AAHM 2025

Coffee provided at the meeting. Pick up your breakfast food from the Grand Ballroom Foyer and join the group in Back Bay C.

Come to the AAHM Registration Desk with your questions or needs for assistance. Please see the AAHM Visitors Guide tab in Sched for useful information.

Wi-Fi
Network: Marriott Bonvoy Conference Access Code: AAHM2025

A lactation room is available on the 3rd level of the hotel. Ask for the key at registration. Please see the AAHM registration desk for the key.

Gender-neutral restrooms are available on the 3rd level of the hotel near the Commonwealth Ballroom.

Enjoy medically-themed works of art in the collections of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Harvard Art Museums, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston using this detailed guide.

Information gathered by Christine Bentley (PhD). Assisted by: Jen Thum (PhD), Brooke DiGiovanni Evans (EdM), Corinne Zimmermann (MA, MEd), and Dabney Hailey (MA). Design by Elmira Bagherzadeh (MFA).

Visit the AAHM Book Exhibit. Learn more about the exhibitors here.

E1. Women’s Health in Global Perspective
Chair: Vincenza Mazzeo, Johns Hopkins University   
 

1. Sarah Duff, Colby College: “I am also oppad again”: Histories of Menopause in the Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony 
2. Prinisha Badassy, University of the Witwatersrand: “I am not a train for Glasgow”: Medico-legal Discourses of Puerperal Insanity and Infanticide in Colonial Natal, 1890-1920   

3. Brooke LeFevre, Baylor University: "'Evidently a Case of Extra-Uterine Pregnancy’: Analyzing Race, Class, and Queerness in the Cincinnati Hospital Obstetrics Ward, 1878-1881” 

To paraphrase Utathya Chattopadhyaya, research frameworks in which certain ideas and practices transition in and out of the status ‘medicine’ can risk reifying ‘medicalization’ as a concept. Tracking processes of medicalization in colonial settings have certainly helped to reveal key political and social impacts of biomedical diagnostic and treatment regimes in the global south, demonstrating how they have risen to dominance. Empirical cases also necessarily speak to the unevenness of their spread and the limits of their legitimation, across diverse lifeworlds in settings of inequality, resistance and neglect. The papers in this panel highlight four different case studies showing medicalization in South Africa as dynamic and contingent. In South Africa, quests for wellbeing have long involved multiple sites of knowledge-making, shaped by racial and economic formations of power and by cultures of formal and informal provisions of care and control. The authors here consider how institutions of the family, the courts, the laboratory/field, the clinic – and how different communicative forms – shaped expert, moral and relational pursuits of being well. These accounts, based on rich and diverse archival materials, help to unsettle and nuance approaches to medical histories in colonial contexts.

E2. The (Sometimes) Uneasy Relationship between History of Medicine and Disability Studies: Audience Discussion. Co-sponsored by Disability History Association (DHA) and AAHM 
Chair: Sarah Handley-Cousins, University at Buffalo   
 
Hannah Zaves-Greene, New York University 
Beth Linker, University of Pennsylvania 
Elaine Lafay, Rutgers University  
Michael Rembis, University at Buffalo 
Sarah Rose, University of Texas at Arlington 

In this roundtable, join the panelists for a conversation about the long and complex relationship between the History of Medicine and Disability Studies. Panelists will discuss the 2013 special issue of the Bulletin of the History of Medicine that focused on disability history and considered how the fields have progressed. The panelists will offer their perspectives and make some suggestions for how conferences can be made more accessible for all scholars in attendance. In addition, the panelists will engage the audience in a discussion about how to foster more connections between these two interrelated but distinct fields.

E3 Roundtable: Resuscitating the History of Nursing: A Roundtable on New Methods, Clinical Audiences, and Institutional Challenges  
Dominique Tobbell, University of Virginia (chair) 
 
In her 2022 Bulletin of the History of Medicine positioning paper, nurse and historian Patricia D’Antonio related nursing history to the history of medicine and called for new directions in the history of nursing. Theoretically and conceptually, nursing history has heeded critical cues from postcolonial studies, ethnic studies, queer theory, and disability studies. Historians have also engaged audiences of nurses and health policymakers through the digital humanities and collaborative interdisciplinary articles in health-science journals. Thus, this roundtable explores the following questions: How have nurses–as historical actors, care laborers, and as people–navigated their social and political contexts? What are new methodological approaches for studying the history of nursing? Also, what are the practical, material, and institutional circumstances that have forced historians–especially those working in nursing and health-sciences schools–to undertake these new approaches?

