2026 AAHM + AAHN Annual Meeting: Full Schedule

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9:30am EDT

A5. Reframing the History of 19th century Medicine

Friday June 5, 2026 9:30am - 11:00am EDT

The 19th century in the history of medicine has been viewed as an era of epistemic changes brought about by the advent of the germ theory and the rise of laboratory medicine. While building upon these existing frameworks, this panel makes a historiographical intervention in our understanding of 19th-century medicine by adopting a polycentric approach, expanding the canvas of actors and institutions, ideas and practices as well as bodies and spaces associated with medicine.

This roundtable brings together four speakers who illustrate the dynamism of 19th-century medicine by reorienting our understanding of familiar themes through race medicine, psychiatry, death, and sexuality. Focusing on the use of race in 19th-century medicine, Suman Seth unpacks one of the deepest contradictions of race medicine that was based on differentiating between black and white bodies while simultaneously using black subjects to understand diseases that afflicted white bodies. Sohini Chattopadhyay highlights the significance of death and display, focusing on the prototype of vertical burial pits as a British imperial invention to conceal starvation-related famine deaths and limit expenses while reinforcing divisions of caste and community. Arnav Bhattacharya revises the Eurocentric focus of the Foucauldian argument of the medicalization of sexuality in the 19th century by revealing how disparate sites ranging from Beirut to Bombay influenced the production of sexological knowledge, the practice of sexology, and the diagnosis and treatment of sexual disorders. Through such themes, this roundtable opens up a wider cast of “experts”, social differences, locations, and practices to rethink the assumed characteristics of 19th-century medicine.

Chair email: [email protected]

Learning Outcomes

To reframe our understanding of 19th-century medicine by expanding on the set of actors, practices, institutions, and locations usually associated with major historical developments in that era.
To unpack how historical developments in race medicine, psychiatry, sexual health, as well as the management of the dead, are relevant for medical practice today, as they overlap with core questions of social identity and bioethics in medicine.
The roundtable directly speaks to the issue of the social determinants of medicine as well as the equitable and inclusive representation of health practitioners by highlighting how these were historically relevant concerns even in the 19th century.

Moderators

Suman Seth

Cornell University

Speakers

Karim Malak

Wagner College

Sohini Chattopadhyay

Assistant Professor, Union College

Arnav Bhattacharya

University of Pennsylvania

Friday June 5, 2026 9:30am - 11:00am EDT
Ellicott Room Hyatt, Floor 2

Concurrent Session, AAHM Roundtable

12:30pm EDT

B5. Medicine and the Senses in Asia: Regional Stories

Friday June 5, 2026 12:30pm - 2:00pm EDT

Ellicott Room

While historians of medicine are keenly aware of the importance of sensorial knowledge and practice in healing, most studies have focused on Western societies and the five conventional senses. By discussing medicine and the senses in Asia, this first roundtable, together with a related one submitted separately, aims to reconceptualize what constitutes the senses by exploring a wide range of sensorial conditions and techniques in various Asian healing cultures, from East, South, and Southeast Asia to the Near East. Furthermore, the discussion seeks to shed light on the connection between the senses and culture, gender, and politics in various Asian contexts.

Lisa Brooks discusses the central role of touch in the ontology, epistemology, diagnostics, and treatments of first-millennium Ayurvedic medicine, through which to reveal constructions of gendered interactions and embodied knowledge in premodern South Asian medical sources. Lan Li discusses the sense of ma in premodern Chinese medical and literary sources, a word that denotes a common plant yet encapsulates a multiplicity of sensations related to plant-human relations, including flavor, touch, and pain. Saghar Bozorgi discusses the role of embodied practices in healing mental illness, through oral history narratives of 1960s and 1970s Iran, demonstrating how the senses of non-human creatures could directly impact a human’s mental well-being. Finally, Nicole Barnes discusses the odor of night soil, or “humanure,” in modern China, illustrating how sensitivity to the stench of humanure and its related health concerns became politically mobilized in the Mao era.

Collectively, this roundtable intends to expand our understanding of the senses by bringing key Asian perspectives into the conversation. We also hope that medicine and the senses can be a useful window through which to acquire deeper insights into a given Asian society.

