Five Questions With…Alexandra Lord
One of the benefits of being a Smithsonian Affiliate is the access to Smithsonian scholarship and its scholars. In 2025 we are reviving our “Five Questions With…” series to introduce our Smithsonian Affiliate network to the incredible staff working hard for the “increase and diffusion of knowledge” at the Smithsonian.
In this post, we interviewed Alexandra Lord, chair of the Division of Medicine and Science at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History and asked her to share what inspires her about her work and how she hopes to connect with communities in 2025.
Tell us a little about yourself and how you got to the Smithsonian.
I became interested in the history of medicine even before I knew there was such a thing! As a kid, I loved books like The Secret Garden, Little Women, and the Little House books but I was really puzzled by all the references to diseases I had never heard of such as cholera, tuberculosis, and scarlet fever. In college and then in grad school, I opted to study how people in the past experienced illnesses and how physicians and nurses cared for patients before they understood how diseases spread.
After grad school I became the historian for the U.S. Public Health Service (2001). While working at the PHS, I became really interested in preservation—in part because the hospitals on Ellis Island, which are linked to the Public Health Service, were being renovated. And so, in 2008, I applied to become the Branch Chief for the National Historic Landmarks Program, the National Park Service’s premier preservation program. I loved working with local communities to preserve their historic and archaeological sites. But in 2015, after I had been at the Park Service for 7 years, the Smithsonian advertised for a historian to oversee their history of medicine and science collections. The opportunity to work with the Smithsonian’s amazing history of medicine collections made me realize how much I had missed the opportunity to focus on the history of medicine. I’ve been here ever since, and I have yet to grow tired of exploring our collections!
Why is your area of interest important?
In a time when we are very divided, one thing unites us: we all know what it’s like to be sick. But while being ill is one of the most universal human experiences, we rarely ever think about what it was like to be sick in the past—before vaccination, before antibiotics, and before we even understood how diseases spread. This may be because when we are sick, we tend to be too miserable to think about the past! But epidemics and diseases have shaped the outcomes of wars, immigration policies, politics, our workplaces and, much more importantly, our families. Today, we live in a world in which diseases are heavily controlled and contained so it’s easy to forget how diseases shaped the past. But, as we saw with the COVID-19 pandemic, diseases still pose a threat. Understanding how people responded to diseases and epidemics is key to understanding not only our past but also our present and future.
What inspires you, excites and challenges you about your job or department?
The National Museum of American History has over 100,000 objects related to the history of medicine and science. Our collections range from an 18th-century obstetrical kit to 19th-century patent medicines to 20th-century artificial hearts. Caring for, and adding to, this collection is an ongoing struggle. Like all museums, we don’t have enough storage space, so we think very carefully about what we are collecting—and we need to periodically review what we have collected. It’s a difficult challenge but an interesting one as it pushes us to explore and think deeply about the material culture around medicine and the people who have used these objects.
Tell us about something in your recent work you are particularly proud of and why.
During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, we asked people across the country to contact us and share their pandemic stories. We also asked them to tell us what they thought we should collect to document this story. We got a huge response (we are still receiving responses!). Many Affiliates worked with us, both in thinking about how we should collect and how we should tell this story. Working together with Affiliate museums enabled us to ensure that objects went to the best homes, whether that was the American History Museum or an Affiliate organization. We especially loved working with Affiliates on our Pandemic Perspectives virtual programming. These programs ranged from the light-hearted (“How to Look Good on a Zoom Call,” for example, highlighted historic make-up and personal care products) to the more serious (“Race and Place” which explored the yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia in 1793). Our audience especially loved the program we did which highlighted how several Affiliate museums were collecting around the pandemic. We loved it, too, because we learned a lot about how museums were thinking about this work across the country.
We are always looking to share people and resources with our Affiliate network, what would you like to share with them or what specifically would you love to talk about in a speaking program hosted by an Affiliate?
I love to share our collections and their stories. I’m especially interested in speaking to and hearing from audiences across the country about their experiences with the stories listed below:
- Sex Education/Reproductive Health: Why has sex education been so controversial since its beginnings in the 1890s? How has the battle over birth control as well as the fight to contain sexually transmitted diseases shaped American culture and history?
- Women’s Health: Why have issues related to women’s health been neglected? How have changing ideas about women shaped the practice of medicine?
- Infectious Diseases/Vaccines: How do we experience infectious diseases differently from our ancestors? Why has vaccination been so controversial?
- Collecting Around COVID-19: How will we tell the story of COVID-19? In 2020, the National Museum of American History issued a call to Americans to hear their stories about the pandemic. We are still collecting around this story, and we would love to engage in a discussion about this with Americans across the country.
- Mourning Rituals: Why were the Victorians so obsessed with death? How did changing ideas about religion and science, along with new technologies, change how nineteenth-century Americans understood death?
Thank you to Alexandra for sharing a little about her work with us. As Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III said in a recent Smithsonian magazine article, “One of the reasons I agreed to become Secretary years ago was because of my profound respect for the amazing work of my colleagues.” The Smithsonian “is a collection of amazing people who do work that sometimes is not understood, sometimes that is undervalued, but it’s work that as Secretary, I see as essential to a nation understanding itself.” We hope you enjoyed meeting one of these amazing people and hope you’ll stay tuned for more Five Questions With… interviews this year.
If you are a Smithsonian Affiliate interested in inviting Alexandra to your neighborhood this year, please fill out this Speaker Interest Form and an Affiliations team member will be in touch to discuss in more detail.