This roundtable brings together a diverse group of scholars who study nursing history in various contexts around the globe. Ravenne Aponte's project, "Nurses You Should Know," utilizes an Equity-Centered Community Design Framework to showcase the contributions of past and present nurses of color, serving as a resource for clinicians and educators. Ren Capucao explores the transnational history of Filipino nurses between the Philippines and the United States through a critical disability lens. Marissa Nichols’s work utilizes a linguistic analysis to center Indigenous nurses in twentieth-century histories of healthcare and development in Mexico. Andre Rosario “speaks two languages” when addressing historians and nursing or health researchers about his work, which focuses on immigrant nurses in the United States and examines their roles in shaping policies that protect other foreign-trained nurses from predatory international recruitment companies. The roundtable will be chaired by Dominique Tobbell, Centennial Distinguished Professor of Nursing and Director of the Eleanor Crowder Bjoring Center for Nursing Historical Inquiry at the University of Virginia.

E4. Ethics and Patient Data Initiative: Drafting Guidelines
Closed session for members of the committee to meet and review draft.

E5. Roundtable Geographies of Medicine in the Early Modern World: An Exploration in Pedagogy 
Chair: Lauren Kassell, European University Institute 
 
This roundtable examines the diverse health cultures and ideas of the body across the premodern world, with a focus on how best to teach a global history of early modern medicine to students. The six roundtable participants represent a range of geographies of early modern medicine: Latin America, China, the Ottoman Empire, North America/Atlantic World, and Europe. We also teach students at a variety of levels: undergraduates, graduate students, medical students. The goal of the roundtable is to spark a conversation that will lead to a co-written chapter, aimed at introductory students, on the geographies of early modern medicine.

The roundtable focuses on three key questions: how can we teach histories of medicine across the early modern world without “dumbing down” the nuances of the material? How can we foster connections and dialogues across the rich and diverse historiographies? What kind of resources might we create to make this topic accessible to undergraduates and medical students? We hope to provoke a lively conversation on the possibilities and perils of trying to teach truly global histories of early modern medicine.

* Develop knowledge and understanding of the rich geographies of early modern medicine
* Develop strategies for teaching global histories of early modern medicine to students

E6. Gendered Approaches to Fertility, Contraception and Abortion in the Medieval and Early Modern West  
Scottie Buehler, Sam Houston State University (chair) 
 

1. Nichola Harris, State University of New York Ulster: Concubines & Cockstones: Fertility, Contraception and Abortion in the Medieval English Lapidary Tradition
2. Anne Leone, Syracuse University: Gestational Development and Terminating Pregnancy in Boccaccio 

This panel focuses on premodern medical advice and pharmaceutical aids for fertility, contraception, and abortion in the medieval and early modern West. Three complimentary papers explore these topics using Italian, French and English sources from both religious and secular male authors.  Research findings presented in this panel not only provide insights into these important aspects of premodern women’s health and healing, but also highlight the fact that much of this information circulated in male-authored texts offering a singularly male perspective of reproduction and the use of female bodies. The first paper “Gestational Development and Terminating Pregnancy in Boccaccio” investigates the theological, legal and medical opinions on abortion contrasted with the lived female experience. The second paper, “Concubines & Cockstones: Fertility, Contraception and Abortion in the Medieval English Lapidary Tradition,” examines medical advice within vernacular Middle English lapidaries aimed at male audiences seeking reproductive control of female bodies. “Henry Daniel’s Family Planning: Omissions, Additions, and Ambiguities in Aaron Danielis,” the third and final paper in the panel, discusses pharmaceutical remedies involved in medieval family planning but also considers the ambiguity in the language used in Latin sources on the topics of abortion and contraception that often complicate modern inquiries. Such considerations of the historical use of contraception and abortifacients are especially timely in light of SCOTUS’ Dobbs v. Jackson decision, which includes references drawn from a thirteenth-century treatise and English Common Law. The use of historical sources by a modern jurist has spawned significant debate among researchers in the field of premodern medicine. As part of this ongoing debate, the proposed papers of this panel provide important evidence and insight into historical practices related to fertility, contraception, and abortion as well as offering substantive analysis of premodern Western cultural norms and attitudes in regard to women’s reproductive health.