Chair email: [email protected]

Learning Outcomes

Develop the capacity for critical thinking about the nature, ends and limits of medicine
Understand the dynamic history of medical ideas and practices, their implications for patients and health care providers, and the need for lifelong learning
Recognize the dynamic interrelationship between medicine and society through history

Moderators

Ruth Rogaski

Vanderbilt University

Speakers

Lan Li

Johns Hopkins University

Saghar Bozorgi

Princeton University

Nicole Barnes

Duke University

Friday June 5, 2026 12:30pm - 2:00pm EDT
Ellicott Room Hyatt, Floor 2

Concurrent Session, AAHM Roundtable

2:15pm EDT

C5. Medicine and the Senses in Asia: Cross-Cultural Stories

Friday June 5, 2026 2:15pm - 3:45pm EDT

Ellicott Room

This roundtable highlights the cross-cultural exchange of sensorial knowledge and practice between different healing cultures within Asia and between Asia and the West. Each participant’s case study reveals a dynamic process of translocal interplay in forming emergent understandings about the senses in relation to the body, conditioned by commercial interests, religious aspirations, and colonial influences. Yan Liu examines how transregional exchange of aromatics from West, South, and Southeast Asia—like saffron, camphor, and frankincense—shaped the production of olfactory knowledge and its relation to medical practice among Chinese physicians in the medieval period. Claire Cooper investigates how “mummy medicine,” as knowledge and commodity, was translated from early modern Dutch pharmacopeia into Japanese medical treatises, and the multisensorial ethical concerns that emerged in Japan from the idea of consuming the dead. Genie Yoo explores the role of the body and the senses in Islamicate understandings of spirit possession and exorcism in early modern and modern Indonesia, with an emphasis on the medical and magical potency of Quranic verses in their recited, written, and edible forms. Finally, Ling Ma illuminates how Euro-American missionary surgeons based in China at the turn of the twentieth century relied on touch to establish trademark “modern” methods in diagnosing and treating the birthing body of Chinese women. Paying attention to both local and transregional dynamics influenced by the circulation of commodities, ideas, and people, this second roundtable, together with a related one submitted separately, invites participants and attendees to rethink the role of the senses in medicine and society across regions and time periods, while bringing a diversity of Asian perspectives into the conversation.

Chair email: [email protected]

Learning Outcomes

Develop the capacity for critical thinking about the nature, ends and limits of medicine
Understand the dynamic history of medical ideas and practices, their implications for patients and health care providers, and the need for lifelong learning
Recognize the dynamic interrelationship between medicine and society through history

Moderators

Pablo Gómez

University of Wisconsin, Madison

Speakers

Genie Yoo

University at Buffalo, SUNY

Yan Liu

University at Buffalo, SUNY

Claire Cooper

Assistant Professor, Eastern Kentucky University

I am a historian of material and intellectual exchange in Japan from roughly 1600 to 1900, with a particular focus on the trading and consumption of medicine and medicinal substances.

Ling Ma

State University of New York, Geneseo

Friday June 5, 2026 2:15pm - 3:45pm EDT
Ellicott Room Hyatt, Floor 2

Concurrent Session, AAHM Roundtable

4:00pm EDT

D5. Doing Health History Across the Contemporary University

Friday June 5, 2026 4:00pm - 5:15pm EDT

Ellicott Room

Health historians are facing important challenges in the current higher education climate. While our courses add significant value to undergraduate, graduate, and professional education, their very premises are under assault from attacks on classroom speech and curricular content. An unprecedented termination of federal support for science and humanities research and education has created a resource crisis for public and private institutions alike, with direct and indirect effects for the health humanities. Histories of the health sciences link diverse spaces in the university: the undergraduate classroom, graduate programs, and professional training in nursing, public health, and medical schools. Yet in an atmosphere of retrenchment, the structures by which we collectively bridge these different parts of campus are themselves under threat.

This roundtable offers an opportunity to reflect upon these challenges and to develop strategies for facing them. It shares the perspectives of program directors in a range of settings—private and public, schools of health sciences and arts and sciences—to address scholarly vulnerabilities and tactics for resilience in the face of shrinking resources, new pedagogical threats, and collapsing support for inquiry into some of the principal axes of health humanities research, including (but not limited to) health disparities research. We seek to engage with an audience of peers to share concerns and learn about the experiences of health historians at all levels—graduate, professional, tenure-track, contingent—as a means of fostering scholarly community and building strength during a moment of exceptional precarity.

Chair email: [email protected]

Learning Outcomes

Participants will learn about significant challenges facing medical humanities programs in a range of settings.
Participants will develop critical thinking skills in the areas of pedagogy, humanities research, and program administration.
Participants will be able to strategize about ways to build resilience in the face of adversity.

Moderators

Richard Keller

University of Wisconsin-Madison

Contemporary history of Europe and global medicine and public health; disease ecology; social determinants of vulnerability; health implications of disaster

Speakers