Lindsey Grubbs is a Hecht-Levi Postdoctoral Fellow at the Berman Institute of Bioethics. She holds a Ph.D. in English from Emory University, where she also obtained a certificate in bioethics. Grounded in the health humanities and feminist disability studies, her research and teaching focus on the literary and cultural history of medicine in America and bioethics, with a particular interest in psychiatry and neurology.

Lindsey’s work on the relationship between literature, medicine, and science has been published in Literature & Medicine, American Journal of Bioethics: Neuroscience, and the Routledge Handbook of Neuroethics, and is forthcoming in the Cambridge Companion to United States Literature and the Body. While at Johns Hopkins, she is at work on a book examining the role of literature in the development and dissemination of psychiatric diagnoses in nineteenth-century America. She also plans to research the ethical diagnosis and treatment of functional disorders, in which physical symptoms exist without an identifiable structural basis. These disorders are common, but poorly understood, and stigmatized patients fall between the gaps of traditional medical categories, shuttled between specialists trained with different vocabularies and assumptions about illness and treatment. With both projects, Lindsey hopes to contribute to the literary, historical, and ethical study of diagnosis and medical ambiguity.