Grab a cup of coffee or try out the "Grab and Go" lunch and head to the Poster Presentations starting at 11:45am. All will be located in the Liberty/Grand Ballroom Foyer

"Grab and Go" menu

Hot honey chicken, brussels sprout slaw, sweet pickle chip, sub roll @ $12.00

Grilled portobello tzatziki, grilled red onion, shredded carrot, pita pocket @ $11.00

Roasted turkey cured tomatoes, baby spinach, Brie, pesto mayonnaise on focaccia @ $12.00

Grilled Chicken & Chopped Romaine Salad, avocado, tomato, blue cheese, onion, bacon, cucumber, balsa @ $12.00

Individual Bags of Frito, Lays Potato Chips and Pretzels @ $3.00 Each

Soft Drinks – Assorted Pepsi Products | Still & Sparkling | Bubly @ $3.00 Each

Poster Presentations
(Some poster titles have been abbreviated. Complete titles available in the attached Poster Abstract Document)

P1. Erika Acosta, University of Pennsylvania, Steps Towards Self-Help and Solidarity: Cross-Racial Coalition Building in Philadelphia 

P2. Cameron Bernstein, University of Queensland-Ochsner Clinical School, Volatile Wellsprings: Offshore Oil Rigs and Early Adoption of Helicopter MEDEVAC 

P3. Carlson, Hannah, University of Minnesota, "A Uniform Exchange": Defining the Nursing Profession Through International Exchange

P4. Emi Glass, Yale University, “Women’s Right to Know”: Mandatory Ultrasound Requirements, the Fetal Image, and Informed Consent in Abortion Access

P5. Sara Hollar, Yale University, Fetal Portraits: Specimens from the Yale School of Medicine’s Forgotten Anatomical Collection 

P6. Jonathan Kuo, Johns Hopkins University, Revisiting “The San Francisco Experience”: Emotional Encounters and Intellectual Exchanges during the HIV/AIDS Study Tour 

P7.Julie Lemmon, Johns Hopkins University, Multiple Missions: The Army Medical Museum as Maker of Medical Knowledge and Site of Memory 

P8. Melanie Lorenz, Marquette University, From Choice to Control: The Marginalization of Midwives in the Early 20th Century.

P9. Marcus Milani, University of Minnesota The Value of Incorporating History in Medical Training: Insights from a Chest Tube Skills Workshop 

P10. Kimberly Monroe, Trinity Washington University, Medical Oppression and Resistance: The Health Struggles of Assata Shakur

P11. Knowledge Moyo, The University of Texas at Austin, “Feluna Pills for Females Only”: Blood, Advertisements, and the Gendered Medicalization of Women’s Bodies in Colonial Zimbabwe 

P12. Sohini Mukhopadhyay, University of Illinois-Chicago, Experts' Against 'Quacks' : How Sexology and the Popular Interacted in Late Colonial Bengal

P13. Nora O'Neill, Yale University, The Programmed Patient: The Standardization of the Doctor-Patient Relationship in US Medical Education 

P14. Kyle Patel, Johns Hopkins University, Anti-Colonial Medicine and the Indian State: The Life of Dr. Jivraj Mehta 

P15. Sophie Qi, Columbia University, Black Rage: Pathologizing Race Riots in the 1960s and 70s

P16. Peper Rivers, Indiana University, “Passive Cooperation” and “Artificial Motivation” at the Lexington Narcotics Hospital 

P17. Alexandria Soto, Duke University, “Sew What?”: Stapling Instruments and Their Impact on 20th Century Surgical Practice 

P18. Yash Wadwekar, Yale University, "Masked Altruism: Colonial Public Health and the Economic Exploitation of Bombay’s Poor (1896–1910) 

P19. Sloane Wesloh, Sloane, University of Pittsburgh, Computerization, the International Classification of Disease, and Diagnostic Precision 

P20. Jesse Ballenger, Drexel University and Sharrona Pearl, Texas Christian University, Facing Forgetfulness: The Iconography of Dementia in Medical and Popular Discourse since the 19th Century.  

