[2] In this time he continued work in the history of zoology along the lines begun in his PhD: he reworked his thesis into his first book; he edited the two volumes Interpretations of Animal Form: Essays of Jeffries Wyman, Carl Gegenbaur, E. Ray Lankester, H. Lacaze-Duthiers, Wilhelm His, and H. Newell Martin (1968)[5] and Victorian Science (1970, with George Basalla and Robert H. Kargon); and he wrote the textbook Biology in the Nineteenth Century: Problems of Form, Function, and Transformation (1971).
[6][2][3] During this time he also wrote his 1966 article "Science and Symbol in the Turner Frontier Hypothesis,"[7] linking his research interests to American social and political theory.
[2] In 1971, Coleman moved to Northwestern University, near enough to Chicago to collaborate with Allen G. Debus and David Joravsky,[2] before returning to Johns Hopkins in 1973.
During his tenure at Wisconsin, he continued his work on class and disease, culminating in the 1982 book Death is a Social Disease: Public Health and Political Economy in Early Industrial France, and he spent the year 1982–1983 at the German Center for Interdisciplinary Research, Bielefeld seminar on probabilistic thinking[3] organized by Lorenz Krüger, Ian Hacking, and Nancy Cartwright; the seminar aided his transition to apply his interests in the history of medicine in the history of epidemiology,[3] leading to his final book, in 1987, Yellow Fever in the North: The Methods of Early Epidemiology.
[12][13] The Coleman Dissertation Fellowship provides a one-semester stipend, assessed at $13,000 for 2024, a tuition waiver and health benefits, and additional printing, fax and photocopying privileges.