalities between populations, particularly the history of explanations that have been given for health inequalities since the seventeenth century.
  • Medical decision making, focusing on the history of cardiac therapeutics, particularly the relationship between changing disease models of coronary artery disease and the various strategies used to treat it.
  • Human subjects research.
  • History of pharmacogenetics.

Current Projects

  • “The Rise and Fall of Cardiac Revascularization: Therapeutic Evolution and Health Policy in the Late Twentieth Century.” Funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Foundation for Informed Medical Decision Making.

Select Publications

  • Whitmarsh, Ian, and D.S. Jones, ed. What’s the Use of Race? Modern Governance and the Biology of Difference. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010.
  • Dorr, Gregory M., and D.S. Jones. “Facts and Fictions: BiDil and the Resurgence of Racial Medicine.” Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics 36 (Fall 2008): 443-448.
  • Jones, D.S. “The Persistence of American Indian Health Disparities.” American Journal of Public Health 96 (December 2006): 2122-2134.
  • Jones, D.S., R.H. Perlis. “Pharmacogenetics, Race, and Psychiatry.” Harvard Review of Psychiatry, 14 (March-April 2006): 92-108.
  • Jones, D.S. Rationalizing Epidemics: Meanings and Uses of American Indian Mortality since 1600. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.
  • Jones, D.S., and R.L. Martensen. “Human Radiation Experiments and the Formation of Medical Physics at the University of California, San Francisco and Berkeley, 1937-1962.” In Useful Bodies: Humans in the Service of Medical Science in the Twentieth Century, ed. Jordon Goodman, Anthony McElligott, and Lara Marks, 91-108. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.
  • Jones, D.S. “The Health Care Experiments at Many Farms: The Navajo, Tuberculosis, and the Limits of Modern Medicine, 1952-1962.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 76 (Winter 2002): 749-790.
  • Jones, D.S. “Technologies of Compliance: Surveillance of Self-Administration of Tuberculosis Treatment, 1956-1966.” History and Technology 17 (Winter 2001): 279-318.
  • Jones, D.S. “Visions of a Cure: Visualization, Clinical Trials, and Controversies in Cardiac Therapeutics, 1968-1998.” Isis 91 (September 2000): 504-541.