P21. Zoe Beketova, Yale University, Malleable Minds, Controlled Bodies: Walter E. Fernald and the Social Eugenics of Feeblemindedness 

P22. Cadence Brown, Yale University, Secrecy in Pregnancy and Adoption: Lorraine Dusky’s Adoption Politics and Reproductive Justice   

P23. Semaj Campbell-Blakes, Syracuse University, Agents of Change: The Impact of Black Women Public Health Leaders on Teenage Mothers' Reproductive Care 

P24. Isabella Cantor, University of Rochester, Behind the Bars: Anonymity in Patient Imagery in the British Medical Journal, 1870-1930 

P25. Ashley Cooper, Yale University, Suicide as a Racialized Phenomenon: Unveiling the Cultural Image of Youth Suicide within the U.S. Public Imaginary 

P26. Alice Fan, Yale University, Memorializing Fetal Death: Buddhism, Grief, and Pregnancy Loss in the U.S., 1990-2013 

P27. Yating Li, University of Illinois Urbana- Champaign, Starting from Symptoms: The Rise of "Womb Maladies" in Republican China 

P28. Alex Hsu-Chun Liu, Institute of STS, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Indigenous Minds Acculturated: A Transculturalist’s Fieldwork Amid the Crisis of Identity and Masculinity in a Settler Colony 

P29. Evan Roberts, University of Minnesota, “Such a rash act”: Wartime experiences and veteran suicides after the Great War 

P30. Rena Patricia Seeger, University of Ottawa, The Evolution of Patient-Centered Decision-Making in Lung Cancer Surgery 

P31. Daniela Krahe, Johns Hopkins University, Do or Do Not Resuscitate, Who Decides? The Emergence of

F1. Reclaiming Black Health and Reimagining Black Futures in the Civil Rights Era and its Wake  
Chair: Samuel Kelton Roberts, Columbia University  
 

1. Udodiri Okwandu, Rutgers University: The War on Postpartum Psychosis: Dr. Elizabeth B. Davis, Family Planning, and Racial Uplift in 1960s Black Harlem 
2. Kelsey Henry, Princeton University: “Deprivatized Emotions, Public Feelings: Kenneth B. Clark and the Psychologization of Antiblack Environments in the U.S., 1950s – 1960s" 
3. Angelica Clayton, University of Pennsylvania: Cycles of Grief and Mourning Absence: The Origins of Intergenerational Trauma and its Critiques, c. 1970-2000  
4. Alexandra Fair, Harvard University: “Black Panther Party Challenges Racist to Intellectual Duel": The Black Panther Party's Anti- Eugenic Activism   

In Listening to Images, Tina M. Campt defines “black futurity”  as the “power to imagine beyond current fact and envision that which is not but must be” to resist the subordination of Black communities. A commitment to black futurity was central to the Civil Rights Movement, which catalyzed the eventual abolishment of legalized racial segregation and discrimination. Yet, as Campt aptly observes, black futurity is not only evident in “political movements and acts of resistance” but also “less likely places.” In this vein, this panel explores how a diverse range of Black practitioners – including community organizers, developmental psychologists, social workers, psychiatrists, and psychoanalysts – articulated and advanced black futurity in both the scientific and medical domains, ultimately envisioning them as critical sites to achieve social, political, and economic liberation. While cognizant that legal disenfranchisement and economic marginalization were central to racial oppression, they also interrogated how, for example, contradictory scientific discourses and postwar policies, racial biases embedded in clinical interactions,  unequal access to healthcare, and psychiatric and psychological conceptual frameworks normed around white populations,  perpetuated Black marginalization. As the Civil Rights Movement spawned countercultures, the movement’s heterogeneous offshoots  reflected novel political ideologies and approaches to achieving Black liberation, many of which exemplified the Black Panther Party’s holistic commitment to “Serve the people body and soul.” Foregrounding the  anti-eugenic politics of the Black Panther’s Intercommunal News Service,  Kenneth B. Clark’s quest for an antiracist social psychiatry at the Northside Center for Child Development, Black psychiatrist Elizabeth Bishop’s efforts to depathologize Black motherhood through family planning at Harlem Hospital Center, and Black researchers’ alternative models of intergenerational trauma and healing, this panel positions Black health activism as integral to the success of  Black social movements more broadly.   Thus, this panel not only highlights understudied and undertheorized interventions at the intersection of health politics and liberatory movement toward Black futurity, but also emphasizes their significance for understanding the historical struggle for Black freedom.

