2026 AAHM + AAHN Annual Meeting: Full Schedule

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

Kavita Sivaramakrishnan

Columbia University

Beth Linker

University of Pennsylvania

Jeremy Greene

Johns Hopkins University

Dominique Tobbell

University of Virginia

Merlin Chowkwanyun

Columbia University

Friday June 5, 2026 4:00pm - 5:15pm EDT
Ellicott Room Hyatt, Floor 2

Concurrent Session, AAHM Roundtable

10:15am EDT

E5. Sexual Knowledge, Medical Power: Reframing the History of Sexology

Saturday June 6, 2026 10:15am - 11:45am EDT

Ellicott Room

Sexology, beginning with Heinrich Kaan’s Psychopathia Sexualis in 1844, has presented itself as a rigorous and objective science while simultaneously addressing medical and health concerns, often seeking to apply findings for clinical and therapeutic ends. Tensions over whether sexology has been descriptive or therapeutic, neutral or activist, and normalizing or pathologizing partly reflect these tensions between scientific origins and medical applications.

This disciplinary duality has also shaped the historiography of sexology. This history has developed largely through science and technology studies (STS), the history of sexuality, and the history of science. While these approaches have been fruitful, the contributions of historians of medicine to the history of sexology have been less clearly defined. Given the medical backgrounds of many sexologists, medical questions and applications, and the significance of sex therapy and sexual medicine, medical histories of the discipline are necessary. Some recent histories of transgender medicine, psychiatry, and fertility have shown possibilities of medical histories of sexology, but there is much more to be explored.

This roundtable brings together historians engaged in research into the history of sexology and the sexual sciences to think through the benefits and limitations of a “history of medicine” approach to sexology. Sophia DeLeonibus considers how intersections between sexology, psychoanalysis, and psychiatry informed the making of the category of “gender identity” in the mid-20th century US. Donna Drucker considers the role of technology in defining sexology as medical practice. Kirsten Leng examines the role of female sexologists in early-20th century Germany, and the ways in which their work entangled medical and scientific knowledge with desires for social change. Ezra Gerard’s research investigates how medicalized understandings of childhood development were central to sexologists’ constructions of homosexuality. Rachel Louise Moran (speaker/moderator) examines “female sexual dysfunction” in the mid-20th century US, and tensions between psychiatric and physiological solutions. Sohini Mukhopadhyay explores the great diversity of the “unruly appropriations” of Euro-American sexology in turn-of-the-century Bengal, including the role of doctors.

Chair email: [email protected]

Moderators

Rachel Louise Moran

Professor of History, Texas A&M University

Speakers

Donna Drucker

Columbia University

Ezra Gerard

Independent Scholar

Kirsten Leng

Department of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Sophia DeLeonibus

Yale University

Sohini Mukhopadhyay

PhD candidate, University of Illinois At Chicago

Saturday June 6, 2026 10:15am - 11:45am EDT
Ellicott Room Hyatt, Floor 2

Concurrent Session, AAHM Roundtable

1:00pm EDT

F5. Historian-Clinician Engagement

Saturday June 6, 2026 1:00pm - 2:30pm EDT

Ellicott Room

While their perspectives may differ, both clinicians and medical historians share a common interest in the history of health care. The premise, therefore, of this roundtable is that historians and clinicians have much to offer each other in both theory and practice. This is particularly true at a time when medical history is occupying an ever more precarious place in the medical school curriculum. Further, while dated stereotypes about Whiggism and presentism persist, the clinician population is changing as are its historical interests. The possibilities for new areas of collaboration are expanding.

Growing out of an ad hoc committee on clinician engagement, this roundtable will explore practical strategies for expanding historian-clinician engagement. This roundtable will facilitate discussion between clinicians and historians, and generate additional ideas that can be applied at the institutional and local level.

Shelley McKellar PhD will draw on her experience teaching medical students and residents, who are seeking venues and communities for avocational clinicians interested in the history of medicine
Mindy Schwartz MD will discuss the Clio Project and the development of an online community to support medical history
Justin Barr MD, PhD will provide insights into publishing history in medical journals from his perspective as both an author and the history editor for Annals of Surgery Open
Peter Kernahan MD, PhD will discuss historical initiatives at the American College of Surgeons
Julie Lemmon MD will comment on historian-clinician interaction from the perspective of a clinician completing a master’s degree in the history of medicine
David Korostyshevsky PhD will discuss his experience researching, writing, and producing a departmental history while a graduate student

Chair emails:
[email protected]
[email protected]

Learning Outcomes

To understand historical activities in the clinician community
To recognize the mutual benefits of collaboration between historians and clinicians
To develop initiatives for integrating history into the medical curriculum

Moderators

Walton O. Schalick, III

University of Wisconsin - Madison

Speakers

Justin Barr

Ochsner Clinic

Peter Kernahan

University of Minnesota

Shelley McKellar

Western University

David Korostyshevsky

Faculty, Colorado State University

I am an interdisciplinary historian studying addiction, gender, and the family at the nexus of medicine and law. My research interests also include life insurance medicine and the formation of enduring disparities in modern healthcare systems. I am an Instructor in the Department... Read More →

Julie Lemmon

Johns Hopkins University

Mindy Schwartz

University of Chicago Medicine

Saturday June 6, 2026 1:00pm - 2:30pm EDT
Ellicott Room Hyatt, Floor 2

Concurrent Session, AAHM Roundtable

3:45pm EDT

G5. Thinking with Southeast Asia

Saturday June 6, 2026 3:45pm - 5:15pm EDT

Ellicott Room

This roundtable brings together a group of scholars to discuss the possibilities for future directions in the history of medicine from the vantage of Southeast Asia. As a place of tremendous cultural and ecological diversity, shaped by the collision of different colonizing and decolonizing projects, Southeast Asia focuses our attention on those cross-cultural circulations of knowledge and transnational networks of expertise that shaped the everyday experiences of medicine, health and caregiving across the region and beyond. Indeed, we argue that this region, which remains "peripheral" to scholarship on the history of medicine, was never just "out there" but was instead a constitutive feature of the global development of medicine and public health. The four panelists will offer vignettes from their current projects. Anh Le (Assistant Professor, Muhlenberg College) will speak about how connections across diasporic Chinese communities in Southeast Asia reshaped the meaning and practice of traditional Chinese medicine in colonial Vietnam. Thuy Linh Nguyen (Associate Professor, Mount Saint Mary College) will discuss the health impacts of the colonial mining industry amidst the intensification of colonial capitalism and ecological degradation in Vietnam’s northern borderlands with China. Claire Edington (Associate Professor, University of California - San Diego) will discuss how we might use archival sources to recover the experiences of drug users and their families in Vietnam across the twentieth century. Michitake Aso (University at Albany - SUNY) will talk about the public health response to Agent Orange during and after the Vietnam War as a way to reframe our understanding of the relationship of medical science and postwar politics. This discussion will showcase how the history of medicine in Southeast Asia offers valuable conceptual frames for widening our field of vision, both within HOM and Southeast Asian Studies.

Chair email: [email protected]

Learning Outcomes

To deepen understanding of the importance of Southeast Asia to the global history of medicine and public health
To think with Southeast Asia as a generative site for exploring new themes and methodologies in the history of medicine
To reflect more generally on the relationship between area studies and the history of medicine, and to chart out future steps for collaboration across fields.

Moderators

Concurrent Session, AAHM Roundtable

2026 AAHM + AAHN Annual Meeting

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