Center for Medical Humanities & Social Medicine

Who gets sick, who gets better, and why?

The biological mechanisms of medical science and the quantitative sciences of public health only get us partway to the answers to these fundamental questions. Key aspects of our understanding of health and illness are only answerable through analyses that draw from the methods of humanities and social sciences—including ethnography, history, philosophy, and sociology—to help understand the social context of illness and health outside of the ordered environment of the hospital, clinic, and laboratory. The Johns Hopkins Center for Medical Humanities and Social Medicine is an interdisciplinary teaching and research unit that bridges the humanities, social sciences, and health sciences across the campuses of Johns Hopkins University to foster innovative interdisciplinary scholarship with maximum impact, and to train undergraduates, graduate students, and health professionals with skills to apply critical social analysis to the study of health and disease.

The Center’s current programs investigate: Medicine, Science, and Humanities; Critical Global Health Studies; Reproduction, Health, and Society; Technology, Data, and Health; Race, Racism, and Health; Social Medicine in Medical Education; and Arts, Humanities, and Health.

Together, the fields of social medicine and medical humanities and arts help health care professionals develop acumen in addressing nuance, contradiction and uncertainty in health care settings and in broader society.

NIH- NIAID Division of Infectious Diseases

Medicine, Science, and Humanities

The Program in Medicine, Science, and Humanities represents a growing movement in medical education that draws attention to the vital interplay between humanities on the one hand and medical and allied health fields on the other.

Critical Global Health Studies

The Program in Critical Global Health Studies is dedicated to thinking globally about the structures and systemic issues that affect health.

Reproduction, Health, and Society

The Program in Reproduction, Health, and Society engages with scholarship and practice that critically examine how these forces come to bear on individuals, institutions, and communities.

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Technology, Data, and Health

The Program in Technology, Data, and Health seeks to understand the complex role of diagnostic, therapeutic, and preventive devices in changing the definitions of health and illness, while focusing attention on the increasing role that information technology takes on in mediating access to care in past, present, and future.

An unidentified African American physician, assisted by a nurse, treating a baby born with a club foot at an unidentified public health clinic, circa 1945

Race, Racism, and Health

The Program in Race, Racism and Health draws on the immense expertise of our affiliates to engage in research, outreach and actions committed to the study of and action against racism in medicine. The Center recognizes the immense importance of critically examining the role of racism in the production of medical knowledge and the linkages between racist thought and legacies of oppression.

Social Medicine in Medical Education

The program in Critical Pedagogies of Health and Society seeks to build students’ structural capacities in social medicine, an interdisciplinary field which engages clinical, social science, public health, and health policy perspectives to better understand and intervene upon the social determinants, social meanings, and social responses to illness and health.

Arts, Humanities, and Health

The Program in the Arts, Humanities, and Health engages members of the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions and East Baltimore communities in a range of activities at the nexus of artistic expression, humanist inquiry and well-being.

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Events

Arts, Humanities, & Health / Critical Global Health Studies / Critical Pedagogies of Health and Society / Epidemic//Endemic / Media, Data, & Health / Medicine, Science, & Humanities / Race, Racism, & Health / Reproduction, Health, & Society

Launch of Epidemic//Endemic: A Web Series

February 3 to February 13

We are excited to launch the web series hosted by Dr. Alexandre White & Marian Robbins – Epidemic//Endemic! We invite you to check out our website, view our introduction video, and submit questions for our upcoming guest – Antoinette Cooper. Questions will be accepted from now until February 13^th at 12pm EST.

Antoinette Cooper is a poet, Collective Trauma Facilitator, and founder of Black Exhale, a non-profit dedicated to healing intergenerational trauma in Black Communities. Our conversation will focus on how critique of medicine from outside academia and medicine is critically important to making medicine better and more effective for all of us. All questions are welcome, but will be asked at the discretion of the hosts. Premise: To much of the public, the world of medicine is opaque, incredibly technical, and often inaccessible in terms of receiving care, understanding that care, developing scientific expertise, and the vast array of disciplines necessary to its practice. In turn, the world of medicine and medical care is cut off from much of the day-to -day life of Americans as well as people around the world. With this web series we seek to demystify not only medical knowledge but also the people who practice medicine at the levels of the clinical, public health, and health social sciences and humanities. Sponsored by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Agora Institute and the Johns Hopkins Center for Medical Humanities and Social Medicine, this interactive web series aims to bring together thinkers in medicine, the arts, social sciences, and humanities who speak to the critical questions and challenges facing public health and medicine today and engage in questions from a larger audience.

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