F2. Public Health in Global Perspective 
Raúl Necochea López, University of North Carolina  
 

1. Gabriela Soto Laveaga, Harvard University: Nutrition, Race, and the Value of Corn  
2. John Eicher, Pennsylvania State University: Your Lying Eyes: Government Mistrust During the 1918 Influenza Pandemic at the End of WWI   
3. Nathan Chaplin, University of Iowa: The Servicio Cooperativo Interamericano de Salud Pública: Negotiating Race, Gender, and Public Health in Nicaragua, 1942-1946 
4. Pamela Maddock, University of Sydney: Disease control, gendered tools, and imperial work: Women navigating labor and public health in US-occupied Manila, 1902  

F3. Roundtable HIPAA, Privacy and Accessing Historical Medical Records  
Chair: Alexandra Lord, National Museum of American History 


In 1996, HIPAA created national standards to protect a patient’s health information from being disclosed without the patient’s consent or knowledge. As it was originally written, HIPAA also effectively prevented historians and descendants from ever accessing medical records if they were stored in entities covered by the law. By 2013, the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) had recognized the problem caused by “the lack of access to ancient or old records of historical value.” That year, HHS published 45 CFR 164.502(f), a rule amending HIPAA and allowing patient records to be accessed 50 years after the patient’s death.

While some states opened their medical archives, laws banning or sharply limiting access to these records are still widespread. New York State, for example, requires historians seeking access to nineteenth-century asylum records to submit to an IRB. Michigan recommends that researchers hire an attorney and obtain a court order. But the situation is even worse in states such as Massachusetts where historians and descendants are barred from accessing these records.

To some degree, these restrictions are understandable. After all, medical records include sensitive private information. But banning or, more simply, imposing requirements which make these records inaccessible puts them at risk of destruction. It also prevents scholars from using them to develop a nuanced and deep understanding of the experiences of patients in the past.

In 2016, an AAHM panel explored the potential destruction of these records along with issues around Privacy Boards and researchers’ access. Building on that conversation, this proposed roundtable will focus on both changes over the last nine years as well as the impact of state laws on care of and access to these records. Bringing together key stakeholders, including archivists, community historians, academic historians and public historians, this roundtable will also explore the ways in which historians, archivists, and practitioners can work together to develop best practices for safeguarding records while providing scholars and others with access.
This roundtable will encourage the following Learning Objectives:
* Develop knowledge and understanding of professional behaviors and values:
* Understand the dynamic history of medical ideas and practices, their implications for patients and health care providers, and the need for lifelong learning by promoting an understanding of how concepts of patient privacy have shifted over time
* Promote tolerance for ambiguity of theories, the nature of evidence, and the evaluation of appropriate patient care, research, and education by promoting an understanding of how concepts of patient privacy have shifted over time

Contribute to the improvement of patient care
* Acquire a historically nuanced understanding of the organization of the U.S. healthcare system, and of other national health care systems by promoting an understanding of both the ways in which concepts of patient privacy have shifted over time and the need to ensure that patient records are maintained for future study by historians and practitioners
 * Respond to changes in medical practice guided by a historically informed concept of professional responsibility and patient advocacy by promoting an understanding of how concepts of patient privacy have shifted over time

F4. Roundtable Carceral Sickness: Towards Inclusive Research with New York State Correctional Facility Records  
Chair: Richard McKay, University of Cambridge 
This roundtable discussion will reflect upon the groundbreaking experience of a team of researchers - three formerly incarcerated college graduates and one university-affiliated historian - working together to investigate questions of sickness, disability, race, and scientific racism using century-old prison records at the New York State Archives.

The roundtable’s four speakers came together to work on an exploratory research project intended to broaden access to archival prison records and animate the expertise of people with lived experience of the carceral system. The project focuses on records from Elmira Reformatory and Eastern Correctional Facility at Napanoch, two New York institutions linked through hundreds of prisoner transfers, and especially by the carceral journey of one man whose 1920s syphilis infection and prison experience initially attracted the historian’s attention in 2020.

