Social Medicine in Medical Education

The Center for Medical Humanities and Social Medicine is committed to critical pedagogy with clinical and public health professions trainees as well as undergraduate and graduate students in a range of social science and humanities disciplines. This program 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. The practice of social medicine draws attention to the fact that all disease, cure, prevention, and health care inherently have social as well as biological dimensions that are of equal importance in ensuing positive health outcomes.   

Center scholars are actively involved in curriculum development and didactic education for medical students in their pre-clinical and clinical years at Johns Hopkins.  Through our contributions to broader curricular goals and more granular course content, we aim to train health professional students in critical awareness of structural forces, including racism, that shape health experiences, outcomes, and systems. 

Researchers

Joanna Behrman

Graduate Fellow

William Egginton

Director, Alexander Grass Humanities Institute; Professor, German and Romance Languages & Literatures, KSAS

Henry Fessler

Director, Fellowship Training Program in Pulmonary and Critical Care; Professor, SOM

Yulia Frumer

Professor, History of Science and Technology, KSAS

Jeremy Greene, Director

Director, Center for Medical Humanities & Social Medicine; Professor, Medicine & History of Medicine, SOM

Lindsey Grubbs

Graduate Fellow

Daniel Polsky

Distinguished Professor

Carolyn Sufrin, Associate Director

Associate Director, Center for Medical Humanities & Social Medicine; Professor, SOM

Charles Wiener

Professor, Medicine, SOM; Director Emeritus, Osler Internal Medicine Training Program

Roy Ziegelstein

Vice Dean for Education at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine

Upcoming Events

0 event(s) found.

Past Events

March 4, 2025
5:30pm – 7:00pm

Medicine and Society EB Reading Group – First Meeting

Medicine and Society Reading Group
The Medicine and Society Reading Group is an interdisciplinary group based at the East Baltimore campus that was created to provide a space for students interested in exploring the social, cultural, political, and historical dimensions of health and medicine. Meetings, held monthly, are led by students and cover topics like gender identity, vaccination, climate and the environment, race and ethnicity, and many, many others. We welcome all students looking for fruitful discussion and engagement with humanistic material beyond the clinical and scientific curriculums.
 
Join the Medicine and Society Reading Group for the kick-off meeting!
  Time and Date: Tuesday, March 4th, from 5:30 PM – 7:00 PM.
Location: East Baltimore campus, Armstrong Medical Education Building (AMEB) Room 270* * AMEB requires SOM ID Badge swipe to access. We will have students available to let people in for the first ten minutes of each meeting. After that, please email Jonathan Kuo if you are unable to access the building (jkuo17@jh.edu).
Food: Dinner and non-alcoholic beverages will be served!
RSVP: Sign up at the following link to join our listserv and hear about future events: https://forms.gle/LnggqsL59dcHUAPD6 . More Information: Check out our website!
Agenda: In addition to introducing everyone to the group, we will be discussing readings on the theme of "Identity, The Mind, and The Body." Please email Jon Kuo for full reading list.
 
If you'd like to receive email notifications about our meetings and events, please sign up to our listserv by filling out this form!
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February 24, 2025
Medicine, Science, & Humanities
6:00pm – 7:30pm

STS+MH Hub: Sofia Grant

The STS+Medical Humanities Hub will meet next on Monday, 2/24 from 6-7:30pm in Mergenthaler 266 on the Homewood campus. Dinner and drinks will be served.

At the meeting, Sofia Grant, a PhD student in History of Medicine, will workshop her second-year paper.

Please contact Hub organizer Gabrielle Robbins (grobbin4@jhu.edu) for a Zoom link and paper materials.

The STS+MH Hub is a collegial biweekly gathering for emerging scholars (graduate students, postdocs, early-career faculty, etc) to share their work and research. Our aim is to encourage institutional community around scholarship in Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Medical/Health Humanities (MH), as well as allied disciplines. The Hub is co-sponsored by the Center for Medical Humanities and Social Medicine and the Program in Medicine, Science, and the Humanities.
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February 10, 2025
6:00pm – 7:30pm

STS + MH Hub: Leigh Alon

 

The STS + MH Hub will meet on Monday 2/10 from 6-7:30pm in Mergenthaler 266 on the Homewood campus. Dinner and drinks will be served.

MD/PhD student Leigh Alon will workshop a talk for the Colloquium on the History of Psychiatry and Medicine, to be held at Harvard University on 2/20.

Please email Hub organizer Gabrielle Robbins (grobbin4@jhu.edu) for talk audio and slides, as well as a link for Zoom participation.
The STS+MH Hub is a collegial biweekly gathering for emerging scholars (graduate students, postdocs, early-career faculty, etc) to share their work and research. Our aim is to encourage institutional community around scholarship in Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Medical/Health Humanities (MH), as well as allied disciplines. The Hub is co-sponsored by the Center for Medical Humanities and Social Medicine and the Program in Medicine, Science, and the Humanities.
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January 27, 2025
Medicine, Science, & Humanities
6:00pm – 7:30pm

STS+MH Hub Kick-Off

The spring semester kick-off meeting for the STS+MH Hub (formerly Collective Scholarship Working Group) will be Monday 1/27 from 6-7:30pm in Mergenthaler 266 on the Homewood campus. Dinner and drinks will be served. Please join us to celebrate a return to campus and plan for the semester ahead!

The STS+MH Hub is a collegial biweekly gathering for emerging scholars (graduate students, postdocs, early-career faculty, etc) to share their work and research. Our aim is to encourage institutional community around scholarship in Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Medical/Health Humanities (MH), as well as allied disciplines. The Hub is co-sponsored by the Center for Medical Humanities and Social Medicine and the Program in Medicine, Science, and the Humanities.
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November 12, 2024
4:00pm

Levi Symposium on The Value(s) of Disposability in Health Care

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
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April 9, 2024
Critical Global Health Studies / Reproduction, Health, & Society
12:00pm – 5:00pm

Find the Midwife Project Launch

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.
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December 3, 2023
Critical Global Health Studies / Critical Pedagogies of Health and Society / Medicine, Science, & Humanities / Race, Racism, & Health
All Day

CFP: New Perspectives in the History of Child Health

**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

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September 6, 2023
Arts, Humanities, & Health / Medicine, Science, & Humanities
8:00am – 2:00pm

Visual Histories of Humor and Health: A Virtual Symposium

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.
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July 14, 2023

New “For the Medical Record” Mini Episode with Zubin Mistry

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.
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June 15, 2023

New “For the Medical Record” Mini Episode with Rana Hogarth

A new episode of “For the Medical Record” will be published June 15! In one of our mini episodes based on colloquium talks given here at Hopkins, we speak to Rana Hogarth about the paper that she presented at the Johns Hopkins Program in the History of Science, Medicine & Technology’s colloquium series titled “The Science of Skin Color: Miscegenation and the Eugenic Gaze in the Early Twentieth Century.” 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.
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