AAHM 2025

Meeting participants, please pick up your breakfast from the Commonwealth Ballroom Foyer and join the meeting in Clarendon, both on the third level.

Themed Breakfasts

Pick up your breakfast from the Commonwealth Ballroom Foyer and joined the discussion at one of the themed breakfast tables in the Commonwealth Ballroom.

T7--From Proposal to Program: Success at the AAHM Meeting for Early Career Scholars, led by Lauren MacIvor Thompson, Kennesaw State University and Kelly O’Donnell, Bryn Mawr College 

T8--Research Methods and Critiques of the Archive, led by Stephen Greenberg      
 
T9--Women and Gender Diverse Historians Bonus Networking, led by Lara Freidenfelds  

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).

H1. The meanings of “success” and “failure” in the history of humanitarian medicine  
Lisa Haushofer, University of Amsterdam (chair) 
 

1. Maria Cullen, University of Manchester: The nutritional Success Story of the Twenty-First century? Plumpy'Nut in Historical Perspective   
2. Bertrand Taithe, University of Manchester: Revisiting Goma 1994: Cholera, Failure, and Renewal in Humanitarian Medicine?  
3. Chimwemwe Phiri, University of Manchester: Malawi: The Poster Child of Humanitarian Medicine?  

What constitutes the history of humanitarian medicine: medicine in humanitarian circumstances or the shaping of a normative discourse and sets of practices defined by key epistemic moments (Taithe, 2014)? This panel brings together four research papers from the "Developing Humanitarian Medicine" project (University of Manchester, 2023-2028) on the heuristic devices used by humanitarians, to reflect on success, failure, and how humanitarian interventions have been historicised (or not). The papers bring into dialogue different registers of narration and recollection which, over time, have become bedrocks of normative reflection.

We consider how the fluidity of the concept of humanitarian medicine has largely been produced by acts of remembering and forgetting. Our papers use African case studies from 1980 to the 2010s to explore discursive narratives of success based on the introduction of specific products (e.g., Plumpy’Nut for severe acute malnutrition) and sets of guidelines and coordination (e.g., Somalia’s primary health care-focused Refugee Health Unit), and, conversely, the perception of abject failure of uncoordinated response to a technically less challenging epidemic (cholera response and the Rwanda evaluation leading to the Sphere Project, Glasman 2021).

The links between global health, international development, and humanitarian medicine have been especially blurred in some sites of intervention, where many humanitarian and development actors have long contributed to the provisions of the ministry of health. As one of our papers explores, in Malawi, the provision of HIV chronic treatments and more recently oncology and palliative care reshapes our understanding of humanitarian medicine, as defined by what self-identified humanitarians do. More broadly, our panel draws on the burgeoning body of scholarship in global health history on the meanings of success (Birn 2009 and 2011, Winters 2024), which highlight the power of using archival methodologies to critically interrogate success narratives emanating from institutions of power.

Learning objectives:
-Develop historical perspectives on the nature of humanitarian medicine and of its key exponents and debates in the 1980s-2010s 
-Engage with the nexus between development and humanitarian action through the examination of African case studies 
-Critically appreciate the context of clinical guidelines production and debates 
-Reflect on the meanings of success and failure in emergency medical situations 

H2. Leaky Body Politics: Public Health and Pelvic Health 
Chair: Rachel Moran, University of North Texas  
 

1. Georgia Haire, Vancouver Island University: White, clear, grayish, yellow, curdy: Vaginal infection, discharge and women’s everyday health in Canada and the United States, 1960s-1990s  
2. Antje Van Kerckhove, University of Leuven: Consciousness, Conditioning and Control: Treating Vaginismus Through Pelvic Floor Physiotherapy in Belgium (1970-2000)  
3. Madeleine Ware, Yale University: Fit, but not too Fit: Moderating Health and Citizenship through Interwar Pelvic Floor Dance Therapeutics  

Research in the field of “women’s health” has predominantly focused on reproductive topics such as pregnancy and contraception. Through a series of case studies organized in two panels, we investigate how the often-overlooked dimensions of pelvic health and wellness are influenced by medical and cultural factors, including: feminist activism and solidarity building, the politics of health autonomy and citizen science, and national and transnational information exchange on pelvic disorders. Together, these contributions illuminate the interplay between individual experiences of pain and discomfort, and collective models of care that prioritize self-assessment and access to health information. By addressing the tensions between clinical care and patient experiences, these two panels enhance our understanding of feminist health activism and the complexities of gender identity and sexual health.

