Bob Blaskiewicz's Summer

Bob left graduation to catch a plane to Chicago, where he spent a week in archival bliss pouring through the American Medical Association's collection of medical quackery. The work he did there became part of a talk that he gave at Balticon, where he was also on a panel about pseudoscience. Some of that talk will very shortly be published at the Skeptics Society INSIGHT blog as a short overview of medical regulation. He was also invited to host a live Google event by Backstory, an American History podcast, on quackery. He still needs to set up a date for that. Lastly, he has submitted a (solicited) article to Skeptical Inquirer magazine; it's an update about a cancer quack in Houston who was in front of a judge and may lose his license. 

It was a busy summer. He would go back to the AMA in heartbeat. He is co-authoring another article, probably a feature, for Skeptical Inquirer about the guy who established the quackery archive, Arthur J. Cramp. He did a huge amount of work detailing questionable medical practices and in doing so played a huge role in professionalizing American medicine. He doesn't even have a wikipedia page. He figured that he'll write the article for Skeptical Inquirer with a friend (who apparently had been interested in doing the wiki page) and then they will use that for the Wikipedia article. But that's all down the line still. 

Robert J. Blaskiewicz, Jr. 
Assistant Professor of Critical Thinking and First-Year Studies