Rosenberg, Charles E.

Charles E. Rosenberg was an assistant professor of history at the University of Wisconsin until August 1963, then associate professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, starting in Sept. 1963.

Charles E. Rosenberg was born in New York City in 1936. He graduated with a B.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1956 and obtained both M.A.(1957) and Ph. D. (1961) from Columbia University. He joined the history faculty at the University of Pennsylvania in 1963, was promoted to Associate Professor in 1965 and Professor in 1968. He served as Chairman of the Department of History, 1974-1975 and 1979-1983 and as Chairman of the Department of History and Sociology of Science, 1991-1995. Rosenberg was Janice and Julian Bers Professor of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania.

Rosenberg left Penn for Harvard University in 2000. He was Professor of the History of Science and the Ernest E. Monrad Professor in the Social Sciences at Harvard University. He served as acting chair of Harvard's History of Science department in 2003-2004.

Rosenberg has written widely on the history of medicine and science and is best known for his Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866 (1962); The Trial of the Assassin Guiteau. Psychiatry and Law in the Guilded Age (1968); No Other Gods: On Science and American Social Thought (1976); The Care of Strangers. The Rise of America's Hospital System (1987); Explaining Epidemics (1992); and Our Present Complaint: American Medicine, Then and Now (2007).

He is a member of the American Philosophical Society, Institute of Medicine, and fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has served as president of the American Assocciation for the History of Medicine and Society for the Social History of Medicine (UK) and on the executive board of the Organization of American Historians. He is a recipient of the William H. Welch Medal of the AAHM, and the George Sarton Medal from the History of Science Society. He has been awarded fellowships by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Rockefeller Foundation.

Rosenberg has been married twice: first to Carroll Smith-Rosenberg and second to Drew Gilpin Faust.

The Charles E. Rosenberg papers exist all in the form of correspondence. The first correspondence series, organized alphabetically by title or subject, consists basically of files of Rosenberg's acquaintances, with whom he corresponded for scholarly discussion or for whom he wrote evaluations in support of job application, promotion or publication. This series includes two other features, namely, files of professional institutions with which he was affiliated (both inside and outside the University of Pennsylvania) or had publishing business; and files of two of Rosenberg's own research projects, the Cholera of 1832 research and the Charles J. Guiteau research.