Medicine and medical understandings have played prominent and problematic features in framing transgender historiography. Often, the critical role of trans people in shaping and contesting medical knowledge and practices has been overlooked. In this workshop, we propose to turn the question around and ask what transgender history says about the history of medicine. How can we use transgender history and trans medicine as a lens to analyze broader developments in medicine? What does trans medicine tell us about knowledge production, medical technologies, and clinical practices in modern medicine? This workshop seeks to illuminate the history of trans/medicine as a broad analytical field with a variety of actors (activists, patients, media, institutions, experts), technologies (paper, pamphlets, membership magazines, newspaper articles, diagnostic tools, hormones, scalpels), and practices (community meetings, parties, rallies, blood tests, clinical examinations, construction of nosologies). The workshop approaches history as a meaningful way of responding to pressing issues for trans people and trans medicine in the present. Organizers: Ketil Slagstad, MD and Jacob Moses, PhD  

Robert H. Levi Leadership Symposium in Bioethics and Health Policy Susceptibility, Surveillance, and Stigma: A Conversation on History, Infectious Disease, and Genomics Modern public health practices for both infectious and noninfectious diseases rely heavily on screening technologies that can predict disease or susceptibility to disease before symptoms are present. Testing technologies have focused on transmission for infectious diseases and on inheritance or susceptibility for genetic diseases, with each category raising social and ethical issues for the people and populations tested and ‘labeled’ with disease. Increasingly, the distinctions between the two types of testing (and diseases) are dissolving, raising a new constellation of social and ethical issues. This public event will bring together a panel of experts to explore how screening technologies for infectious and noninfectious diseases have been used over time to understand and categorize not only disease, but also the people who have the disease. This moderated conversation will explore historical perspectives on (primarily genetic and infectious) disease causation and the relationship of causation to surveillance and stigma, with particular attention to the interplay with social and biological understandings of race. Panelists: Amy Fairchild, Dean and Professor, College of Public Health, Ohio State University Robin Scheffler, Associate Professor, Program in Science, Technology, and Society, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Quayshawn Spencer, Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of Pennsylvania Moderator: Jeremy Greene, William H. Welch Professor of Medicine and the History of Medicine, and Director of the Department of the History of Medicine and the Center for Medical Humanities and Social Medicine, Johns Hopkins University

The Sawyer Seminar on Precision and Uncertainty in a World of Data (a grant co-sponsored with Center for Medical Humanities & Social Medicine’s and the Department of Anthropology) presents “Black Beyond Data: Combating Racial Injustice Through the Digital Humanities: An Introduction” on Friday, September 17^th at 9am. Register here for event link. For more information about the Black Beyond Data project, for which CMHSM’s own associate director Sasha White is co-PI, see the article here.

Featuring Dr. Robbie Shilliam and Dr. Jeffrey Kahn of Johns Hopkins University. To register, visit Zoom Webinar. Part of the "Epidemic//Endemic" year-long speaker series sponsored by the Center for Medical Humanities & Social Medicine. Moderated by Dr. Alexandre White, Associate Director of the Center for Medical Humanities & Social Medicine. About the Epidemic//Endemic Speaker Series: The COVID-19 epidemic has starkly illuminated a series of structural forces in health and society that produce endemic disparities. As a result, older questions of inequalities, social relations, and political and economic ideology are now occurring in direct conversation with current issues associated with health and health care systems. The Center for Medical Humanities and Social Medicine at Johns Hopkins seeks to use this moment to bring scholars together for a yearlong discussion on the role of the COVID-19 epidemic in raising questions of wider importance to the social sciences and the humanities, and vice versa. Note on proceedings: We will be using the Q&A option of Zoom Webinar to collect questions throughout the talk to be asked to our speakers in the last section of the event. If your question is selected, we will ask you to come on screen and converse directly with the speakers. If you do not wish to come on screen, please let us know when submitting your question.