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Elizabeth Fee was a remarkable and influential public health historian, whose personal and professional trajectories led her to speak truth to and about power in public health, past and present. Born in Northern Ireland in 1946 to Irish-Methodist missionary parents, Liz's childhood brought her into contact with peoples and struggles across the globe. At just five weeks of age, she was whisked away by her parents to civil war-era China, where she lost hearing in one ear from an untreated bout with scarlet fever. In midchildhood, she attended school in Malaysia, after which her family returned to Belfast. There, she came of age amid festering political and religious violence, learning firsthand that history is told and retold by protagonists and witnesses, oppressors and oppressed.
Liz achieved First Class Honors at Cambridge University in biochemistry and in history and philosophy of science, proceeding to earn two master's degrees and then a doctorate in history of science (1978) from Princeton University, with a dissertation focusing on "Science and the 'Woman Question,' 1860-1920" as analyzed through Victorian-era periodicals.1
From 1974 to 1995, she was a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health (now Bloomberg School), first in health humanities, then international health, and finally health policy. Active in both feminist and health leftist movements, she also became deeply curious about her own institutional base, in 1987 publishing Disease and Discovery: A History of the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health, 1916-1939.2 In this first-ever "biography" of the first-ever school of public health, Liz crafted what might have been a staid institutional history into an engaging and eyebrowraising account that retraces the powerful forces, figures, and ideologies that shaped the school's founding and early trajectory. She revisited this theme in later works, illuminating the politics of health training in distinct milieus and demonstrating how power was marshalled in the presumed neutral and technocratic domain of public health education.
Her early interests in feminism, women, and science burgeoned into several notable works on women, gender, and health, including "Women and Health Care: A Comparison of Theories" in the International Journal of Health Services (1975), and the coedited volume (with Nancy Krieger), Women's Health, Politics, and Power: Essays on Sex/Gender, Medicine, and Public Health (1994).3