Emily Abel

Emily Abel is a shortened form of the public-health historian's name, Emily K. Abel, professor emerita at the University of California, Los Angeles. UNC Press issued Sick and Tired, subtitled An Intimate History of Fatigue, in its Studies in Social Medicine series. The press describes Abel's book as a history of fatigue shaped by medical uncertainty, cultural expectations about productivity, and her own experience after cancer. Rather than treating tiredness as a simple symptom, she examines why patients have struggled to make the condition legible to doctors, employers, and families. The Society for U.S. Intellectual History independently discusses the book's blend of personal account and historical analysis. Abel's wider scholarship addresses care, illness, public health, and the social meanings placed on patients' experiences. Sick and Tired extends that work by asking how a common human condition became medically underrecognized and morally judged. The exact author record includes her middle initial, which this shorter byline omits.