C. Michele Thompson

Michele Thompson is a Professor of History at Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU) in New Haven, CT.  She received her M.A. (1985) from the University of Alabama and Ph.D. (1998) from the University of Washington, studying both ancient and modern Southeast Asia, the history of medicine, and late traditional China.  Her current teaching interests include Southeast Asia, history of science, medicine, and technology, and comparative colonialisms.  Select publications include: Vietnamese Traditional Medicine: A Social History (National University of Singapore Press, 2015); Translating the Body: Medical Education in Southeast Asia (co-edited with Hans Pols and John Harley Warner, National University of Singapore Press, 2017); "Gia Truyền: Family Transmission Texts, Medical Authors and Social Class within the Healing Community in Vietnam" Southeast Asia Research 25:1 (Winter 2017): 34-46; "Selections from Miraculous Drugs of the South by the Vietnamese Buddhist Monk Physician Tuệ Tĩnh (c 1330-c 1389)" in C. Pierce Salguero ed. Buddhism and Medicine, a Sourcebook (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017).  Thompson’s current research focuses on the involvement of the Vietnamese Buddhist Sangha in medical care during the 14th century, particularly the semi-legendary biography of Tue Tinh, a 14th century Vietnamese Buddhist monk-physician; and the history of vaccination for smallpox in all of Southeast Asia from the first introduction of this technique in 1805 to sometime in the 1970s when smallpox had been eradicated in every country in the region.