In 2023, the historian participated in a powerful work-in-progress presentation about this man’s experience with an audience of formerly incarcerated alumni of Hudson Link for Higher Education in Prison, in Ossining, New York. Their collective wisdom and enthusiasm encouraged the historian to co-design this collaborative project with guidance and funding support from Hudson Link, leading to additional funding from the New York State Archives Partnership Trust in the form of a Larry J. Hackman Research Residency award in 2024.

In addition to reflecting upon the project design, the speakers will discuss their experiences of recruitment and interviews in spring 2024, their six days of archival research and reflective discussions during summer 2024, and three presentations, culminating with one to college students inside Sing Sing Correctional Facility. They will share the successes and challenges of their journey and lessons learned about the value of such partnerships for reaching broader audiences. They will also give attention to the issue of dehumanization in prison systems past and present, the role of prison psychiatrists in shaping the New York state carceral system, and the fraught relationship of documentary evidence to prisoners’ lived experience.

* Develop a historically informed understanding of sickness and health in the carceral system
* Learn new ways of designing and conducting health history research
* Develop an understanding of the influence of eugenics and scientific racism on medical practice and patient experiences

F5. Disability in America 
Chair: Barron Lerner, New York University, Langone Health 
 

1. Deirdre Cooper Owens, University of Connecticut: Harriet Tubman, Slavery & the Contours of Disability     
2. Emma Wathen, University of Wisconsin-Madison: These “Children Won’t Become Women”: Depo-Provera, Menstruation, and Mental Disability   
3. Heather Dron, Sterilization & Social Justice Lab, UCLA Institute for Society & Genetics: Sonoma State Hospital at a Crossroads: Entangled Goals of Innovation, Care, & Prevention of Disability at Mid-Century (1950-1970)   
4. Beth Linker, University of Pennsylvania: The Other Disabled President: JFK’s Chronic Back Pain and Cover Up  

F6. Nineteenth-Century U.S. Medical Education: The Urban Poor, the Janitors, and the Students  
Chair: Dominic Hall, Harvard University 
 

1. Jessica Leigh Hester, Johns Hopkins University: Rethinking “Stiff Doctors”: How Nineteenth-Century Dissecting-Room Janitors Worked Toward Mobility 
2. Christopher Willoughby, University of Nevada: Medical Motley Crews: Anatomy, Monopoly, and the Urban Crowd in the U.S., 1765-1860    
3. Courtney Thompson, Mississippi State University: The Medical Student Has Two Faces: Interpreting Emotion in Nineteenth-century Medical Student Diaries  

This panel explores responses of varied Americans to the institutionalization of medical education in the long nineteenth century. Specifically, we examine three distinct perspectives on medical education: the applicant/student, the non-faculty staff, and the urban poor. Together, these three groups reveal how “medical progress” had different meanings to various classes and ethnic groups in the United States.
For applicants and students, as Courtney Thompson explains, medical schools were not only sites of class production and attainment: young men had to grapple with the emotional work of practicing medicine. Would their work change them? Could they handle the emotional labor? For the janitorial staff, as Jessica Hester unpacks, working in the medical school meant a steady wage in exchange for performing a variety of repulsive acts, including facilitating the procurement and preparation of bodies for dissection. Negotiating this stable but demeaning work was riddled with difficulties—and opportunities for social and economic mobility. Likely, these workers shared some discomfort towards dissection with the urban poor who took to the streets in “motley crews” to protest corpse theft, as described in Christopher Willoughby’s paper. Willoughby recontextualizes an old history of crowd action against medical schools by situating it within a larger context of urban protests against impressment into the British Navy. Unlike the banning of impressment, urban protests led to the legalization and, ultimately, legitimization of dissecting the friendless poor.
Together, these papers reveal that the institutionalization of medical education was a tumultuous and contested process. The proliferation of medical schools dramatically expanded opportunities to join a professional, managerial class, novel for its rapid growth during this period. On the other hand, for janitors, these sites provided stable work that was also degrading, and could strain community ties when these laborers helped steal and dissect the bodies of their neighbors. The poor experienced medical schools as another entity attempting to force labor from their unconsenting bodies, and they responded accordingly. In considering these varied perspectives, we begin to reformulate the nineteenth-century medical school as not simply about student-teacher relationships and pedagogy but as a larger, mushrooming institution, whose maturation carried mixed consequences for Americans of different classes and ethnic backgrounds.
 

