Jesse Ballenger

Jesse Ballenger, PhD, teaches courses in health care ethics, the history of health care and the health humanities. His background is in the history of medicine and the interdisciplinary field of Science, Technology and Society. After working for more than a decade as a nursing assistant, he earned an MA and PhD in history from Case Western Reserve University, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University. He has lectured widely and written extensively on the ethical and policy implications of dementia. He is author of Self, Senility and Alzheimer’s Disease in Modern America: A History (Johns Hopkins Press, 2006), and coeditor of Treating Dementia: Do We Have a Pill for It? (Johns Hopkins, 2009) and Concepts of Alzheimer Disease: Biological, Clinical and Cultural Perspectives (Johns Hopkins, 2000).