Dr. Michelle LaBonte receives Stanley Jackson Prize for recent journal article

Dr. Michelle LaBonte, Assistant Professor in the Department of History, was awarded the Stanley Jackson Prize from the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences for her paper, “Diagnostic Uncertainty, Microbes, and the Isolation of People with Cystic Fibrosis.”

The Jackson Prize is given for a paper published in the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences and is awarded yearly by a committee chaired by the editor. The prize is presented to the best paper that appeared in the journal in the previous three years, favoring the work of an early-career author.

The prize was created in honor of Dr. Stanley W. Jackson (1920-2000), a former editor of the journal, president of the American Association for the History of Medicine, and a distinguished professor of psychiatry and medical history at Yale Medical School.

Dr. LaBonte explains, “This article examines how patients, families, and medical professionals have grappled with uncertainty related to the diagnosis of infectious disease and the risk of transmission, which has important parallels to the COVID-19 pandemic.” Her work documents how uncertainty about whether people with cystic fibrosis (CF) were infected with a pathogenic microorganism led to restrictions on their in-person interactions and the loss of critical support structures in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

The research is part of her current book project exploring diagnostic uncertainty in medicine and its impact on patients. “In addition to the emotional toll on patients and families, a lengthy diagnostic odyssey is associated with delayed access to therapeutics, increased morbidity, and significant medical costs to individuals and health care systems,” says Dr. LaBonte. Using CF as a case study, her book documents how diagnostic uncertainty has persisted over more than eighty years despite the development of new technologies.

Dr. LaBonte joined the Department of History at Purdue University in 2023. She is a historian of biomedicine and a biologist with interests in the history of diagnostics and therapeutics. Prior to joining the faculty at Purdue, LaBonte was a Lecturer in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University, where she received a PhD in the History of Science in 2022 and was recognized with several awards for her teaching. Some of her recent work has appeared in the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, the Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, the Bulletin of the History of Medicine, and the Journal of the History of Biology.

Her first book, Challenging Diagnosis: Cystic Fibrosis, Diagnostic Technologies, and the Persistence of Uncertainty in Medicine, is under contract with the University of Chicago Press.

Learn more about Dr. Michelle LaBonte: https://cla.purdue.edu/directory/profiles/michelle-labonte.html

Read the full journal article, “Diagnostic Uncertainty, Microbes, and the Isolation of People with Cystic Fibrosis,” at this link.