As many of you have heard at business meetings since at least 2021, our financial advisors have deemed it essential to the long-term operational and financial stability of the AAHM that we merge the “American Association for the History of Medicine” and “History of Medicine Foundation” components of what we generally refer to as the AAHM.

The American Association for the History of Medicine, as a 501c3, is formally based in New York. The History of Medicine Foundation, as a 501c3, is formally based in Ohio (it was established in 1990 as a fund-raising complement to the American Association for the History of Medicine, but as a separate 501c3).* Working with legal counsel in recent years, it became clear that our most advantageous option would be to dissolve the New York entity and merge it into the Ohio entity, such that a single entity, the American Association for the History of Medicine, formally based in Ohio, would emerge from this process. This would happen in a manner such that this would be legally simultaneous.

Council voted unanimously in favor of the attached “Plan of Agreement” at its February 2025 meeting. The next step is for membership to vote on it, and this will take place at the AAHM 2025 annual meeting as part of the business meeting, held on Saturday, May 3 from 2:45 to 3:30 pm. We will need a 2/3 vote in the affirmative (among those voting) to move this forward, and we will need at least 100 votes in the affirmative to constitute a quorum to move this forward. Please join us for this important meeting so we make quorum and can move forward with this important project. Snacks and coffee will be provided! The Meeting Agenda is also attached.

G1. Health Activism, Healthcare as Activism  
Chair: Sarah Tracy, University of Oklahoma  
 

1. Benjamin Folger, University of Oklahoma: “...And We’ve Come a Long Way”: Medicine, Migration, and Black practitioners in Early Oklahoma  
2. Justin Barr, Ochsner Clinic: Bullets in the History of Medicine:  Physicians and Gun Control in the 20th Century United States  
3. Andrew Hogan, Creighton University: Disabled Students in Late 20th Century Physical Therapy: Steppingstones to Participation 
4. Sydney Goggins, University of Wisconsin: "My illness would cast the future in a different mould": Temporality and Patient Advocacy in Tuberculosis Sanatorium Newsletters  

G2. Roundtable Revisiting the American Physician Dr. Robert L. Dickinson: Exploring his Contributions, Critically Examining his Legacy  
Chair: Sarah Rodriquez, Northwestern University  
 
Rose Holz, University of Nebraska 
Wendy Kline, Purdue University 
Beans Velocci, University of Pennsylvania 

Over the course of his long and varied career, Dr. Robert L. Dickinson (1861-1950) was a prominent and deeply influential American obstetrician-gynecologist, scientist, sexologist, and artist. In addition to helping Margaret Sanger win the medical profession over to the birth control cause in the early twentieth century, he was deeply engaged in many other issues of “women’s” health, sexuality, and eugenics. He also served as a friend and mentor to, and the intellectual bridge between, prominent sexologists Havelock Ellis, Sigmund Freud, Alfred Kinsey, William Masters, and Virginia Johnson. Consequently, not only does he regularly appear in scholarly accounts on birth control, abortion, sterilization, clitorises, lesbianism, and menstruation, but medical historian Vern Bullough declared that he might be regarded as “the founding father of much of American sex research.”

Despite Dickinson’s significance, his work and legacy remain yet to be fully synthesized and critically examined, particularly in ways that don’t fall into the trap of traditional hagiographies of great white male physicians. Thus the purpose of this roundtable is to bring five scholars together: Donna Drucker (on the intellectual relationship between Dickinson and Kinsey), Anne Garner (Dickinson’s role as an agitator within medical libraries for greater public access to sexual information), Rose Holz (the 1939 Dickinson-Belskie Birth Series sculptures), Wendy Kline (Dickinson as a sexual predator who violated some of his patients), and Beans Velocci (Dickinson’s construction of Norma, the perfectly vulvaless woman). Led by moderator Sarah Rodriguez, each will briefly share their engagement with Dickinson. The conversation will then open up in exploration of Dickinson in ways that prompts a critical discussion of his life and legacy while still seeing the scope and influence of his work. Keywords: 1. Reproductive Medicine 2. Sexology 3. Medical Ethics 4. Obstetrics and Gynecology 5. Birth control

1. To understand the contributions of Dr. Robert L. Dickinson as physician, scientist, and artist to the developing fields of sexology and reproductive healthcare in the first half of the twentieth century.
2. To evaluate the legacy of his work through the prisms of medical ethics, structural racism, and cissexism.
3. To consider the ways that Dickinson shaped the role of a public physician in the US beyond the clinic, via research advocacy, public education, and the arts.

