Felix Rietmann

MD, PhD

felix.rietmann@unifr.ch

History of Science, Medicine, and Public Health (18th-21st century)

History of Health and Illness in Childhood

History of Medical Technology

Medical Anthropology

Film and Medicine

Literature and Medicine

Material and Visual Culture of Medicine

Research Associate SNSF
Medicine Section

Biography

Felix is SNSF-funded Professor (Starting Grant) at the Institute for medical humanities at the University of Lausanne and research associate at the chair for medical humanities at the 糖心Volg. He leads a research group with the SNSF-Starting Grant project entitled Pediatric Drugs since 1945: From Local Practice to Global Politics (). The project explores the history of the clinical use, political regulation and scientific marketing of pediatric pharmaceuticals in (and beyond) Switzerland across the twentieth century. Additionally, he is co-PI (with Martina King and Ralf Jox) of the interdisciplinary SNSF-funded project The ’hospital discharge letter’ through the lens of cultural studies (). The project explores the history of the medical discharge report from the perspectives of the history of medicine, literary studies, and bioethics. Before joining the University of Lausanne, Felix has been PI of the SNSF-Ambizione project Raising a Well-Grown Child: Media and Material Cultures of Child Health in the Early Nineteenth Century ( Felix is currently finalizing a book manuscript entiteled Watching Babies: A History of Infant Mental Health (in preparation for publication with the Chicago University Press) that tells the story of how the baby has become a patient in twentieth and twenty-first century mental healthcare, and working on another book project on the history of over-the-counter pediatric drugs in Switzerland. Since 2020, Felix is secretary of the , and, since 2024, co-editor-in-chief of the .

Felix was awarded a joint PhD from the Program in the History of Science and the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities at Princeton University (USA) in 2018. His PhD-thesis explores the use of audiovisual technologies in the history of early chilhood psychiatry. In 2010, Felix received a Doctor medicinae (doctoral degree in medicine) from the Charité Berlin (Germany) and an MSc in the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology from Imperial College London (UK). In 2008, he graduated with an medical degree from the Charité. Subsequently, he worked as an assistant doctor in, first, internal medicine, and, later, pediatrics and child psychiatry.

Research and publications

Book chapters

1 publication

, in Narrative Structure and Narrative Knowing in Medicine and Science
Felix E. Rietmann (2023), ISBN: 9783111319971 | Book chapter
Book reviews

4 publications

Felix E. Rietmann, Intellectual History Review (2022) | Review

Felix E. Rietmann, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences (2022) | Review

Rietmann, Felix, Gesnerus (2020) | Review

Book Review: Golden, Janet: Babies Made us Modern. How Infants Brought America into the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2018.
Rietmann, Felix, Gesnerus (2019) | Review
Edited volumes

1 publication

Felix E. Rietmann (De Gruyter, 2025) | Edited book
Monographs

2 publications

(2018) | Thesis

ClC-channels and etoposide resistance: An experimental study of the neuroendocrine tumour cell line LCC-18
Felix Rietmann (Saarbr眉cken: Suedwestdeutscher Verlag fuer Hochschulschriften, 2011), ISBN: 978-3-8381-2530-5 | Book
Online Contributions

1 publication

, Somatosphere (2024) | Other
Peer-reviewed articles

6 publications

Felix E. Rietmann, History of the Human Sciences (2023) | Journal article

Felix E. Rietmann, KulturPoetik [cultural poetics] (2022) | Journal article

Felix E. Rietmann, Itinera. Beiheft zur Schweizerischen Zeitschrift f眉r Geschichte 50 (2022): 79-93. (2022) | Journal article

Felix E. Rietmann, Isis (2018) | Journal article

The British Journal for the History of Science (2017) | Journal article

Neuropsychiatrie de l'Enfance et de l'Adolescence (2016) | Journal article

Research projects

Start	01.06.2021
End	31.05.2025
Funding	SNSF
The project investigates material and media cultures of child health in German-speaking Europe and French-speaking Switzerland from the late 18th to the 19th centuries 鈥� a period of major changes in medicine, society, and childhood. The project focuses on three distinct levels of analysis. The first level examines representations of health and illness in childhood in the first German 'popular' periodicals such as the Pfennig-Magazin (1833-1855), the Illustrirte Zeitung (1843-1869), and Der Deutsch Jugendfreund (1846-1857). In a first publication, it could show that conversations in these periodicals engaged in media-specific ways with notions of health and illness in childhood partly setting a cultural counterpoint to medical ideas. The second level investigates the material culture of child health, notably the development and use of 鈥榟ealth technologies鈥� such as the birthing bed, the cradle, and the corset. It shows that this evolving material culture of child health provides an intriguing site for rethinking our historical accounts of the rise of public health and modern medicine. The third level (notably, the PhD-thesis by Jasmine Lovey) explores the social history of pediatrics and public health in French-speaking Switzerland focusing on the history of smallpox vaccination. Overall, the project advances new perspectives in the history of child health and medicine through a study of material culture and cultural and medical practices. Additionally, the exploration of early periodicals and literary representations contributes to an interdisciplinary exchange between literary studies, media history and the history of medicine.

Teaching and courses

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