Roughly 80 percent of healthcare’s oversized carbon footprint derives from the production, transportation, use, and disposal of a single-use medical supply chain. Yet as health care organizations try to practice ‘resource stewardship’ – that is, to move away from single-use disposable items toward sustainable use of durable items – they encounter widespread perceptions that disposability is a necessary virtue in modern health care. Caregivers, patients, and health-system managers fear that any move from disposability to sustainability must lead to trade-offs in safety (from infectious threats), efficacy (in pharmaceutical delivery) or efficiency (in cost-effectiveness).

This year’s Levi Symposium will question these perceived trade-offs, disentangling legitimate evidential and moral reasoning from the inertia of convenience. Convening scholars and practitioners in bioethics, clinical practice, environmental justice, practice innovation, and health policy, we aim to host a multi-disciplinary exploration of how we can elucidate policy pathways that harmonize clinical safety, efficacy, and efficiency with sustainability. For more information and to register: https://bioethics.jhu.edu/disposability

Join us as we use documentary film to connect midwifery's past and today's maternal health crisis. You are invited to join us for project launch events on Tuesday, April 9th across two Baltimore campuses. 12pm - Homewood Campus - Clipper Room, Shriver Hall 3pm - East Baltimore Campus - Room N431, School of Nursing, with reception to follow. The events will be offered in a limited hybrid format via zoom webinar - Click here to join the events! No registration is necessary, just click on the link at the time of the events and you'll be able to join us online. You can submit a question via the Q&A function on the zoom webinar. Your questions will be read aloud for the project team to answer as time allows.   Sponsored by The Johns Hopkins Center for Advanced Media Studies, Department of the History of Medicine, and the Center for Medical Humanities & Social Medicine.

**2024 Workshop and Special Issue: Call for Proposals**

Call for paper proposals for an international workshop on child health history hosted at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, on June 21-22, 2024. There is support available for travel and lodging. The workshop is sponsored by: The Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) and the University of Fribourg

In bringing together junior and senior scholars working on issues surrounding children’s health and healthcare, the workshop aims at developing a series of articles for a special issue journal focusing on child health and children’s experiences of health and illness from a historical perspective. Though the field of children’s history has grown over the past thirty years, it deserves more attention from historians of medicine and public health. Therefore, the workshop aims to underscore the importance of child health as a field of research and point to its potential for historical and historiographical interventions in the history of medicine and public health. In addition to historians, we encourage paper proposals from scholars working at the intersections of histories of children’s health, disability studies, non-western areas of study, healthcare disparities, health policy, sociology, anthropology, or other related fields.  We especially encourage submissions from scholars whose work focuses on child health in low- and middle-income non-Western countries. Applicants must be prepared to submit a full working draft of their paper prior to the meeting. The workshop will be led by Jason Chernesky (Johns Hopkins University; jcherne2@jhmi.edu),  Janet Golden (Rutgers University; jgolden@camden.rutgers.edu), and Felix Rietmann (University of Fribourg; felix.rietmann@unifr.ch).

Please submit an abstract (max. 300 words) and a brief CV here. The deadline for submission is Friday, December 1, 2023. All questions can be addressed to Jason M. Chernesky: jcherne2@jhmi.edu

Register here for this virtual event! Join us for this virtual symposium exploring visual histories of humor and health, organized by Christine Slobogin, Katie Snow, and Laura Cowley in collaboration with Johns Hopkins's Center for Medical Humanities and Social Medicine. These discussions of medically adjacent art will examine the role that visual humor has had and continues to play in healing and healthcare, as well as in experiences of illness, injury, and death. This event aims to enrich interdisciplinary approaches to the medical humanities, humor studies, and histories of visual culture and art. This event will feature ten-minute short-form talks exploring vibrant intersections of humor, visual culture, and the health humanities, each followed by ample time for discussion, questions, and feedback involving all attendees. The speakers showcased are contributors to an upcoming edited volume, but the event is open to all, and we encourage people who are not contributors to join us and get involved. We will schedule regular breaks and aim to accommodate participation across multiple time zones. You are welcome to join late or leave early. Please reach out with any access needs at cslobog1@jh.edu.

A new episode of “For the Medical Record” will be published July 14! In one of our mini episodes based on colloquium talks given here at Hopkins, we speak to Zubin Mistry about the paper that he presented at the Johns Hopkins Program in the History of Science, Medicine & Technology’s colloquium series titled “The Problem of Monastic Gynecology: Reproduction, Religion and Medicine in Western Europe before 1100.” Subscribe to our podcast “For the Medical Record” to be alerted when new episodes drop – you can do this on Apple Podcasts or on Spotify.