G3. Changing Medical Practices 
Chair: Peter Kernahan, University of Minnesota  
 

1. Cole Giller, Johns Hopkins University: Surgery in a Fishbowl: Audiences in Surgical Theaters in 18th and Early 19th Century London 
2. Lukas Meier, Harvard University: Death: From the Heart to the Brain  
3. Joseph Sosa, Bowdoin College: Making a Parapharmaceutical: USFDA Regulation and the Creation of the Poppers Industry   
4. Yang Li, University of Wisconsin: Unruly Cures: Antibiotic Side Effects and the Contested Rise of Clinical Expertise in Socialist China  

G4. Roundtable Act Two: Black Life Through Biopolitics, Necropolitics, and Afrophobia 
Chair: Alexandre White, Johns Hopkins University 
 
Vincenza Mazzeo, Johns Hopkins University 
OmiSoore Dryden, Dalhousie University 
Elizabeth Adetiba, Columbia University 
Pyar Seth, University of Notre Dame 

How might we reimagine and retheorize Western biomedicine in a world presently defined by what’s left in “the wake” of imperialism, colonization, and racial capitalism?

This roundtable explores the role of biomedicine — specifically through public/global health — in spaces shaped by imperialism, colonialism, and racial capitalism, and how it functions to sustain and transform Black, African, and Diasporic life across time and space. We use theories belonging to Black Studies, Post-Colonial Studies, and African Studies to foreground the centrality of medical histories in anti-colonial and de-colonial movements and histories on a global scale. By doing so, we explore how inter-disciplinary theories informed by race allow us to understand medicine as a paradoxical tool for the production of well-being and good health, on the one hand, and the creation of debility and death worlds, as Achille Mbembe suggests, on the other. This round table will detail how interdisciplinary approaches to histories of Black health have generated new ways of thinking about how systems of domination shape Black life on a global scale., This panel will achieve multiple goals, including: developing the capacity for critical thinking about the nature, ends and limits of medicine; deepening understanding of illness and suffering; understanding the dynamic history of medical ideas and practices, their implications for patients and health care providers; the need for lifelong learning; and enable one to recognize the dynamic interrelationship between medicine and society throughout history and at present (the present is not divorced from the past).

G5. Transgender Health, Healthcare, and Community  
Chair: Elizabeth Reis, Macaulay Honors College, CUNY  
 

1. Tegan Flowers, University of Virginia: Trans Families: Exclusion and Radical Caring through Coalition  
2. Alma Grant-Sanz, University of Cambridge: Julia and John: The Making of a “MTF” Transexual and a Psychiatrist   
3. Cam Cannon, George Washington University: Gender-Affirming Care, Incarceration, and Healthcare Ethics: Lessons from U.S. Medico-Legal History  

G6. Deinstitutionalization and its Discontents: An Historical Reappraisal  
Stephen Casper, Clarkson University (chair) 
 

1. Susan Reverby, Wellesley College: “A Terror at Home:” Chronic Disease Hospital Change in the mid-20th Century and its Consequences  
2. Martin Summers, Boston College: Community Mental Health Care in the Neoliberal City: Race, Class, and Diverging Treatments for Youth in 1980s and 1990s Chicago  
3. Elizabeth A. Nelson, Indiana University: Death after Deinstitutionalization: Former Patients' Fates in 1990s Indiana    

This panel proposes to re-examine the history of deinstitutionalization and trans-institutionalization in a variety of hospitals and facilities in the mid-to-late 20th-century United States from the patient/family perspective. Taking up case studies in New York City, Chicago, and Indianapolis, the panelists examine how institutional closures shed light on the political economy of health care policy in this era, as the reallocation of resources exacerbated certain disparities in well-being across populations. The uneven effects of trans-institutionalization between inpatient psychiatric institutions, prisons, juvenile facilities, and nursing homes rendered patients of color especially vulnerable to harm. For immigrant and BIPOC families, the closure of long-term care facilities entailed significant crises as loved ones were displaced. Ultimately, by examining such policy changes on different scales, not only at the population level but as they affected individuals and families, this panel reappraises deinstitutionalization in practice – or rather the economic abandonment that accompanied it.