Department of History History of Medicine

About Me

Bethany is a PhD student at the University of Saskatchewan, studying under Dr. Erika Dyck. Her dissertation examines the theme of abstinence through an examination of non-medical intervention and educational campaigns of the twentieth century, like the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), and Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE). Examining abstinence education through the lens of social, medical, religious, and gender history complicates temperance history to trace the medicalization of addiction, religious and gendered consequences and roots of abstinence, and the role sobriety played in a person’s identity as the ideal citizen throughout the twentieth century in Canada and the United States.