The first panel examines how diverse conceptions of “leaky bodies” have influenced experiences related to bacterial infections of the urinary tract and vagina. By exploring historical narratives surrounding bodily discharge, the papers analyze how societal attitudes towards these conditions have evolved, and how, how, despite the proliferation of medical information regarding leakage, infections, and pelvic floor therapy, women’s experiences of discharge remain entangled with stigma and shame. The second panel emphasizes how women have actively shaped clinical and cultural understanding of their pelvic health conditions. This includes an exploration of the racial origins of the “dancer’s body” in pelvic floor therapy, the development of cervical screening programs, and the role of citizen activists in demanding information about endometriosis treatments. Through feminist information advocacy, these efforts provided crucial health information—and corrected misinformation—to thereby reframe societal expectations about health and fitness.

H3. Challenges in Public Health 
Chair: Jacob Moses, University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston  
 

1. Karen Flint, University of North Carolina-Charlotte: Contesting Cholera: Navigating Ambiguities of Colonial Health from India to Natal  
2. Abena Dove Osseo-Asare, University of Texas at Austin: “Stop AIDS, Love Life”: Condom Campaigns in Ghana before and after the outbreak of HIV  
3. Robin Scheffler, MIT: From “Orange Eyed” Creatures to “Unpleasant Odors”: The Impact of Urban Health on Biotechnology  
4. Gabrielle Corona, Princeton University: Plasma, Public Health, and Prisoners in Late Twentieth Century Louisiana  

H4. Medical Technology: Innovations, Research, and Politics   
Chair: Michelle LaBonte, Purdue University 
 

1. Samin Rashidbeigi,  Rice University: A Soviet Medical Legacy: Blood Transfusion from Cadaver   
2. Heidi Hausse, Auburn University: What Could a Sixteenth-Century Prosthetic Hand Do? A Case Study in 3D Printing  
3. Sophie Grapentin, Yale University: 2,000 Cubic Inches of Freeze-Dried Skin – Medical Technology as Diplomacy in Cold War Brazil  
4. Kirsten Moore-Sheeley, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center: Defining the Human Aspects of Malaria: Disease, Research, and the Limits of Technology, 1970s-1990s  

I1. Epidemiological Knowledge and Historical Thought from the Middle Ages to Modernity   
Chair: Kristen Ehrenberger, University of Pittsburgh  
 

1. William Aidan McGrath, New York University: Beyond the Black Death: Plague in Tibet  
2. Jim Downs, Gettysburg College: Paving the Way for Germ Theory: Yellow Fever, Syphilis, and The London Epidemiological Society in the Caribbean  
3. Ori Ben-Shalom, Harvard University: Plague in the Archives: Medicine and Historical Thought during The Plague of Messina (1743)  

Since ancient times, outbreaks of epidemics have been experienced as unparalleled historical events that incited a particular historical awareness in those living through them. Medical knowledge about epidemic diseases drew and continues to draw on histories of diseases in order to study and confront them. This panel discusses the relationship between historical thinking and epidemiological knowledge by examining the inherent connection between the individual and social experience of epidemics, their historicization, and their theorization. The presentations in the panel inquire into different historical contexts, from Medieval Tibet and early modern Sicily to the Caribbean in the nineteenth century. All papers, however, deal with the impact epidemics, both recent and historical, had on those responding to them. They ask how physicians and public health experts across time formed medical knowledge in reaction to historical events, and they scrutinize what meaning the practice of history assumed within their work. By so doing, this panel provides a necessary comparative approach to the study of epidemics, showing that certain scientific practices were as common as the epidemics that stimulated them. In addition, by joining pre-modern and modern case studies, it also contributes to broadening the understanding of the relationship between modern epidemiology and its antecedents.

I2. Reproductive Health in Global Perspective 
Chair: Evan Roberts, University of Minnesota  
 

1. Elizabeth Foster, University of Cambridge: “I must know if it is Gonorrhea before I get married”: Female Patients’ Agency at a Twentieth-Century Venereal Disease Clinic   
2. Jennifer Kosmin, Auburn University: Forensic Medicine and Fetal Viability in Nineteenth-Century Italy 
3. Arnav Bhattacharya, University of Pennsylvania: "Rejuvenating the Soul of the Nation": Endocrinology, Sexual Health, and Medicine in Early to Mid-Twentieth Century India    
4. Minji Lee, Montclair State University: Cause versus Cure of Leprosy: Hildegard of Bingen's Understanding of Menstruation in Cause et cure  

I3. Philanthropy and the State in the Early Twentieth Century 
Chair: Kavita Sivaramakrishnan, Columbia University 
 

1. Devon Golaszewski, Colgate University: French colonial benevolent associations and infant health programs in Mali, 1918- 1950" 
2. John Carranza, Texas State University: “Life from an Iron Lung: Polio and Civic Participation in 1930s America”  
3. Valentina Parisi, Columbia University: “The Third Frontier”: The Development of Influenza “Observation Zones” by the Rockefeller Foundation during the mid-1930s through 1940s  

This panel explores the relationship between philanthropic institutions and the state between 1900 and 1950, drawing on examples from different imperial and regional contexts. Paper 1 explores the role of French women’s benevolent associations such as the Berceau Africaine in the provision of reproductive health care in interwar colonial French Sudan (Mali). Paper 2 considers the role of the Rockefeller Foundation in the creation of “observation zones” and laboratory networks for the study of influenza and mitigation of pandemic threats during the interwar period and World War II. Lastly, Paper 3 examines the work of the Philippine Islands Anti-Tuberculosis Society in Manila and Hawaii during the early twentieth century, and the Society’s influence in transpacific tuberculosis control and management through concentrated programming in schools and sugar plantations.

The papers reveal the centrality of philanthropic organizations to national and imperial health systems during the first half of the twentieth century. These papers underscore complex partnerships between philanthropic institutions and different sectors of government–including the health system, schools, and the military–that targeted diverse population health issues, from infectious diseases to maternal health. The partnerships are diverse, reflecting both direct partnership between institutions and the state, as in the case of the Rockefeller organization and the military during wartime, as well as state co-optation of disease control procedures and educational models, such as in the case of the Anti-Tuberculosis Society.

These papers ask: How did philanthropic initiatives reflect and produce expectations about normative state services and interventions? Were these processes different in the context of formal or informal empire? Were philanthropic programs a response to missing state resources or gaps? How were different groups–from experts to companies to elite women–mobilized to act as proxies for state health services? Who funded these philanthropic organizations, and what was their relationship to commercial interests? How did philanthropic-state collaborations inform broader conceptualizations of race and population “hygiene,” citizenship, and security?
These papers highlight how philanthropic institutions shaped longstanding ideas of disease risk and surveillance, hygienic and unhygienic behaviors, and “model” populations with lasting influence on state approaches to disease control throughout the twentieth century.

I4. Contested/Contesting Heredity  
Chair: Jennifer Gunn, University of Minnesota 
 

1. Caroline Wechsler, University of Pennsylvania: Bending to Fit: Genetics, Identity, and the Making of Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome  
2. Kathryn Irving, University of Melbourne: Garbage in, Garbage out: Idiocy and the History of Statistics  
3. Leigh Alon, Johns Hopkins University: Defining "The Jew" in the Age of Eugenics: American Jewish Physicians and Biological Jewishness in the early 20th Century 
4. Emer Lucey, Arizona State University: Autism or Autisms? Genetics, Advocacy, and Autism Discourse  

This panel explores the complex role that genetics and heredity have played and continue to play in defining disease. Genetics and ideas of heredity in medicine have long been a source of both promise and peril, with clear ties to eugenics movements, but also the potential to develop life-saving treatments, such as the FDA’s recent approval of the first gene therapies for patients with sickle cell disease. Over the course of the twentieth century, hereditary and genetic discourses have changed how physicians, patients, and researchers have understood and discussed disease and disability, as well as potential interventions. In the cases explored in this panel, disease definitions, management, and research change and shift as heredity or genetics comes into the equation.
 Drawing from both historical and contemporary perspectives, from archival documents to oral histories, panelists explore how heredity and genetics have shaped discourses around disease in a range of conditions, from the early 20th century to the present. Emer Lucey and Michael Yudell conduct and analyze oral histories with genetics researchers and autism advocates to explore how autism genetics research shapes discourses about autism both inside and outside the lab, drawing attention to the tensions between the potential for further knowledge and the risks of pursuing “cures” which might eliminate autistic populations. Leigh Alon studies the work of American Jewish physicians in the early 20th century, elucidating how eugenics and discourses around hereditary disease could be mobilized and molded towards different pressing questions of identity. Caroline Wechsler traces how a connective tissue disorder, Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, was fashioned as “genetic” as part of early field-building efforts in US medical genetics, but has subsequently become less and less tied to medical genetics, calling into question how definitions of “genetic” disease have changed over time.
 In each study, panelists explore what happens when inheritance intersects with other ways of knowing disease and disability, asking about the consequences for patients, researchers, and healthcare providers. What makes a condition “genetic” or “heritable”? What can studying such genetics do or mean for patients and providers? And what might be the consequences of such genetic discourses?